On Saturday 13th April QuickSteps Dance Club Studio held our first ever Latin Dance Party and it was a huge success!
Why a Latin Dance Party?
We love to have variety at QuickSteps and ensure that our members are verstaile social dancers, able to dance to all styles of music. In saying that though we also value practise and reptition. By playing Latin music for an entire 3 hour Dance Party members were able to fine tune and focus on their Latin dance styles. These styles were salsa, bachata, rumba, cha cha, samba and merengue.
By the end of the dance party members were feeling the benefits.
Some of the team received feedback that confirmed this for us. Members said they were feeling noticably more comfortable with their bachata and salsa than when they had first stared dancing only 3 hours earlier!
Latin Dances can be a little bit easier to lead as they don’t travel around the floor and hence, don’t require quite as much navigational skill. So this Latin party was a comfortable way for some our members to work on their leading and following skills without worrying too much about running into other dancers! Collisions can be common in Ballroom styles! 🙂 Here are the differences between balllroom and Latin dances if you’d like to learn more.
We also experimented with the start and end time. The Latin dance scene here in Adelaide is made up of night owls!
We started at 7pm and finished the last song at 10pm rather than our normal 5:30pm-8:30pm monthly Dance Parties. This worked well as people were able to grab dinner along Gouger Street beforehand.
As we all know Francesco is very passionate about authentic Latin music. We asked him to put together our playlist for the night. We loved the playlist so much that we have added many of these tracks to our regular studio play list for dance lessons.
Here are some easy salsa songs to practise to at home aswell.
When you look at our playlists you will notice that the suggested dance style is on the right hand side. We always add this to our playlists so that members can easily get up and feel confident they are dancing the correct style of dance to the correct song. Of course, you can also get creative if you want to… 🙂
We ended up with 16 salsa, 15 bachatas, 7 cha chas, 6 sambas, 2 merengues and a lot of rumba options throughout the night.
Here is Francesco dancing with Pavi and enjoying the playlist he put together.
Whilst I love Latin music I do find it a little repetative at street Latin events focusing mainly on Salsa and Bachata. I felt here Francesco put together a good blend of traditional, authentic Latin music mixed in with pop and party songs that we all love and can cha cha or rumba to.
It really was a perfect blend!
It was great to see beginner, advanced and all members inbetween come along, dance together and mingle in the cafe.
Will we be holding another QuickSteps Latin Party in the future? Certainly!
We will most probably try holding the next one from 5:30pm-8:30pm and we will also look at adding some more english/pop songs to the playlist around every 10th song. This will make it easier for our dancers to know where we are up to on the playlist.
Thanks to everyone that come along and we will see you on the dance floor soon.
Mish
