How can I improve my dancing?

Sunset44 said:

I learn cuban salsa, and we don't learn shines. As I've previously done belly dancing though, I love doing body/chest rolls, figure8 hips etc

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I do Cuban salsa as well...

Other things you can learn to improve your Cuban body movement are Reggaeton and Rumba (Guaguanco and Yambu).

There are special classes in London for this.

Sunset44 said:

and really want to incorporate that into my dancing but often find it hard to slot these into the dance at an appropriate time. The styling I throw in also depends I suppose on how I am led, many of the leads I dance with will maintain some sort of contact throughout most of the dance so I have to be more subtle, whilst others (more rarely) will separate every now and then giving us both a chance to dance more freely.

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Yes generally speaking you want to focus on following when the guys has both your hands so body movement in Cuban salsa is limited to lower body movement - e.g. figure 8 hip movement.

When you seperate from your partner you can do more upper body movement Rumba, Reggaeton, Folkloric Orishas etc, depending on the music.

Sunset: If you want some styling ideas to practice in Cuban salsa, try these DVDs:

Casinando
Mueve La Cintura

from boogalu.com


Or to focus on basic body movement:

Janet & Rafael - Get it right (video)
Iris de Brito - Body talk I & II
Italian style Reggaeton vol.1

Youtube has lots of salsa dancing videos. Pick the ones you like and watch it as many times as possible. Our brain has this whacky ability to memorize movements and then practice.

And one year of dancing is nothing. It will take years and years of dancing continuously to get good at this endeavor.

I have try this DVD.It really very nice.I like the different style of the dance.I try some style of the dance.It really very easy.It really good DVD for practice Cuban salsa.

Thanks for the tips for cuban salsa- the boogalu website has some fantastic clips and info...

I was intruigued about this Orisha dance and wow ended up spending ages reading up on the history of it and only skimmed the surface! I suppose like anything the amount of info can be overwhelming so its just about selecting the right bits you need at the time.

There is one short clip Ive seen before on youtube- Janet and Rafael's basic rumba step (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elDbIG38lDA) shows you how good it can look if you get the fundamental moves down! So, for now I will be focusing on basics and maybe in the future I will worry about which Orisha to represent hehe.

Sunset44 said:

Thanks for the tips for cuban salsa- the boogalu website has some fantastic clips and info...

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You might want to take a look at my youtube account as well youtube.com/azzey2. Lots of good Cuban salsa dancers on there. There are playlists for Cuban salsa, Rumba and Reggaeton. The one you'll probably be most interested in though is a playlist called '4kasia', which I made when I was last teaching Cuban ladies styling. Some really nice clips in there of Janet Fuentes doing her thing.

Sunset44 said:

I was intruigued about this Orisha dance and wow ended up spending ages reading up on the history of it and only skimmed the surface! I suppose like anything the amount of info can be overwhelming so its just about selecting the right bits you need at the time.

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There's a video for each of the Orishas in (I think) my Rumba playlist. Orishas are interesting but even after 8 years doing Cuban salsa I found I don't use them enough to bother learning them properly (even though I've done individual workshops for them). Learning the basics of Rumba and Reggaeton is much more important in my opinion for being able to dance well to Timba and will really improve your freestyle Cuban dancing to a new level.

Sunset44 said:

There is one short clip Ive seen before on youtube- Janet and Rafael's basic rumba step (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elDbIG38lDA) shows you how good it can look if you get the fundamental moves down! So, for now I will be focusing on basics and maybe in the future I will worry about which Orisha to represent hehe.

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Yes, that's a great one to start with and I was going to mention it but ran out of time before. In fact I would recommend only practicing that step (and variations of it) for Rumba for the first 6 months or year. It really is all about the basics and getting all the little details right.

There's a social dancing clip (see ladies styling playlist above) of Janet dancing at the recent Bournemouth Cuban salsa congress and when she breaks away from her partner all she's doing is little versions of the Rumba basic and a bit of Reggaeton. Subtle but great.

Ildolydia is another one to watch or learn from. When she does a Vacilala she glides through the turns so well that she makes it look like she's doing more turns than she is but also in slow-motion.

Thanks for the advice and pointers. Azzey your youtube account looks brilliant, I have found it really hard to find a variety of decent clips of cuban salsa and its styling before now...and you cover the different styles and all this other stuff too...I'm just like a kid in a candy shop of salsa clips.

The class I now do is usually led by a male, but they have started to introduce a second teacher there- a female to focus on styling for the ladeez, which is great, but will only happen every other week. One of the things she told us to introduce on fri was more (arm) styling during the vacilala- so great timing!

Aside from taking lessons and practicing a lot, I find I am getting a lot of good tips from this forum as well. Sweavo, Salsa Bear, Chr, Azzey, La Gringa, Miranda are just some of many who really know the dance and I can learn things just by listening to what they say. Keep up the good work boys and girls