On Monday nights, the fourth floor of the Campus Recreation Center is home to the usual pickup basketball games and, on the far side of the courts, fencing team practice. One Monday last fall, I walked along the edge of the court and suddenly heard an incongruous sound: Cuban jazz music floating out of a room labeled “Studio C.”
More than 100 students filled the room. Among them were scattered several “Certified Salseros,” as their shirts read. Pierre Thys, one such salsero (Spanish for “salsa dancer”), asked how many of us were new to salsa. I raised my hand, and my nerves slightly calmed when the vast majority of hands also shot into the air.
A year earlier, Jaime Toro, an aerospace engineering graduate student, had been in the same position. Now Toro is serving his first term as president of the Georgia Tech Salsa Club. “I don’t know if I could be president—I have only been here one year,” he said when asked to apply for the role. But since taking the position, Toro has nearly doubled class attendance.
The Salsa Club started in April 2006 and has evolved into two components: a competition team and a noncompetitive organization that teaches salsa classes to students, alumni and the public three to four times a week.
Classes range from beginner to advanced and cover many club-style Latin dances, and they provide members with access to local salsa competitions.
Each month, the club also holds an event called Salsa Sting at the Georgia Tech Student Center Ballroom—“considered by many the best ballroom in Atlanta,” the club boasts. The event starts off with beginner and intermediate salsa lessons and continues with exciting performances from experienced dancers, and can run as late as 2 a.m. These events draw large crowds of amateurs and experts alike from around Atlanta.
Taking the beginner class that Monday night, I found it to be a great way to escape the stress of classes. But it shared one similarity with my academic courses: The salsa instructors jumped—or in this case stepped—right into the material. They showed us the basic steps and right and left turns. With the help of an instructor, I began to feel as though I had become a master salsero myself.
However, that all changed once they introduced a simple element: music. Everyone in the class began to bump into each other, and we learned that our sense of rhythm wasn’t so refined after all. Then came another complicating factor: It was time to test our skills with a partner.
Unlike in decades past at Tech, the ratio of guys to girls proved to not be an issue. The guys had to “twist” their partners, while the girls had to figure out how to do the steps they’d just learned but in reverse. It wasn’t pretty.
After dancing with several partners, we concluded the class with a recap of what we had learned. Even though the class was as challenging as most of life at Tech, it was great to step out of the classroom and into the rhythm of salsa.
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