Salsa Is Basically Lego

Tuesday night. Bachata Level 3.0. I was teaching a combination that ran a full four counts of eight, and halfway through I stopped the class.

I told them something I'm not sure I'd ever said out loud quite like that before. This whole combination, all four counts of eight, is actually just a handful of smaller pieces connected together. The headroll near the end? Pull it out. Put it somewhere earlier instead. You've got a different combination now. Same pieces. Just moved.

Seeing the moves for what they actually are matters more than the order I taught them in. Blocks. Ones you can pick up and place wherever you like.

Why You Stop Improving Once You've Learned the Moves

This started as a two-part video on my Instagram. Part 1's up, Part 2's coming soon. The idea kept unfolding on me mid-class on Tuesday though, so it made more sense to write the whole thing out properly here.

Salsa is basically Lego. Stay with me.

You've got your pieces. The basic step, the turn, the shine, the headroll. Early on you learn them the way the instruction manual tells you to. Step by step, exactly as shown, in order. Fair enough. Everyone starts there.

Then you finish the moves and you think, okay. Set's done.

The people who genuinely get good, the ones you watch on the floor and think how are they doing that, never stopped playing though. They're still pulling pieces out and putting them back somewhere else. Still testing what happens if you move this one thing.

I was trying to show my class exactly that on Tuesday. Pick your core piece. For that combination it was the body movement, the piece everything else hangs off. Then play with what goes in front of it and what comes after, while keeping that core piece involved. Move the headroll earlier. Cut the shine short. Try the turn before the step instead of after.

Nothing about that combination changed. What changed is how many different combinations were sitting inside it the whole time.

Why Playing Feels Childish (And Why It Isn't)

Here's the part that took me longer to actually understand.

As adults we tell ourselves that kind of playing is childish. Unserious. You're supposed to have a goal, a plan, something you're actually building towards. Not grown adults rearranging dance moves for no reason.

The dance floor is one of the only places left where you still get that feeling back though. No rules. No right answer. Just picking up pieces and seeing what happens.

This is what people are chasing when they say they want to feel the music. They want to play.

Ever watched a good dancer and thought they looked like they were just having fun up there? They are. On purpose.

Stuck on the Same Combination?

Playing like this is hard on your own, especially early on, when you don't know your pieces well enough yet to trust breaking them apart. A private lesson, more than anything else, is someone who knows your pieces well enough to show you what's possible with them. If that's where you're stuck, I've got a few spots open.

Nobody builds something cool by staring at the box.

What piece have you been dancing exactly the same way since the day you learned it?