and it felt so good! 
I was out in a place where there were a mix of styles (on1, on2, Cuban). This one guy picked me up and started dancing Cuban. I was trying to follow his motion, but I've never had any formal training in Cuban and there are some elements that are pretty different from slot-style. One thing is that I guess you have to keep your arms really relaxed - slot-style needs some tension and elasticity for a lot of the moves, even to the point of a locked elbow for spins, and I have trouble letting my arms go as soft as the Cuban leaders want them. (Also the floor was really crowded with slot dancers and I was trying to shrink our circle subtly, not very successfully though, by keeping my elbows flexed a lot of the time.)
So anyway. He starts by telling me "relax your arms" which is fine, and then moves into, "You want to feel the music? Follow me if you want to feel the music. No no, you're not feeling it. You gotta feel it. You know how I learned salsa? My grandmother was Cuban, she taught me... blah, blah, blah."
Finally I turned to him and said, "Listen, if you say one more word I'm going to leave you right on this dance floor. I mean it. It's rude."
Dude was shocked, but I felt great. We finished out the song very nicely without another word, and afterwards he came by for a conversation. I said something like, "Look, you're the leader and I have to adapt to follow you. That's fine. But not everybody dances Cuban, you know. There are a lot of different styles out there. I don't know your style and you don't know mine, so if we're going to be able to have a dance we have to make some kind of compromise." He seemed to buy that OK, and he actually came back for several more dances later on in the evening, heh heh heh.
(Probably because there were no Cuban followers and I was willing to try, but anyway.)
Some other interesting things happened tonight. I danced with a couple of "power leads" I hadn't seen in maybe four to six months, and I found I couldn't follow them nearly as well as I had in the past (even though I feel like my dancing has improved a lot since then, and I've had several different leaders comment on my improvement as well). I think I got used to lighter leads and now I'm less adaptable to the power leads. I kept trying to provide my own momentum for spins, and with my momentum plus his momentum there was just way too much momentum going on and I kept getting unbalanced. Weird.
I was out in a place where there were a mix of styles (on1, on2, Cuban). This one guy picked me up and started dancing Cuban. I was trying to follow his motion, but I've never had any formal training in Cuban and there are some elements that are pretty different from slot-style. One thing is that I guess you have to keep your arms really relaxed - slot-style needs some tension and elasticity for a lot of the moves, even to the point of a locked elbow for spins, and I have trouble letting my arms go as soft as the Cuban leaders want them. (Also the floor was really crowded with slot dancers and I was trying to shrink our circle subtly, not very successfully though, by keeping my elbows flexed a lot of the time.)
So anyway. He starts by telling me "relax your arms" which is fine, and then moves into, "You want to feel the music? Follow me if you want to feel the music. No no, you're not feeling it. You gotta feel it. You know how I learned salsa? My grandmother was Cuban, she taught me... blah, blah, blah."
Finally I turned to him and said, "Listen, if you say one more word I'm going to leave you right on this dance floor. I mean it. It's rude."
Dude was shocked, but I felt great. We finished out the song very nicely without another word, and afterwards he came by for a conversation. I said something like, "Look, you're the leader and I have to adapt to follow you. That's fine. But not everybody dances Cuban, you know. There are a lot of different styles out there. I don't know your style and you don't know mine, so if we're going to be able to have a dance we have to make some kind of compromise." He seemed to buy that OK, and he actually came back for several more dances later on in the evening, heh heh heh.
(Probably because there were no Cuban followers and I was willing to try, but anyway.) Some other interesting things happened tonight. I danced with a couple of "power leads" I hadn't seen in maybe four to six months, and I found I couldn't follow them nearly as well as I had in the past (even though I feel like my dancing has improved a lot since then, and I've had several different leaders comment on my improvement as well). I think I got used to lighter leads and now I'm less adaptable to the power leads. I kept trying to provide my own momentum for spins, and with my momentum plus his momentum there was just way too much momentum going on and I kept getting unbalanced. Weird.
