Short Summer Salsa Courses are Bad without Extra Mileage

With the summer just around the corner, the heat intensifying, hearts pumping faster, and the media bombarding us with images of beautiful & healthy people, many get the urge to go out dancing. Salsa is growing in popularity, so it is a logical choice for a large number of people not leaving their countries for a long vacation to follow Salsa Dance Courses.

The problem is that the grand majority of regular Salsa Dance courses end before the big summer break, and the new courses start between the last weeks of August and the first weeks of September. Salsa Dance instructors promise potential clients that their Short & Intensive Salsa Summer courses will bring some relieve and comfort for the ones staying at home or taking short summer breaks. The teachers also promise the Salsa-Summer dancers they will be more than ready to follow the regular course of the next higher level starting in the Fall. A good question would be: do these short bursts of Salsa immersion totally deliver what the instructors promise?

Reality against Perception

Summer Salsa Courses are shorter than regular courses, and the individual classes take longer than usual. A regular Salsa Dance course consists of 10 dance classes of one hour each. A summer course can last for 4 weeks, and each dance class is two-and-a-half hours long. The net result of Summer Courses is the same as the regular ones. They are called ‘intensive’ because of their length and the amount of technicalities learned in one class. Salsa students can perceive the dance classes as being very intensive, but technically, they are not. A ‘real’ intensive Salsa Dance course consists of classes in which the instructor chooses to repeat dance techniques for a longer period than usual. These classes focus more on mastering individual Salsa dance techniques instead of the students learning (intricate) Turn Patterns and variations by heart and reproducing them on command.

INTERMEZZO with some Salsa Dancing on the Beach.

End of INTERMEZZO.

The logical consequence of ‘real’ intense & short summer courses is dual: the dancers end up mastering basic partnering techniques, which in turn makes them able to learn their variations at a much faster pace, but they will not master the whole syllabus of a regular Salsa course. Real intense courses have more benefits to the students, but they are not commercially attractive for the Salsa instructors because most of their (potential) Salsa clients choose for quantity instead of quality. The smaller group in need of quality will follow several Salsa Bootcamps, workshops during international Salsa Congresses & Festivals, and/or take Private Dance classes. The Salsa Dance teacher will choose to instruct more Turn Patterns for the whole duration of the short summer course to keep his or her costumers happy, and to have them ready in terms of mastering the Dance Combinations they should already know when starting the next dance level.

Salsa Dance Mileage

Dance instructors and students alike seem to forget or disregard the most important factor in this equation, which is Salsa Dance Mileage: the dance level increases exponentially with the amount of time a Salsa student dances on the social dance floor. The best students are the ones who go out social dancing on a regular basis and dance with as much dance partners as they possibly can. The ambitious Salsa student will go out ‘Salsa clubbing’ at an average of two times a week. The eight times total of a summer course student bleaks in comparison to the twenty times of his or her colleague following regular dance courses.

This discrepancy is the main reason why so many Summer Salsa students who are ready on paper do not meet the requirements of the next or higher Salsa Dance level in practice.