A Week-Long Dance Adventure: From Salsa to Merengue

When Philippe suggested a week-long dance trip with 200 people from Switzerland, I was skeptical. It sounded like far too much dancing and far too many people for our taste for quietness.

Still, we packed our dance shoes and party clothes and headed off to Mallorca. To ease into the experience, we started with two days of hiking before the dance week began and met up with three of our regular Swiss dancing friends.

Classes ran daily from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. In addition to our usual Cuban Salsa and Bachata, we tried Cha-Cha-Cha, Pachanga, Puerto Rican Salsa and On2. As usual, I overdid it a little and sometimes attended seven classes a day. By the end, my brain was overloaded with information, combinations, steps, arm movements and techniques. And at the end of the week, my knees started to hurt.

By the fifth day, Philippe felt completely saturated and desperately needed a break from the dancing, noise, and constant activity. So he had a quiet day…

In the end, though, we learned a tremendous amount and had the opportunity to check out many different and some new dance styles. The teachers were excellent, really! We especially enjoyed Adrian’s Body Movement classes. He emphasized the importance of using less figures, reducing unnecessary movements, and instead listening to the rhythm, the flow and the accents of the music and feeling the dance partner. He also recommended practicing shoulder movements with merengue music, which was a bit of a surprise, but after trying, made a lot of sense.

Now that we are back home, we want to continue practicing what we’ve learned, work on some merengue basics, and improve our Cha-Cha-Cha steps. There is still a lot to learn, but this trip helped us find a clearer direction in our dance journey.