First Salsa Lesson: My Dance with Andre
About the most fun I had all fall was going to a salsa dance. I had a little practice before the event in my friend’s kitchen, felt great: I get it, no problem! Then, out on the dance floor, the whole experience went ten thousand times faster than I was expecting. Really loud! Many people! It didn’t work at all! Where the hell is the beat in this festival explosion crazy beat riot? I was an otter. The only otter out there. Cute, but are those feet or flippers?
Now I have Andre. My own salsa teacher. He says a thing that seems useful to me for all activities, all learning. “You do these moves all day, at some point. There are no new moves in what you are learn. You are already moving like this.”
I love this. Great teaching. Moving from known to…known! For new writers, it’s the same thing—it looks so crazy-busy-fast-wonderful, when you read a great poem or story, but it’s all sentences—the exact same thing you talk in all day long. It’s not new. It’s just focused. Teaching is showing people how to put the things they do already together in a new pattern.
A big part of my stress during the Initial Salsa Debacle of 2008 was this: I couldn’t hear the beat. I can’t dance without the beat. Andre says: bongos are difficult. They are the beat in a kaleidoscopic format. He says: you can always find a simpler thing to listen to; avoid the bongos.
(Good advice for real life. Good advice for writers: keep it simple, don’t get all jazzed about language and showing off and trying to do so much.)
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