Dance workshop in Salamanca

I have been dancing since I was a little kid. I have tried many different styles from ballet through Latin-American dances to hip-hop. Yet, the workshop held last Saturday in the Azabache dance academy was a whole new experience for me, as I got to familiarize myself a little bit more with krump, dancehall and waacking. I attended the workshop together with the sister of my boyfriend, who is also a dancer, so we had a lot of fun finally dancing together.

As I stopped going to dance classes since I left Hungary, it was an important afternoon for me, and for this reason, I would like to devote this post to giving a brief introduction to each dance style and to telling you my opinion about them and the classes.

[This was the flyer of the workshop. ]

Krump

We started with krump, which I was already familiar with to some extent, as I have watched a whole documentary about it a couple of years ago. (If anyone is interested, it is called Rize and explores the krumping subculture in Los Angeles. ) Honestly, I was a little bit reluctant to do it, because it is a very aggressive, intense and stiff dance style that requires strong muscles and face expressions. Another difficulty this dance style poses to its dancers is that there are only a limited number of basic steps and movements and the rest of what we can see at any krump battle is mere freestyle. Our teacher was Vero, who explained to us that krump was invented at the beginning of the 2000s by Ceasare “Tight Eyez” Willis and Jo’Artis “Big Mijo” Ratti in Los Angeles. This was quite a big surprise to me, because I was convinced that similarly to dancehall, krump was evolved from the everyday life of the people. Anyhow, despite my fears, I joined the group and it was a good decision; I enjoyed it a lot, even if within 60 minutes we only had the time to acquire some of the basic steps and do only a very short choreography.

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Dancehall

The next class was dancehall, the one that I was looking forward to the most. The truth is that I am in love with dancehall for years now, thanks to one of the most amazing women on Earth, Laure Courtellemont. She is probably the most famous dancehall dancer at the moment. She simply kills it! But no matter how much I would love to express my admiration, I will just talk a little bit about the style itself. Dancehall originally is a genre of Jamaican music, but nowadays people also use it to refer to its corresponding dance style. Laure herself was the pioneer who started to popularize the music and its culture and tried to introduce a new concept, a new dance style originating from the latter but incorporating fresh movements that have some relation with hip-hop. So this is how ragga jam was born.

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Our class was a lot of fun and definitely the one I liked the most. Our teacher, Alejandra made sure to create a very nice atmosphere and forget about everything we had in our minds before. I cannot wait to attend her next class!

Waacking

For me, this class was the odd one out. Waacking is a dance style that consists mostly of moving the arms over and behind the shoulders to the beat of the music, usually unbelievably quickly. The other main part of this dance style is posing – as much and as sexy as you can. I think this is the best way to describe waacking. Well, I have to say that neither as a spectator nor as a dancer I find this style that interesting and engaging. I might actually be incompetent for waacking, as it is quite difficult for me to move my long arms that quickly as I am supposed to.

In spite of this, I have to admit that our shy teacher just rocked it when it came to the dancing. She was a native Russian, who could not speak Spanish perfectly – at least something I could identify myself with, - but who could clearly master the language of waacking. If not for anything else, but seeing her arms moving incredibly fast and posing as a star was worth attending her class.

So this was my Saturday dancing experiences in Salamanca, only for 18€.

I would definitely advise checking out this dance academy, Azabache, which is also specialized in flamenco, the typical dance from the South of Spain. Here is the address: Calle Consuelo, 11, Salamanca.

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