South Korea: Seoul, mambo capital?

Seoul, 25 October 2015

You'll have noticed the question mark in the title of this post? I don't want to start a controversy :-D — this is of course my own experience, but given my stay I sincerely think the question is worth asking. Why?

First of all, I've never had an experience of social dancing like the one I had in this country, over such a long stretch.. Of course, you'll say, there are the congresses; salsa congresses are great, yes, but I always tell myself that isn't "real life". A congress is an (enchanted) parenthesis, and so remains a relatively brief experience. In Seoul I lived and found again the elements that make a good congress work — but on almost every night of the week.

A multitude of venues

There is, in Seoul, an impressive number of salsa nightclubs. I do mean nightclubs, and for the uninitiated let me explain why I'm insisting on the word. In my career as a social dancer and over the course of my travels, one thing came back tirelessly in every country: salseros are bad customers! That is, we don't drink enough alcohol in the eyes of club managers, compared with a more conventional clientele.... Sadly I can't testify to the contrary — I'm not a big drinker myself, and although a small glass can set me up nicely to start the evening, I'm not at my best as a dancer with a drink in me. Besides, you go out to dance, don't you; stopping for a drink is counterproductive :-b (I'm barely exaggerating) lol. Anyway, for that reason, clubs dedicated exclusively to mambo — even in New York — don't really exist... In Seoul, in Gangnam alone, I went to four, and in my view there are more. These places are open on more or less every night of the week, and every single time I went there were always people there.

The quality of the places you dance in

Every salsa club I went to meets the criteria for being top notch: a very good wooden floor, a very good sound system, a well-stocked bar, drinks at affordable prices and a good DJ. On that last point I'll add a caveat, so as not to take a kicking from the purists... The notion of good music is of course entirely relative, and I think some people won't like the music in Seoul's clubs. Why? Because it's quite varied — but as I said, these are clubs, which may explain it. The sequences are generally as follows: 4 or 5 salsas; 1 cha-cha and one or two bachatas. On the salsa side there can be stretches of mambo (salsa dura or Latin jazz...), but it can also head off into romántica, timba, reggaeton or salsa con reggaetón.... Personally I like it when things vary, so it was perfect. But to go further, I even wonder whether that isn't one of the reasons for the vitality of mambo here.... Románticas and other pop remixes in salsa form appeal to beginners... Isn't that the plain and simple formula for renewing the mambo population? In any case, that's the kind of music I particularly loved when I was starting out.

The high mambo IQ of Koreans

Koreans are very, very good dancers... I wasn't unaware of that before coming; it was in fact one of the reasons that motivated me to put this stop on my itinerary. The leads impressed me very often.. In the rare moments when I was catching my breath and looking at the floor, I had the impression they were all good... genuinely... Mind you, I know how it goes: when you watch a floor you can tend to fix on the good ones, on the ones who shine most, and you tend to see only them... but no, really, this was general... They were all on the right timing and their leading looks particularly precise and fluid.

The follows were on fire too, on the whole... it's completely mad! Even when I came across beginners I was blown away. They might sometimes have only two months of salsa classes in their legs, but what they did, they did very well.

As for the more advanced dancers, I'll allow myself a "Bruce Lee digression" :-D. That great man, speaking about tai chi in one of his famous interviews, put it as running water never growing stale — so you have to keep on flowing.

Well, that's the philosophy I try to apply in my dancing :-) , that's what I'm after: I like it when things run continuously, fluidly, because that's how I feel the music (except when it has breaks, obviously). In that way of working I can also make better use of my partner's energy — or rather her momentum — so that we move better together... It isn't always easy for me to come across dancers who appreciate this style, or who can even follow it. When the tension of the lead is continuously present on every beat, that can clearly be destabilising for some, who expect to be able to do this or that after a given movement and who, as a result, briefly pause their listening to the lead in order to go where they thought we were going, rather than where I'm leading them at each instant (well... I know what I mean ;-) )....

Of course, I know dancers who love this and it's a blast with them. Well, the vast majority of the dancers here are receptive to this style. That had only happened to me on such a scale in Rostov in Russia, and even then it was a salsa congress. Even the beginners here are receptive to this energy, though of course I wasn't going at the same speed with them.