When I first started dancing, one of the things I loved about salsa was its diversity. Different nationalities, people of all shapes sizes and colours in one scene and no bad atmosphere or fighting, fantastic!
Now, I still love the fact that you get all kinds of people at salsa, unfortunately, the same can not be said for the atmosphere or aggression.
You may wonder what I mean by bad atmosphere, in this circumstance, it’s not the music, or the venue, its people bringing bad attitudes into salsa.
This is not a new thing by no means, I’ve seen people having a few ‘heated discussions’ (I hold my hands up, I’ve been involved in a couple myself) but until very recently, I would still have said that there was no real aggression in salsa.
Over the last few months, I’ve seen what I would call serious acts of aggression in salsa. I can honestly say, in my opinion, these acts have nearly resulted in physical violence!
Now, I don’t know about you but for me, salsa is a release from all the day to day pressures and cr*p that you normally have to put up with, so how people can bring that nonsense (and it is complete nonsense) into salsa is beyond me and quite frankly, bang out of order!
I’m not going to name and shame or go into too much detail (as tempted as I am) but I will give you an idea of the kinds of scenarios that really get my back up!
The attitude that sometimes goes with status (ergo Ego!)
I have seen this happen to so many people in salsa. People (not all of them but some of them) start teaching or performing and get a little bit of status and POOF! They transform into a complete idiot!
This is a disorder that is more commonly known as Salsa Mafitus and the people that suffer from it are known as the Salsa Mafia (Salsa Maf for short).
You can generally distinguish signs of Salsa Mafitus by the following traits:
· Paranoia
· Rudeness
· Being very selective with dance partners
· Gathering and only dancing with other Salsa Mafia in one particular area of a salsa venue
I caught a mild case of Salsa Mafitus once, the best cure is the genuine friend pill (that’s the one that tells you you’re behaving like a total ar*e four times a day until you stop).
I witnessed a scenario not too long ago where a Salsa Maf, tried to push someone taking pictures of them away whilst shouting and swearing at them, incredible! We have Salsa Paparazzi now, what’s next Salsa Bodyguards?
I must add though, I spoke to this particular photographer prior to the incident taking place as he had some wicked pictures that I’m sure people would have loved to have seen on Salsa Central and he was very rude to me.
Karma, that’s all I’m saying ;-)
Bad Manners and Bad Attitude
My Mother taught me to respect my elders and to treat people the way I would expect to be treated myself. Sometimes, this seems to go out of the window at salsa.
People think it’s perfectly acceptable to be rude to people in salsa and it doesn’t really matter. Well, I’m sorry but it’s not acceptable in any situation, especially salsa! People come to salsa to have fun, not to be made to feel bad!
I’ll give you a couple of examples:
Example 1
I have had students come to me from other classes over the years and tell me that they’ve had a bad experience with a teacher (quite a few of these students have referred to the same teacher).
This is a real shame as a teacher is normally viewed as someone that you can look up to and respect. One particular scenario that sticks in my mind involved a student being shouted at by a female teacher in front of people because ‘she was copying her style’.
My response to that, WTF?!?
As teachers, as clichéd as it may sound, we are supposed to nurture our students and help them to learn and grow, not shout and intimidate them! Imitation is the highest form of flattery is it not?
Example 2
There are a lot of guys in salsa that will blame the follower if something goes wrong when they are dancing, that’s just rude!
One of my friends complained to me the other week about this guy she had just danced with. Apparently, they went off time when he set her up, incorrectly, for a double turn (my friend is also one of my students/teaching assistants so I know that her timing for turns is going to be spot on!).
So, this guy turns to her and says ‘how long have you been dancing’ and she says ‘a year’ and he says smugly ‘ oh that explains it then’.
How rude is that?!! Salsa is supposed to be fun, human beings are naturally judgemental but you know what? How about taking that person’s feelings into consideration before you open your mouth?
Example 3
This is my final example or I’m going to end up writing a novel!
I was teaching at an event recently, the best thing about this venue is that there’s always a nice vibe because the people are really friendly, there’s never any trouble and you can feel that there’s a good atmosphere.
Well, boy was I shocked on this particular night! We had a stall at the event and we had just finished packing up when we saw two guys looking pretty annoyed walking to the front door (which was right by where we were situated) the next thing you see is a lot of finger waving and shouting going on.
Now, normally I wouldn’t get involved if it looked like a fight was about to kick off, but that would be if I had just come out of nightclub with a lot of drunk people milling around, not at a salsa event that the promoter works extremely hard to put on!
So I went outside and being the mediator (aka idiot) that I am stepped in between these two gentlemen and told them to calm down. Quite frankly, the argument seemed pretty pathetic but no one else was stepping into try and stop them from jumping on each other, so I did!
The reason for my involvement (if either of the gentlemen in question are reading this article) was, as I said before, promoters work very hard to put events on for people like us to enjoy and for you to have an argument at this venue (for whatever reason, I don’t really care) is disrespectful to the promoter and bang out of order.
Summary
So to everyone, I say (I feel like Jerry Springer!) This is salsa, it’s a fun dance where people from all walks of life go to have fun and socialise!
As Eddie Torres says in the interview on this site (total name drop I know) leave your personal issues at the door and come and dance, they will still be there at the end of the night.
The greatest worry that I have (and I know I am not alone) is when we start to bring that aggression into salsa, it’s damaging to the scene. New people will stop coming, venues will be lost and promoters won’t bother to put nights on because of the hassle. Is that what you or any of us want?
With all the rubbish that’s happening in the world, salsa is one of the only good social scenes left, let’s not screw it up for everyone else!
