Dancing Salsa and Mambo

Yesterday I blogged about how great dancing is if you want to work out and get fit. I also talked about how it is a form of relieving stress. If you’ve been reading my blogs I’m pretty you’ve noticed that I’ve mostly been posting videos of hip hop, popping and break dancing. Today I’m going to talk about other types of dancing. I’m going to talk about mambo and salsa dance in specifically today. These types of dancing are so much fun yet very difficult. Mambo and salsa are mostly Spanish music and they require a lot of practice. I attached this video of professional dancers. They are dancing salsa and mixing in some other styles into it. Their body postures are placed perfectly while dancing. These types of dances require a partner to dance with (opposite sex). This type of dancing requires the man to lead the woman. The women must be positioned accurately and let herself be controlled by the man in order to dance this correctly. Elbows must always stay up and hand positions must always be the same. This type of dance is ALWAYS danced with heels. There are special types of dancing shoes for this type of dance and enables the woman to turn and twist easily. They these dancing heels have suede in the bottom allowing making it easy to dance and slide. Dancing this requires a lot of turning, therefore it may take a while for someone to get used to the turns so that she/he won’t fall. So here is the video I talk about earlier, hope you like it!

Why dance?

Hello, last week I went over some techniques that make you better dancer. Today I’m going to talk about why dancing is not only fun and entertaining, but it is also an excellent work out. Did you know that you burn more calories in one hour dancing than other sports like weight training (light workout), walking (3 ½ miles per hour), bicycling (less than 10 mph), and golfing? A woman about 130 pounds burns approximately 265 calories dancing for one hour versus a person walking for hour. If you have more body fat, then obviously you burn much more calories dancing. Dancing is a great exercise to keep you in shape. It is so much fun and very recommended if you want to get fit and lose weight. Dancing exercises your entire body, allows you to get the full workout of every muscle in your body. Dancing is also a form of relieving stress; after a hard day dancing helps you take your mind of problems. Dancing can be good for anyone. You don’t need to be in a specific dance class to be able to lose weight, all you need to do is keep your body moving to the music and before you know it time will go so fast that an hour will seem like 15 min. It so easy to get really into dancing, the fun you have doing it is an emotion that is priceless.  

A real dancer

Hey you guys, so it’s Saturday! This is the day of the week that goes by the fastest for me. Okay, so today I’m going to talk about dancing skills and tell you a few strategies to help make your dancing skills great. In hip hop a real dancer ALWAYS has their legs widely spread apart. In every move they make, every count they place, their legs are always exaggerated and spread apart; with this their body constantly remains in a low level, the closer to the ground the better. Their moves are also always placed, in other words, their moves are not just swinging your arms and trying to keep up what you’re being thought. Every move must be place by a style called popping, as demonstrated in the last post I made. You have to place your counts so that you can move with the beat. Dancing is all about dancing to the BEAT, not the lyrics or the beat of the lyrics. If you listen closely to music, the instrumental in the background and the lyrics both always have different beats. You want to make sure you are moving to the instrumental (the drums).  With this your moves and dancing will always stand out, your dancing will be amazing to anyone who watches you. I’m sure you have all hear of the Jabbawockeez, well here is a video of their dancing. They ALWAYS move to the beat of the music, not the lyrics, they dance to even the slightest sound in their music. Pay close attention to their moves and you’ll notice that their dancing moves are not difficult at all, their counts are by far one of the easiest moves I’ve ever seen, but what makes their easy moves so amazing is that they are always moving to the beat and are extraordinary good at popping. Moving to the beat of the music makes their performance seem amazing and out of this world. Almost anyone can dance, but not to the beat, you gain these strategies by practicing how to pop and lock, you place every move with the beat. The video is kind of old, but their moves are so alive and great, their counts are not so difficult, but when they mix break dancing into their hip hop, their dancing stands out even more and has made them one of the best dancers in America.

Making life exciting.

Hello, so last time I touched a little on what the RLC dorm I live in offers and about what I love to do in my spare time, now I’m going to talk about why it is that I don’t have time to join in any dance classes or at least this one called Millennium Dance Complex. I have morning classes at 8:00 a.m. Monday through Friday. I go to work right after class in Los Angeles and get out of work extremely tiered at 6:00 p.m., sometimes a little latter, depending on the amount of work there is. I end up arriving to my dorm between 8:00 p.m. to 8:30 p.m.  Once I’m in my dorm I begin doing homework, although it is very difficult to concentrate when I’m tiered, especially when my roommate turns on the TV and begins talking on her cell phone. Thanks to the quiet study rooms in the RLC I am able to avoid the distractions in my room, but then get easily distracted every time someone walks by the study room because they have glass windows in which almost everyone who passes by peeks inside.  With this said, I burly have enough energy to stay awake after work, if I were to join a dance class after work, I’d probably need a wheel chair to drag myself back to my dorm and would have no energy nor time for homework.

            Saturdays and Sundays are my time to rest, this is when I could catch up on my homework and sleep, when I have time for myself and feel a lot more energized. I wish there were dance classes offered here in the RLC during the weekends. I know that the RLC offers English and a few other classes but why don’t they offer a sport like dance here? Now thinking about it, it wouldn’t be bad to start a dance class here, I’ve seen many dancers around the RLC and I’m sure they’d like the idea of beginning a dance class here. The dance class can be diverse, teaching different types of dances such as hip hop, break dancing, popping, even dances from different ethnicities. We can each show each other what we’ve got and what our styles are, this way we learn about other cultures and their styles and build our way up to diverse dancing. My idea might be a bit weird, but just thinking about it makes me excited. Here are different types of dancing, from break dancing to popping.

Part of me

Hey everyone, I’ve found so many different apartments around the area, the most economical I found is a one room apartment for $675 a month and $600 deposit, but with utilities included (light, water, electric bills), so that’s great! I’ve also been thinking a lot about the dorm I live in, and it also has some good qualities. We have a pool, a big room in the first floor in which we can go in anytime and chill. This room has a piano, a big flat screen TV and couches for us to relax and sleep on. The RLC building also includes various study rooms in which students can go in any time to study, these rooms are always open.

Now that I’ve told you about my environment, I’m going to be talking about what I love to do in my spare time, which is dancing. I love love love super love to dance. I have a huge passion for dancing. I was captain on my dance team in middle school and in high school I joined a dance class in Hollywood, it’s a very famous dance studio. It’s called Millennium Dance Complex, it offers beginner classes up to master classes. When I first joined it I jumped into master classes because I was sure I could keep up, but boy was I wrong! The choreographers here are extremely professionals, they are choreographers for various celebrities. I’m pretty sure you all know who Shane Sparks is right? In case you don’t he was the choreographer for “So you think you can dance”, “You got served”, and was a judge for “America’s best dance crew”. Going back to this dance studio, many celebrities started off here, like Destiny’s Child, Usher, Britney Spears, and many more from movies like “you got served” or “Step up”. Many people in the movie business come to this studio and if they see you have some skills or like the way you dance, they pull you aside and offer you to join their music video or come out in movies such as the ones I mentioned earlier. If you have a passion for dancing and interested in coming out on TV, join these classes, I’m sure they will shape you up to be what these people in the movie business are looking for. As for me, when I moved to Long Beach, I left the dance studio, I still have my membership with them, but with work and school, don’t really have time to attend these classes in Los Angeles, but doesn’t mean I stopped dancing. I dance everywhere and all the time, I’ve taken break-dance classes, hip hop, and other ones like tango, salsa, and samba classes. With all the different dances I’ve learned, I’ve combined them and free style all the time. While exiting my dorm, I practically dance my entire way to the shuttle, I dance in the street, in my room, with my friends, everywhere. If I hear a good beat, you know I’ll be dancing, and if there isn’t music around, I’ll make my own beat to dance to. As you can see dancing is part of my life, it’s part of me, I can assure you that in a couple of years, you’ll be seeing me in music videos and hopefully movies!

Here are two short videos of dance classs at Millennium Dance Complex.

Living in a dorm

Hi everyone, my name is Mayra Castillo; I’m 18 years old, a freshman in California State University Long Beach. I’ve never lived outside on Los Angeles, nor attended any school outside of it. Now I live in a highly expensive dorm in Long Beach that’s a mile away from school campus. The dorm in which I stay in is not worth the amount I pay for, I share the room with my roommate Daniela and we each pay $1,025 including mandatory meal plan, whether or not you eat. Not only is this Residential Learning College (RLC) campus expensive, but we are required to attend constant mandatory meetings at 10:00 p.m. A shuttle in which transports us from our dorm to school gets over crowded in the mornings. It gets so overcrowded that not everyone fits in it; therefore the driver is forced into leaving many students behind. The dining halls close at 8:00 p.m., so if you have a job like me and arrive to your dorm at 8:30 p.m. you either don’t eat, or buy yourself dinner in one of the fast food restaurant around the area. I am definitely going to rent an apartment next semester, meanwhile am hoping to find someone responsible with the same ideas.