EN 81: "Salsa thoughts"
I’m the type of person that gets hooked into a topic or skill and wants to go deeper. Some people might say I get too focused or obsessed, a healthy kind of obsession.
Today, in a fleeting thought, I contemplated the possibility of learning to play fight games and buying a fight stick—I actually had the same thought process many years in Spain and went ahead with it—but then remembered the many hours I’d have to put into it and stopped. It’s not that I don’t want to do it, my problem is my limited time on Earth and too many interesting things to learn.
Salsa is one of those skills that the more I do it, the more I want to understand and get better at. It’s also extremely fun, of course. There’s only been two months at best, but I have thoughts and opinions about social dancing, the way to learn Salsa and things I would love to see while practicing. Most of my thoughts are impractical in the typical way a class is conducted, and being the absolute beginner than I am, they might be very simplistic and narrow, and will get things mixed or confused.
My salsa thoughts 🌶️
Salsa is a social dance. As any dance, it’s a way of moving (and you could argue, a way of feeling and expressing), and since there are two partners—the lead and follow—involved, physical non-verbal communication plays a considerable part.
Since we’re moving according to the “rules” of the dance, learning how to move properly is important: proprioception, footwork, listening to the music and dancing in rhythm, being balanced, mobility, specific moves…
In salsa, the lead is the one that decides where to go, the next “moves”. Even though the lead generally decides, they don’t call the next move out loud like an anime attack. There has to be a way for the lead and follow to be on the same page, so they can send and receive information, and for the follow to go where the lead goes. That’s what the non-verbal communication and having a good frame involves.
A good frame
What’s a good frame? This is a new concept to me, but that the instructor has repeated a few times, without specifically saying what it is or how to have it. If I attempt to describe it, it’s the way to hold and position the body—specially the upper body—so that communication can happen. Both partners need a good frame, specially the follow, as they need to feel and react to what the lead wants to do or where they want to go.
At the same time, the follow has to have it to give back some tension or resistance to the actions of the lead. Bastardising Newton’s Third Law of motion—“to every action, there is always opposed an equal reaction”—, we can rephrase it to “to every action, there is always opposed a small amount of reaction”.
At the ultra beginner level I’m at, nobody is aware of their frame—myself included until a few weeks ago—, most follows typically default to a “zero tension” approach in the upper body. If you remember characters falling down like a ragdoll in older games, you know what I mean.
The term ragdoll comes from the problem that the articulated systems, due to the limits of the solvers used, tend to have little or zero joint/skeletal muscle stiffness, leading to a character collapsing much like a toy rag doll, often into comically improbable or compromising positions
The lack of tension makes it difficult or near impossible for the follow to react. For example, if I’m the lead and want to move forward, if the follow’s arm is limp, unless they know what the move is—because the instructor has called it—or they are attuned to what I’m doing, we’d crash into each other.
The other day, I had a revelation, dancing with a partner that gave back some tension. Some people, instead of having no tension, have too much, so it’s feels like a struggle. But with just enough resistance, there was a stark difference in how dancing felt.
A good frame doesn't mean that we have to be rigid, contracted, or robotic. In this fantastic post, “How to be a good follow”, the author writes:
Leads initiate movement, and follows complete it. In a way, you can think of this pattern as activation. Usually in salsa I am quite loose – as loose as I can be – in as many places as I can be. But when I am activated by my leader with force or tension, I give what I consider to be an appropriate amount of force or tension back. This is how I can be a follow who will follow one feather fingertip, but also a follower who can do five spins in three counts after a classic J lead. In each case my leader gives me a movement, and I respond with what we normally think of as a “resisting” or “opposing” force.
Leads activate, and followers respond to activation.
Leading and communication
The instructors sometimes say that, well, the lead has to lead. What does it mean to lead? I don’t know yet, not completely.
In the simplest sense, the lead needs to make sure that their signals are getting across correctly. That involves moving in a certain way so that the forces felt via the follow's frame convey the lead's intention. However, let's not forget that dancing with a partner is a physical and emotional connection. Both partners have to be comfortable and enjoy the dance. In that respect, I don't want to manhandle anybody when dancing, the thought of it feels violent, dehumanising. Light, gentle and subtle is where it is at, that's why when I read “What about Light Leaders?” I immediately agreed.
Ways of practice
In general, I don't have anything against the salsa classes. In fact, I'm already going two hours instead of one, practicing at home frequently and also considering going more days. I do feel that, in the way they're structured, the “fundamentals” are glossed over. It makes sense, the classes are not a dancing academy, or a dance degree, they’re meant to be engaging, fun, allow for people to come and go, while the regulars can keep improving—at a varying and somewhat disjointed pace—and newcomers can have fun.
My ideal way of learning would be to focus on the foundations first, without rushing. To maximise the learning, it would be a conscious and dedicate practice.
Learning a good frame, the most basics steps—in rhythm—and how to lead and follow come first. The latter probably takes a long time of practice to get right, but it would be good to know the basics of being a light leader and follower. I get the feeling that if we could focus on those elements first, the overall dancing experience would improve. What happens is that because the instructor shouts the next moves in class, as is expected, people do the moves without paying attention to the connection or how it feels. Of course, in a typical beginner class, you’re trying to follow along as much as you can, and worrying about the connection, good frames, etc. doesn’t even cross your mind until later.
For learning about the frame and how to communicate, inspired by The Perfect Follow blog, I would start with exercises to demonstrate the frame and how it feels.
One exercise that comes to mind is to stand still and join palms, applying 50/50 force, so nobody can move the other partner’s hand. Then the partners can play with the forces so that the lead can move the palm forward with difficulty (50/40), no difficulty (ragdoll, 100/0) and then with different ratios.
Then we take that exercise a step further, and we assume the typical position and try to do a similar thing. This time, the lead will move forward, moving their left leg and the follow should play with different degrees of resistance and react to the lead by moving backwards the right leg. Then in the opposite direction, and the follow should focus on feeling the lead’s hand pushing slightly and react to that by moving back to the original position. The idea would be to try to find the least amount of force and resistance needed—that’s not zero— to be able to communicate. The same can be done dancing side by side or any other movements.
Interesting links
How to Build an Agent (Thorsten Ball). A great article on building a code-editing AI agent. It’s an interesting exercise in my TODO list. While I have ethical and environmental qualms about the current LLMs, based on the past months with Claude, I can’t deny they can be useful in improving the workflow.
Remote Mob Programming. The website (or free ebook) shows you a way of doing remote mob programming effectively. The software it’s not the point, but since the website mentions zoom for screen sharing, I’d recommend Tuple or Pop over zoom, but it’s a difficult sell to the rest of the company, so zoom it is.
Deploy on Friday? How About Destroy on Friday! A Chaos Engineering Experiment (Honeycomb.io). For a look at what chaos engineering and observability look like.
My mother, the racist (Didier Eribon). “She spent her life in northern France doing exhausting, back-breaking work – and yet she turned her anger against people who had done no wrongs to her.”