Moje cesta k salse: Jesús (EN)

Since that early age I became a salsa lover, I went through learning to like all the salsa genders - salsa romantica, salsa dura, Timba, boleros, cha cha cha, pachanga, old mambo, etc and etc as long as I was growing. I could listen to salsa all day and never get tired, on the contrary I like it more and more :-), even if it is a song that I have listened 1 million times. I just loved it and love listening to this music.

My way to salsa as a Dj, dancer and instructor began when I first started traveling around the world at the age of 18, I realized how important was this music to me since I couldn t listen to it as  often as I was used to in Peru. Showing my love to salsa in reunions with all the new friends from all over the world that I was meeting in my trips always brought one topic up, and that was the dancing :-). People always asked if u like it so much u should teach us how to dance but i was too shy to dance. I knew how to dance just freely from the neighborhood “the barrio” without knowing any patterns and techniques. That was not the exception when I came to the Czech Republic the same thing happen, people asked me to teach them how to dance. In the year 2008 I met Zulay from Venezuela, she wanted to open some salsa courses the city where we lived “Ceske Budejovice”, I was shy still and I decided to help her the way I could, but still I felt very uncomfortable with myself when dancing since I couldn t know well what we were doing. We both, Zulay and me started our own legendary party in town called “Rumba Latina” which is still on nowadays. I was the Dj and Zulay the dancer. In those parties I used play a mixed of everything, salsa, bachata, reggaeton, merengue, a lot of merengue :-). One day two beautiful czech girls “Marketa and Bara” came to the party and after they saw me dancing, they came to me and ask if I wouldn't like to teach salsa at their dancing studio “Kredance”. I still didn't feel that I knew what I was doing but I took the chance as a challenge to proof myself that i could finally learned it. At the same time I met Adela in one of our parties, we fell in love with each other and after sometime we became a couple. Adela was already a dancer, so when I was preparing my classes for  Kredance, she could figure out what I was doing by telling me things about bodyweight, timing and precision. Thanks to her I finally started to understand that I had still a very long way to learn how to dance salsa properly, that's why in the 2012 we went LA, where we subscribed to our first salsa course together, my first salsa course ever. It was frustrating as latino to see other people from many other nationalities do it better than me. We took some amazing private classes with the teachers of the dancing school “The Granada” and finally I began to understand the basics of the dynamic of how to use your body on your basic steps and how understand the timing and some basic changes in salsa music as a dancer. After coming back from that trip, people from our parties wanted to learn what we learned in LA, so we created a small group. I never thought that teaching salsa was going to be that great. From that date till now I couldn t stop learning how to dance and how understand the music better. Adela and me had had the pleasure and the honor to learn from the best of the best dancers of world. Now we are not a life couple anymore but we are life time dancing couple, we have our own dance school called “Salsa Escuela”.

Salsa has been next to me all my life and it will be till the end of my days. Salsa is my lifestyle and my passion. My expectations for the future are to keep on becoming a better dancer, instructor, performer, choreographer and  Dj by learning from the ones that have inspired me “my teachers, my students, all my colleagues, musicians, singers, salsa collectionists, salsa groups, friends salsa lovers”. Salsa is like life :-), there is just too much to learn and discover, the culture is so rich and so diverse in interpretations that there will be always something new to learn. As a dream I wish that one day to have our own building for our dancing school and I could dedicate full time to dance and my salsa passion.

Never stop learning, listening  and practicing would be my advice for everybody that is interested in become a real salsero.