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Welcome to Episode 60 of the Salsa Kings LIVE podcast
It may not be bedtime, but Andres still wants you to tell him a story. In social dancing, you want it to be more than just physical moves and techniques. You want not just to connect with your partner and the music, but you want to become, to tell a story with your dance. The story can often be super simple but they will still be stories. Sometimes they are just things like ‘I love this person’ but they are still there. Andres wants you to really listen to the music and the stories that they tell, so that you can better connect with the music, become one with it, and use your dance to help the music tell the story it does.
When you dance, you don’t just want to recognize the energy signature, but you want to be able to read it, to see where it is going and what it wants to convey. If both dancers are following the story, that makes it that much easier for them to connect to the music and with each other.
Andres points to salsa, where most songs are in Spanish. Ideally, your goal would be to have someone who does not understand Spanish to understand what the song is about. Even if you can’t tell them completely with your dance what the song is about, you can at least convey the feeling to them. They might not even realize that it is your dance that is doing that, but they will be able to pick up on what you give them. Andres wants listeners to seek the energy signature more strongly, even if they don’t speak the language, to see what the song is trying to say.
Of course one of the beautiful things is that not everyone gets the same message from dance. Everyone picks up on a story differently. Through this, dancers can take a story and make it their own throughout their dance. No two dancers are exactly the same so no one is going to actually read a story 100% the same. It isn’t just reading the story the same, but also picking up on how your partner reads the story of the music more differently that makes up the connection.
“The idea is that in dance we’re not going through the message but opening our mind and heart to the message of the art… as a dancer, your job is to express what you are feeling. If you’re not feeling anything then that’s obviously going to be a little complicated, but if you’re opening your heart to that message then you’ll be able to tell that story together.