Friday, 14 February 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.
 

The Streetbeat Salsa Co. logo 

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

Alastair and Felicity Sadler c.1995


 

 

 

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.

Salsa Dancers Alastair and Felicity Sadler


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. 



The Old Bull, Barnet

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.”

Friday night socials at The Old Bull, Barnet
 

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’.


Salsa Rapido logo


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 :)

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