A Perfect Mambalsa Moment

Just a quick post to tell you about a perfect Mambalsa moment that happened yesterday.

We'd just finished my Salsa Rapido 1-Day Intensive  course at Salsa Soho. It was a great group as usual and one or two had some energy left for a dance afterwards. (Most were sampling the happy hour cocktails upstairs in the sunshine, which slide down well after a five hour salsa course!)

I'd packed up my gear and the music had switched over to the playlist pumped through from the office.

Now Salsa Soho AKA Bar Salsa! (the original one) has always offered an eclectic mix of Latin music on a Saturday night and the track that came on was a modern tango that I think was by the Gotan Project.

The salsa dancer's dilemma! Do we try and squeeze salsa into the wrong musical genre? Would it even work? What does that say about my values of musical interpretation etc. etc? 

Solution: Mambalsa

One minute later and I'd shown my partner the: tap-step, tap-step, tap, step, step, step sequence of Mambalsa and off we went. The bar was a little quiet due to the time and the sunshine, but we were the only ones dancing. Even the Latino couple who'd danced bachata at the bar when I'd introduced it to my salsa newbies remained still. Tango looks sensational and I really like the music but I can't dance it, and even if I did, I wouldn't be able to show someone else how to dance it within a couple of minutes. Mambalsa meant we were able to dance and look good in minutes.

Then three more of my group raced onto the dance floor. There was only one thing for it and that was a snowball! As you roll a snowball it gathers more snow getting bigger and bigger. This is how snow men and women make babies! On the dance floor a snowball is where one couple breaks apart and dances with two more who break apart and dance with four more etc. I've used it many times at weddings and corporate events to fill the dance floor.

I invited my partner to show a young man mambalsa and I danced with another lady. Were it not for the track ending, I'm sure it would have continued to grow until the dance floor was full.

Conclusion:

Did we look like tango dancers? No, nor salsa dancers for that matter, but we did look like dancers and dancers with style and connection who were having a good time. Mambalsa's ability to mould itself to any 4:4 genre of music is uncanny. It'll never usurp dancing tango to tango music as the two have evolved together. I believe Mambalsa's roll in the universe is to act as a common denominator of dance where dancers of any kind can dance together.

Mambalsa's ability to be easily picked up makes it the perfect bridge from non-dancer to social dancer, and that's 95% of the UK population! 

Dance makes you feel good in so many ways and Mambalsa's well-being ethos taps into this idea and rewards us with confidence through looking good and the connectedness of a typical Latin partner  dance :)