Valentine’s Day is a day to celebrate, cultivate, and indulge our capacity for love and romance.  Romance is an interesting word with a range of meanings.  It can suggest a brief and intense love affair, intense and exciting physical love, a spirit or feeling of adventure, and an inexplicable fascination or enthusiasm for something.  Remember that Romance also designates the Indo-European languages that include French, Italian, and Spanish all descended from Latin.  During our salsa dancing during this season of romance, it is appropriate to recall romance, in all its various meanings, so that we will fully celebrate romance in our salsa dancing.  A single salsa dance might appropriately be thought of as a brief and intense love affair.  We meet and connect with another person to enact, through the movements and connections of salsa dancing, an ideal and passionate affair.  It ends when the music stops.  As an improvisational social dance every dance must involve a spirit or feeling of adventure.  When we start dancing we really don’t know how it is going to turn out, yet we dance to achieve something special and memorable with our partner, the music, the occasion.  Every dance ought to be a romance in the sense of an adventure.  Most of us who dance salsa eventually are drawn into it by some inexplicable fascination or enthusiasm.  We just love to dance salsa and we often can’t even say why.  This too is the romance of the dance.  And, of course, it is Latin derived and this too is Romance in another sense.

In this month of Valentine’s Day salsa dancing all salsa dancers should approach their dancing with a renewed devotion to the romance of the dance.  In every dance we should seek to connect with our partner with such smoothness, subtlety, and presence that the dance creates the feelings of the most romantic love affair.  Two people so connected in so many sensual ways as to feel united, to feel as one.  (See our many blogs on the Salsa Connection Blogs, how to know you have it and how to develop it).  All salsa dancers should focus on every dance being an adventure of improvisation and creativity.  Attempt to break the patterns that so often form in our dancing that make everything all too predictable.  Be present to the adventure of the dance, yet do so always keeping foremost the partner salsa connection. 

Oh, one last suggestion.  Make the month of Valentine’s Day a month of dancing where you complement something about every partner in every dance that you do.  A smile, a turn, an element of style, a connection, a bit of sass, anything really is fine.  A complement spreads the romance of the dance and will likely pay off by increasing your own feelings of romance about salsa dancing. 

By Sam Gill Feb 2010

Check out the Valentines Day Move of the Month from 2009