“Salsa is a community”: How dancing changed my life

It was not perceived as a tragedy, because “it is the case for everyone.” I read tons of science fiction and fantasy, I hung out with reenactors, and sometimes I traveled abroad, each time returning immersed in my thoughts. It was clear that I wanted to live completely differently, but for some reason it seemed to me that it was impossible to change what was.

I am writing this text from a café, through whose window you can see the Mediterranean Sea, and in which salsa music is playing, which does not suit the style of the establishment at all. It was with salsa that the path began, thanks to which I have lived in Spain for four years, officially not a lawyer for eleven years, and for eighteen years I have been answering the question “Do you dance?”

My friend and I, two twenty-year-old students, ended up in this bar by accident – we didn’t pass the facial control at the club we were going to and went to the first place we came across to have fun. Conventional Latin American music was playing and I was stuck on the dance floor until morning. Neither my height of 180, nor my obvious lack of skills bothered anyone. They spun me around, put me in beautiful supports and showered me with compliments. I liked the atmosphere so much that I started going to the bar almost every day.

A few months later, new dancing acquaintances started taking me to salsa parties, which was a pretty painful blow to my self-esteem. It became clear that I didn’t know how to dance, and only Latinos invited me for my pretty eyes, and even then not all of them. I realized that “on my own” doesn’t work and that I have to go learn. I discovered the school by asking some of the best dancers where they had trained.

A few years later, I was asked for the first time why I didn’t teach salsa. “Really,” I thought, and I opened a school, hired Cuban instructors, and began to grow rapidly. The studio existed for a year, annoying me with administrative problems and the specific Cuban vision of obligations. But in the process, I realized that I just wanted to teach: give me a mirror, a room, people, and go away! So I already started working in dance, without stopping working as a financial analyst.

The next years go by in endless movement: several schools in Moscow, the first master classes in other cities, then in other countries. During my teaching career, I managed to dance in Spain and on Lake Baikal, in the Ural forests and in Tbilisi, my beloved Tbilisi, in the icy and incredibly moving Krasnoyarsk, in the crazy Sochi, in the epic Budapest … Somehow, out of curiosity, I made a list – more than 30 cities appeared, and I did not count the festivals.

The day before my wedding, I closed my eyes and left my office job, and for the first time in a year and a half, I slept. But instead of dancing and teaching in a relaxed manner, she began organizing Afro-Cuban festivals. And she gave birth to a child, dancing until the 38th week of pregnancy.

Dance left my life as spontaneously as it had entered it. I moved to Spain with an optimistic plan: to settle down quickly, help my child adapt and start working. I spoke the language fluently, in Barcelona there were many familiar dancers and several interesting offers. Who would have thought that a pandemic would break out… In Catalonia, where the quarantine and the resulting bans were among the most severe in the country, three quarters of the dance schools have gone bankrupt, and the others are still not ready to expand their teams.

And even though I talk about dancing in the past tense, there is one irreversible effect that will stay with me forever. First, life has already taken the direction it has taken. I have not regretted for a second that I left my job “in my specialty” and went dancing.

Secondly, dance is a community. Warm, supportive, scattered all over the world. Not only do we always have someone to have coffee with in Barnaul or Amsterdam, but dancers get dental treatment, take out insurance, consult and buy cars from other dancers. In the community you can quickly find any specialist, from a feline ophthalmologist to a speleologist. Now I work with texts, and my first clients came from dance, and then they brought five times more clients.

Third and most importantly, through dance you can understand your body very deeply and learn to live with it in greater harmony. And even if you suddenly stop training furiously, the understanding will not disappear and the skills can always be restored – muscle memory and the ability to learn have not been canceled.

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