Too old to dance?

I have to admit that my motivation for this article is that I'm rapidly approaching a big round birthday! At the back end of September I finally loose my grip on my early fifties as I hit the big six zero! It's a time of reflection and a chance to gather my remaining wits in order to live the next phase of my life. My spring chicken has sprung and the hill's higher behind me than in front.

So it's worth asking the question: Am I too old to dance?

 

Physically there's no reason not to. I'll spare you the organ recital, a wonderful phrase that I heard on Radio 4 describing the first ten minutes of every middle aged conversation. In fact, I could do with the exercise as my body is almost as round as the upcoming birthday. Mentally I’m actually one of the sharpest chisels in the toolkit, but that’s only because most of my chisels have been handed down from grandad, to dad, to me and most are so blunt that they're only useful to open tins of paint. 

 

 
Fliss and I went dancing the other weekend. It was the monthly Sunday social in East Finchley run by Sweetlead Salsa AKA Heidi and Trevor. It was held in a college hall and was very pleasant. The age range was that of those who had learnt salsa in the nineties and kept going. My kind of peeps. Three people said to me they had done their first class with me way back in the day. I limited my use of the ‘no refunds policy’ joke to just the once.

The great thing about dancing in a more mature crowd is that everyone is so chilled. There's no expectation to impress, everyone's polite and positive and everyone gets it. The ‘it’ being that dancing is about having fun. It's not about being the best, or showing off, or flirting (just a tad), or anything else other than having a good time.

I did feel a bit rusty. For me that means my leads are a little early and my repertoire reverts to my old favorites. It takes me longer to attune to my partner and the music, but I know my rust is only temporary.

As a bald, fat, middle-aged man I’ve noticed there's seldom any expectation that I'll be a good dancer. Perhaps I’m just projecting my insecurities onto the crowd, but I feel I fit into the ‘Better than sitting down and it's nice to be asked’ category. The great thing about low expectations is that it’s easy to exceed them; and if you don’t, you’ve delivered exactly what was expected! No pressure!

I'm dance confident. I can connect to the music and move freely. I love entering Chiksentmehi’s ‘flow state’, where it all just works and my brain is flooded with a drip drip drip of happy brain juice. Our bodies, minds, brains and emotions are in sync. It's a place of creativerty and play.

According to research by psychologist Dr Peter Lovatt AKA Dr Dance *, there is evidence that men start to become more dance confident from mid fifties onward. This suggests that either they feel they are better dancers; or maybe they've lowered the bar (or is that barr) and are comfortable with their dancing. Either way, as long as our dancing is good enough, we can leave all the stress of proving ourselves to the young guns.

Interestingly dance confidence peaks for women around their mid fifties before dropping to a lifetime low point around the mid sixties at which point it begins to rise again.

What strikes me about this research is that I'd assumed that dance confidence peaks in teens/twenties but in fact it's remarkably consistent throughout adult life. What is expected is that women always have more dance confidence than men until their sixties.

There's now sooooo much research that dancing is good for our health and that includes our brains as well as our bodies. OK brains are a part of our bodies and not apart. There's a growing body of research evidence suggesting that dance is one of the best activities for our mental health.

So I'm going to keep dancing. Mambalsa, Salsa and perhaps I’ll try many more dances, so see you on the dance floor.

 

* (Lovatt P. 2018 p76) Here’s a link to Peter Lovatt’s AKA Dr Dance’s book Dance Psychology  it’s packed full of interesting studies connecting dance and well-being.

Monkey Dance

Can you dance like a monkey? Yes I can ape them well! Boom another forgettable wordplay is born.

There’s a long association between dance and monkeys, and for the purposes of this article I'm going to create scientific heresy by lumping together monkeys, apes and humans. Just for clarity: F.Y.I. Monkeys have tails, apes don't, so apes may have a tale to tell, but they don't have the tell-tail tail that monkeys have. Whether it's a flange of gorillas, a tribe of humans or a whoop of chimpanzees there are interesting themes hiding within the swirling mix of our cultural soup regarding monkeys and dance.

Did you know the Monkey was a fad dance in the USA originating in 1963. That's the year US President Kennedy was assassinated, Dr Who first materialised on TV and the Beatles released Twist and Shout. 

Fad dances, the viral memes of dance, came along so frequently in the 1960s that there was a fad of fad dances, fueled by affordable 7” singles, transistor radios and the new teenage market. At this time a cultural shift occurred from partner dance to solo dancing. The Beatles Twist and Shout could almost be seen as the final nail in the coffin for social partner dancing in the UK, which remained buried for nearly two decades until resurrected by Modern Jive and Salsa in the 1980s. Later Ballroom and Latin received a little C.P.R. from a T.V. show that shall remain nameless, and their sequins and smiles were revived to sparkle ever brightly. I note with ironic hindsight that Twist and Shout was recorded in mono, how prophetic!

 

The Monkey was not the most challenging dance. In my mind it doesn't look much like a monkey and more like someone climbing a ladder quickly, but it's apparently based on a monkey picking bananas. Perhaps the monkey is using a ladder to pick the bananas! It doesn't have the gyratingly sexual hip movements of the Twist or Watusi so nothing to tut about disapprovingly and yet....

Along with the other fad dances of the era, The Monkey represented expression through what were considered animalistic and therefore transgressive of social norms. To many it was not proper or decent behaviour.

It expressed the newly emergent identity of teenagers and their pop culture who rejected the dances of their elders and betters.
It revealed a connection between mankind and the apes, at a time when many struggled to accept Darwin's evolution. To dance animalistically with loose, free movements, was to lose control, to let go, and as anyone who could wag a finger knew: It would inevitably lead to sex! More importantly, sex with people the family didn't approve of. Such transgression!

The Monkey also had racial connotations. In the racist mindset there was a connection between race and animalistic movements: The fluid, expressive movements of those of African heritage were deemed primitive, less evolved and therefore inferior when compared to the controlled, refined partner dances of white European heritage. It's absolute nonsence, but it shows that anything can be distorted to suit a purpose. 

Then comes a deeper layer...

Whether race or socioeconomic status, old power rituals have always played out where the establishment protected their entitled children from the social climbing under classes through segregating, regulating and suppressing dance. Fortunately their actions were almost always undermined by the very children they sought to protect.

 

Dance has always weaved its path between the establishment and the peasantry. As it does so it fuels the transgression which eventually wins out!
In the 19th century, admission to Scottish Country Dancing events in  Edinburgh's Assembly Rooms was strictly off limits to all but the well-to-do.

Chaperones scrutanised the Highland Fling in order to prevent a highland fling! 

Centuries earlier in the 1500s Queen Elizabeth I powdered her face with white lead in a fashion that separated the elite from the sun tanned agricultural workers. Her court danced the Volta and the Galliard, while out in the shires we mollied (drag), guised (disguised with a mask) and blackfaced for Morris dance, where often the Lord of Misrule, a king for a day, parodied the establishment's power. 

Transgression wins, only to then become the next generation's establishment, to be transgressed once again.
Latin dances have evolved in this space between establishment and peasantry; highbrow and lowbrow; city and country, old and new, transgression and conformity.

Never more so than in Cuba. Around the late 1800s and into the early 20th century, Havana’s salons were filled with the violins and flutes of charanga bands playing to the great and the good. Note the European instrumentation. Away from the establishment, the percussive conjunto bands of the underprivileged  beat out the heritage rhythms of Africa. On high days and holidays transgression ensued as the young and wealthy slummed it wirh the hoi paloy. Music follows the crowd and band leaders began to offer charanga's respectable melody fused with the exciting conjunto percussion. What emerged were new genres of Danzon, the precursor to Son,  Mambo and eventually Salsa. 

Maybe these dances are now the establishment, the salsa generation of the nineties are now the parents and grandparents, and it's their turn to be undermined by transgressive Reggaeton and Bachata Sensual?

Our ongoing connection with apes and dance:
Disney's 1967 cartoon adaptation of the Jungle Book had an ape singing ‘Ooh Hoo Hoo, I wanna be like You Hoo Hoo’, a ditty expressing an apes desire to be human. If only he'd sang: Please stop chopping down our habitat and selling our body parts for Chinese medicine, there might have been a more impact other than record sales, although I accept the lyrics aren't as catchy.

By the mid 1970’s the Goodies released The Funky Gibbon and I remember singing: ‘Do Do Do the Funky Gibbon’ accompanied by appropriate gibbon like dance movements. (Yes I have the record). Not a great example of transgression, but it's nice to be able to reference some 1970s pop artists who didn't transgress in a different way!

To bring things up to date, while neatly avoiding delving into Lion King or Madagascar as it's too soon to unpick the childhoods of Millennials :) I'm sure somewhere an AI produced pop star is singing and dancing some form of monkey dance as we speak, and who am I to judge?

 

The Science Bit:
So do monkeys actually dance or are we just anthropomorphising them?
Well it seems they do do do! (keep up!)

In a recent study co-led by the University of St Andrews published in Current Biology concluded that chimpanzees rhythmically drum using sticks on the buttress roots of trees. The key word here is rhythmically, meaning there is a recognisable pattern that is deliberately repeated. Not only are these rhythms recognisable, but they were specific to the various groups of Chimps.

The great pleasure of not being a scientist means I can speculate on the possibilities that this study might mean without any damage to my academic reputation as I simply don't have one :)

If different groups of chimps have their own drumming patterns, it may suggest that this forms part of their group identity. It may be very useful to the chimps as it projects their territory through setting a boundary of sound, warning off other groups without any need for physical conflict which could result in injury or death.

The low frequency sounds produced in drumming travel well in a forest and have the psychological effect of inspiring confidence and power in the group that drums, and anxiety in those that approach. ‘We are here, we are mighty and we will beat you in any conflict’. Alternatively they might be saying ‘Here’s a catchy little number for all you groovy chimps out there?’ 

We may not need drumming to mark our territory, but someone needs to tell those guys who pull up at the traffic lights with more bass power than a space X launch.  Bass speakers are often bolted to the dancefloor to serve the same confidence boosting purpose as the chimp's tree roots. Rythmn remain part of our identity, our tribe, our culture.

There is another possibility and I suggest it as an example of a human tendency to assume that many cultural assets are automatically ancient. If a cave painting is discovered our assumption is that it was painted thousands of years ago and not last week. If we see Morris dancing on a village green, we assume that the dance has been passed down from generation to generation and not created last year.

All we know is that chimps drum, we don't know when they started drumming. They could have learnt from us humans? But then again gorillas probably didn't learn to drum their fists on their chests from watching Tarzan movies.... or did they? (The first Tarzan movie was made in 1918 and showed Tarzan beating his chest, but it was a silent movie! The yodelling came later)

If apes have an ancient connection to rhythm, why didn't they express it before humans recently showed them? We split off the evolutionary line of chimps around 7-8 million years ago and I find it unlikely that the rhythm talent just sat there, unused for millions of years until humans came along and went around the world teaching apes about rhythm.

Evidence that other apes drum or move rhythmically would suggest an ancient connection between all apes including humans. I remember an article several years ago suggesting orangutans rocked backwards and forwards rhythmically when it was about to rain, so perhaps now we have orangutans, chimps and humans in the ancient rhythm club. 

I'm convinced we apes, we happy apes, we band of cousins, have been feeling the beat since before humans became humans. Perhaps it's our perception that humans are so different, so unique and so superior and so non rhythmic, that needs challenging.

Chimps drumming means they are using deliberate movements to create rhythm. Those movements would be remembered as a mental association between movement and action. What we used to call muscle memory. I suggest the mental association of movement, action and sound means chimps of the same group who hear drumming, would recognise and interact with those rhythms through movement. Deliberate movement interacting with rhythm, sounds a lot like dancing! 

To express ourselves freely, we need to feel safe, we need to belong and we need confidence. We do that through finding our tribe, our collective identity. So when chimpanzees drum and say: ‘We are here, we are powerful and we are confident’, they are creating a safe space in which their group can relax, play and enjoy life. Sprinkle in a little rhythmic association and it's sounding like a recipe for dance.

 

For me, chimps drumming suggests that chimps dance, and it follows that because of our shared heritage, dancing is truly an ancient part of our culture. There are many ancient references to dance and monkeys including from Aztec Mythology: Ozomatli is the Aztec monkey god associated with dance, music, and the harvest, who represents the rhythm of the universe and the celebration of life.

Dance is an expressive space whwere we can be free, engaged and playful. 

So, if you can’t beat them, join ‘em and dance!

End

useful links:

• Monkey dance wiki https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_(dance)
• Monkey dance how to: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzTwx6bJeBU
• Funky Gibbon:  https://youtu.be/pXq8rELhUkw?si=GIwydh8KOPFyg56x
• Chimp study article: 
  https://news.st-andrews.ac.uk/archive/chimpanzee-drumming-shares-the-building-blocks-of-human-musicality/#:~:text=best%20possible%20experience-,Chimpanzee%20drumming%20shares%20the%20building%20blocks%20of%20human%20musicality,long%20before%20we%20were%20human.%E2%80%9D
  
• Tarzan 1918: https://youtu.be/vpLYBVleE2A?si=qfgaZK3nylTGfUD0
• Jungle Book: https://youtu.be/c8eISEw6Wug 

Jack Vettrianos Most Famous Dance Painting

A few days ago on March 1st 2025 the painter Jack Vettriano died aged 73. I’m sure to a younger generation, his name won’t mean much, but to those who’s ‘back in the day’ was the nineteen nineties, Jack’s paintings were ubiquitous. It seemed that every coffee shop had a print of his hanging somewhere.  

His most famous painting was ‘The Singing Butler’ (1992). I’m confident that this picture of a couple dancing on a beach while a butler and a maid hold umbrellas against the wind and rain, is one the most well known images of dance.

My wife and I still have a small print of The Singing Butler in our bedroom. For the thirty years I’ve taught Salsa it has followed us from the kitchen of one flat, to the bedroom of our current house. It’s a print that connects us with our journey in dance and in life. I often gaze at it as I lay in bed pondering what it means to me.

The wind swept beach reminds me of childhood holidays in North Wales and teenage years living a stone's throw from Camber Sands in East Sussex. Why are the couple dancing on the beach? Perhaps to enjoy the sunset or sunrise? Perhaps they'd been dancing and didn't want the evening to end? Maybe Jack is suggesting that as love and desire embraces us, everything else becomes meaningless and as nondescript as sand on a beach.

Much of Jack’s work provokes a sense of anticipation and subversion through elicit sexual tension. The couples dance of intimacy anticipates an even more intimate encounter after the sun sets. The acceptable norms of the social elite dancing in a respectable ballroom surrounded by their peers is subverted as they dance outside, exposed to the elemental forces of nature, on the verge of allowing their instinct to overrule their self control.  And yet the social hierarchy is preserved: As the rich play, their servants shiver in the wind as they work.

Perhaps the most notable observation of the picture is that the man is not leading. In typical partner hold, also known as the ‘embrace’ in Ballroom and Latin, is danced with the leaders left hand high. Partner hold has been around for centuries. A German painting from the thirteenth century shows a couple dancing in partner hold. It has become an iconic position, recycled into every partner dance since. It serves to allow dancers to touch, transcending the normal social prohibitions of acceptable society. It draws them close and brings them to the edge of intimacy, creating tension, risk and thrill.

If you didn’t spot the lady leading straight away you’re in good company. It took me about fifteen years to work out where that sense that something was wrong with the picture was coming from. Then an article was published stating that Jack copied the image of a couple dancing from a sketch from a ‘How to paint’ book. To improve the overall composition he reversed the image.

When an image is reversed, the left becomes right and vice versa. Like a reflection in a pool of water we, like our ancient ancestors, can contemplate its meaning. To the ancients, pools of water became portals through which we could see our shadow selves in a shadow world. Where spirits could travel through to our world or steal us into theirs.

In the Singing Butler the lady leads and our assumptions that the man has power, control and the wealth is inverted. Any assumption that the butler and maid work for him is also reversed as they become her staff. She has the wealth and power and chooses to dance where and when she wishes; the man subservient to her whims. Perhaps he is the suitor of meager means using his charm to advance himself through marriage. Her transgression must remain out of the public gaze, on a deserted beach.

Transgression is at the core of social dance. Whether it’s Salsa, Bachata, Samba or Tango, there’s a back story of the powerful dancing with status hungry swarthy/dusky skinned peasantry. Serfs or slaves, the peasantry was always swarthy and tanned from working the fields compared to the whiter elite.
Trump’s wealthy elite, desperate to keep the Mexicans at bay, or Strictly Come Dancing’s disproportionate number of Italian/ Mediterranean professionals, complete with flashing smiles and natural tan straight from a bottle marked ‘nature tan’ complement today's celebrity establishment.

Social dances today such as Salsa are still considered lesser forms of dance by the elite. Propper dance conservatoires are supported in part by grants from the great and good; while salsa gets the back room of bars. Propper dances are taught by propper dance teachers who are trained and certified. Salsa is taught by maveric salsa dancers. Jack was an artistic maverik, he didn’t go to art college and never found acceptance by the art community.

Sandy Moffat, head of drawing and painting at Glasgow School of Art, said: "He can't paint, he just colours in."
The Guardian's art critic Jonathan Jones, described Vettriano's paintings as "brainless" and said Vettriano "is not even an artist."

Later in his career he was awarded an OBE but by then his work was selling for tens of thousands and he was earning half a million per year in royalties from his prints. Not bad for a son of a miner from Fife who left school at fifteen.

Like dance, Jack's work navigates the respectable establishment and elicit transgression. Our formal steps and moves create a space for empathetic communication including the ancient human flirtation ritual. He puts the sexual tension and excitement on our walls as we dance it on the floor. His career and success breaks the mold of established art, just as Salsa and the like break the establishment's grip of propper dance.

Mambalsa's a maverik dance. It aims to disrupt much of accepted dance teaching practice and drags it into a space of self-development and creativity. In Mambalsa everyone learns to lead and follow. Perhaps in the future Mambalsa dancers will see Jack's The Singing Butler as the first image of equality with the dance relationship, the first painting of Mambalsa!

In memoriam Jack Vettriano 1951 - 2025

How The Streetbeat Salsa Co. began

This April 2025,  I clock up thirty years as a salsa teacher, most of which have been as a full time salsa teacher and promoter.  It’s something I’m proud of and as part of that celebration, I wish to offer some personal reflections on my life in salsa.
 

 

A good place to start is with the birth of The Streetbeat Salsa Co. The origin story.

 

 

 

Fliss a.k.a. DJ Felicidad and I had been learning salsa since Aug 1992. We’d learnt in central London mainly from the late Stephanie Lipton who founded Salsa Fusion and Julio who still runs it today. By 1993/4 we were in their demonstration team where we made many lifelong friends. In Summer 1994 many of the demonstration team danced at our wedding and later that year Fliss and I started to do some demonstrations at various events around London. I’d helped out with the Salsa Fusion classes a few times but really didn’t have any ambition to teach.

At the time, there was a fair amount of interest in this strange new Latin dance called Salsa, although not many people had seen it. It was ten years before Youtube started in April 2005! Few had access to the internet and it was sloooooow with dial up modems often taking minutes to reveal a single image. There were even less websites around and Streetbeat was a relatively early adopter with our first web site in 1996! This was where the term ‘London Style’ (of salsa) was first ever published. But I digress...

One gig in March/April 1995 was at an arts showcase on stage at the Old Bull Theatre in High Barnet on the northern outer edge of London. It had the usual problems of rubberised stages and miss understood sound cues, but that never seemed to matter because nobody had seen salsa so it looked fresh and vibrant whatever we did.

 

Unknown to us there was supposed to be a ten week salsa class starting at the Old Bull a week or two later led by a Colombian couple. Then out of the blue, the Old Bull called and said the Colombian teachers hadn't shown up for the first class and since they had our telephone number (land line of course!) could we cover the class as it had sold out? It is strange now to think back to this pre-internet world where you had to know people in the know to access their contact details. I said yes, and off we went for our first ever class in April 1995. It went well enough and we completed the course and then continued with a regular weekly class. 

It became clear over that first course that I liked teaching salsa and there was also an exciting opportunity to explore the marketing of classes. This was a big appeal as at the time I was managing a garden centre in Harrow (oh the rock ‘n roll lifestyle!) and most of the marketing/ buying decisions were annual e.g. Guess how many Christmas trees we’d sell this year based on last year's sales? By comparison, marketing a dance class was instant. Place an advert and people either came that week or didn’t. This feedback loop of action and response meant that adverts could be tweaked and improved all the time, which is vital. As John Wanamaker (1838-1922) said: “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half.”

 

In this period salsa dancing was just breaking out of central London and most of the suburbs were competition free. In addition to the weekly salsa classes at the Old Bull, I started classes in Harrow. Once a month on Fridays we started a salsa social and at the Old Bull. The Old Bull’s bar area was cool with a good replica of the famous Lascaux prehistoric cave painting of a bull, but my regular classes were in a portacabin in the car park out the back of the centre! I like to say I’ve worked my way up from a carpark to a basement! But at least I can say I started to teach by invitation!

Perhaps I should have mentioned earlier that we (Fliss and I) weren't called The Streetbeat Salsa Co. back then! The original name was ..... The Red Hot Salsa Co. Back then ‘Red Hot’  was a well used catchphrase in advertising so I hopped onto the trending band wagon. Unfortunately just after I’d had some T-shirts made I found out there was another Red Hot salsa who'd beaten us to the band wagon so we changed to The Streetbeat Salsa Co.

This was the nineties and new ideas we're emerging like NLP. I didn't want to teach the same way that others did. Traditional classes spoon fed students with a trickle of information to be repeated until perfected. A perfect teaching system for ballet perhaps, but I prioritised the students becoming  ‘club competent’ i.e. being able to get onto a dance floor and dance salsa. The sooner they could dance, the sooner they would come to our events and spread the word at other promoter’s events. I also found that ‘Fun’ was essential to a successful class. In my opinion then, as now, super disciplined drills were an awful way to spend your free time and do little to develop freestyle creativity. I needed a way to differentiate my approach to other’s so I branded the teaching method Salsa Rapido® and trademarked it. I gave Salsa Rapido a strap line of ‘The Fast and Fun way into Salsa’ which shrank to ‘Fast ‘n Fun’ and these days with the psychological content and well-being themes has grown into ‘Fast, Fun & Feeling Great’.

It’s worth recognising the huge benefit of the pay as you go system of salsa teaching that is still dominant in the UK today. As a rookie salsa teacher I made mistakes. We all do. Those mistakes meant some people didn’t come back and I felt their loss. Had I run ten week courses, those mistakes may have not been felt so clearly until the end of the ten weeks and my teaching wouldn’t have improved as quickly as it did. Give me another thirty years and I’ll get it just right :)

Conclusions:
If you have a passion, do it! Don’t wait to be asked, although being asked is very nice, it's also very rare, so the chances are you won’t ever get started. Be a player, not a wannabe waiting hopefully on the sidelines. I’ve seen so many people who could teach salsa dance very well, but they never took the opportunity, so my first point is:
Do it!! Break into your market!

Secondly: you don’t have to be the best, just good enough, but you do have to be in the game. Once you’re in you gain experience quickly. You’ll learn more from mistakes than successes so get out there and make some mistakes.

Finally: Expect the unexpected. When I started teaching in 1995 I would never have guessed I’d still be teaching salsa thirty years later. I’d never have guessed that the salsa scene would have been here thirty years later!  It was just a ten week gig that grew into something special, something exciting and something that still fires my passion for dance be it: the Salsa Rapido courses in London, or the Thames Salsa Cruise, or the new and shiny Mambalsa Project. It’s been a great journey for me, so what about you? What's you passion?

As Hunter S. Thompson said:

    “Life is not a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a well preserved body,
        but rather to skid in broadside,
            thoroughly used up,
                totally worn out,
                    and loudly proclaiming,
                        “Wow what a ride!”
   

More soon :)

The Dragon Dance of Chinese new year

Spring is coming and about bloody time!

I'm sitting in Cafe Nero watching crowds of people walk by towards Leicester Square to see the Dragon Dance of Chinese new year.

I first saw this by change when I was 18 and travelled up to London to visit my then Swedish girlfriend. We'd arranged to meet at Leicester Square tube station which was a ridiculous thing to do with its many exits and tens of thousands of people. Something like six million people use that station every year! We met and a date was had with hand holding, kisses and a lot of ‘wow that's expensive!’ But I clearly remember the Dragon Dance. The swirling whirling dragon enthralling the crowds. 

They say youth is wasted on the young, and I have to agree. Happy days :) 

There is an irony about the Dragon Dance. The majority of the crowd are hoping it doesn't rain, and yet the Dragon Dance is a rain dance. 

The story is old, dating to the Han Dynasty (206 BC–220 AD) and like so much of dance history is probably much older. 

The story goes that a lady from the village of Lotus, named for a pond full of lotus flowers, that presumably was next to a village called Duckweed!  Well she had a 999 day pregnancy and gave birth to a boy with lizard scales. The village chief wanted to kill the boy so she hid him in the pond in a basin. The Chief found him and raised his knife to kill him, but in a flash of lightning and clap of thunder the boy jumped out and grew into a massive golden dragon.  Ever since the Dragon has brought rain to the village in times of drought and the villages make a dragon with 999 paper scales and dance a dance of thanks for the rain care of the dragon.

I’m curious about the similarity to the story of Moses being hidden in the reeds. The connection between dragons and rain explains a lot about Wales! 

It’s sunny, and I have to start my Salsa Rapido 1-Day Intensive workshop.

Good luck to the dragon dancers and their crowd. I hope no one's disappointed that the dragon isn't like the ones from Game of Thrones. There's a Happy Potter shop across the street so at least our belief in magic is still real :)

Happy New Year

2024 Round Up Year End Year Beginning

Year End, Year Beginning
It was 8am and Fliss and I were in bed watching the winter solstice sunrise over Stonehenge live streamed onto my phone and I thought wow! For some reason unknown to me, I found myself making a connection to the traditional and probably ancient wedding saying of: Something old, something new, something borrowed and something blue.....

An end of year blog that includes:

• -Convalescence and Loss of friends
• -The Salsa Rapido 1-Day Intensive courses
• -The Mambalsa Project
• -Dance as a well-being practice
• -Dance's partially recovered from lockdown.

Stonehenge is certainly old enough and my smartphone is new enough (just!). Something borrowed and something blue were protections thought to ward off the curse of the evil eye!
We certainly borrow the vast majority of our culture and ideas from earlier generations. Many of the crowd at Stonehenge danced to find a spiritual connection with the moment, possibly even to find trance: Trance is the term used by science to describe that animated connection to a higher level of consciousness that has been a part of dance since the beginning of time. Rave dance, Ecstatic dance, Christian Shakers, Mambo’s of Cuba and not forgetting the Whirling Dervish of the Middle East all dance for trance. I’m not sure if as a teenager, I ever found trance stomping away to Status Quo in the Woodchurch Village hall in rural Kent but it was pretty close.

It seems fitting to witness the transition of the blue grey sky of the predawn solstice, into the yellow white of morning. Blue is often used to mean loss and sadness. Appropriate as we lose the old year and restart with hope renewed. The ancients used the symbol of a robin representing the new year, killing a wren of the old year. Hence we have robins on Christmas cards. I don’t buy the story that robins represent red coated Victorian postmen. Why not just have postmen on the cards! Remember that in polite Christian society, it was never encouraged to discuss such pagan things, or maybe they were too busy decking the halls with boughs of holly and other evergreen pagan symbols.

I suggest that loss is a necessary part of change. This year like most these days, there are people we’ve lost. Notably on the salsa scene we’ve lost Melvin. I think he came to every live gig we’ve ever promoted since 1995. I’ll never forget his saggy old cardigan and his pipe. I knew he was a percussionist but I didn’t realise until after his death that he’d played in bands in Cuba before the revolution in 1959. I wonder if he’d played with Enrique Jorrin, the Cuban composer and bandleader who in 1953 created cha-cha-chá. My belief is that in order to get the American tourists to dance in time he played the strong cha cha cha beats on a guiro (grooved gourd). I bet Melvin knew!

We also lost Tina. Tina was somewhere between mid forties and ‘don’t ask’. A typical North London mum with all the stuff that goes with that. Sadly she took her own life. There were no obituaries on the salsa scene even though she’d been a regular at Crouch End and then the Cuban in Camden Market. There is still shame surrounding suicide. As a psychotherapist I’ve trained in suicide and know it’s diverse and nuanced. The go to, stereotypical reasons suggested are usually inaccurate and just a way we can avoid its emotional burden. We protect ourselves through judgmental distance. Better to judge from afar rather than empathise with their thoughts and feelings. That might take us ever closer to our own edge! It’s a superstitious silence, taboo. I miss Tina and I wish I’d been there for her. I’m writing about her because she was a salsa friend and I feel her loss.
Post Christmas and New year is often a very tough time for many. If you or someone you know is struggling, get help. Samaritans tel: 116 123 or explore counselling  BACP

This year has been one of convalescence for me. I had no idea what that meant before this year as I feel it’s a concept that’s slipped out of fashion. My chemotherapy treatments finished Nov. ‘23 leaving my red and white cell count low. They’ve slowly returned and I’m currently cancer free and expected to remain that way for many years. Even if it comes back there’s a heap of other treatments available including a new pill!
Can you imagine having a cancer diagnosis and being told ‘Just take two pills a day’ before meals!’ For me convalescence has been more about letting a lot of stuff go. The treatment and associated fears etc. take a toll, so they don’t just disappear when the treatment ends.
This week is the end of my convalescent year and I’m literally taking it easy after robotic surgery last Monday. I’ve sadly had to let go of Herman and Little Herman, my two hernias. It was Herman, who in 2018 first took me to a GP with a lump (Herman). This led to a blood test and a diagnosis of lymphoma. Importantly, this was years in advance of any symptoms and I was fully prepared for treatment when it finally became necessary. Thank you Herman. The op. went well and I was only in for a night. I’ve five small holes in my belly which are bruised like far away galaxies. They’ll shrink as will  the belly, I hope! The only time it’s hurt has been when I’ve sneezed. Then it feels like a flaming hot knife being thrust into one of the holes. 

And talking of burning issues.....
The Salsa Rapido Gift vouchers are flying out which is a good sign. The Salsa Rapido 1-Day Intensive started in 2003 and is still going strong. One of my better experiments! The course has evolved into a fusion of the essential basics of salsa dancing with the additional ‘Why’ we do this stuff from a perspective of dance and well-being psychology. It’s still a lot of fun and that’s important because having more fun, more often, counters life's stresses.
2025 year is very special for Fliss and I. It’s thirty years this April that we started The Streetbeat Salsa Co.
I’ll be sharing some memories along the way and of course they’ll be the Thames Salsa Cruises.

Mambalsa has had its best year ever. I’ve done the first full day Mambalsa workshop outside of London in Norwich. The Spring Dance Curious event was a resounding success and I’ve run several Mambalsa courses at the Nightingale Cancer Support Charity in Enfield. The weak spot in the Mambalsa project is marketing and maintaining all the connections necessary to really get the ball rolling. This seems beyond my skill set so I’m going to take on someone/s to get the word out there. Mambalsa is something new, relevant and tested, so it’s time for a roll out! If you're interested in P.R./ marketing and could help, please contact me.

Looking ahead there’s lots of opportunities in dance, but I feel social partner dance has to shift away from some of its traditional values that hold it in a timewarp of style and sleaze that no longer seem as relevant to the current generation. People don’t need to dance to meet someone as there’s a multitude of apps for that.  What’s the point of being the top dog in the dance hall if there’s a thousand better dancers on TikTok! The sands are shifting and a dance needs to shift toward becoming a well-being practice.  

I know I haven't taken time to open that up and explain it fully but trust me the research has been done and there’s going to be a book on the way.
Dance, according to Sport England’s Active Lives survey, has only partially recovered from lockdown.
We were at around 8% of the population regularly participating in dance. That dipped to 6% during the covid years and is now back to 7%. In London that means we’re 90,000 people short of pre lockdown levels. Will dance return and flourish? I don’t know for sure but I know it will be different. From Danzon to Cha-Cha-Cha, Son to Salsa and now perhaps Mambalsa? Dance is always on the move. Back in the village hall in Woodchurch Kent, where I stomped to Status Quo all those years ago, they’ve a weekly salsa class! They’ve also got a long established Morris Set (group of Morris dancers)!

It might be the time to let things go but dancing seems to stick around regardless. Besides, some stuff is worth hanging onto.
However you celebrate, have a good one :)