Socially conservative folks often look askance at Western dance. Time was when "dancing schools' in the bylanes of Mumbai were no better than pick-up joints, giving genuine practitioners a bad name.
But internationally trained dance teachers such as Sandip Soparrkar, Terence Lewis, Mirabelle D'Cruz and veteran J.J. Rodriguez have helped make a difference. Recently one could spot a large crowd of men and women doing the salsa at a festival orchestrated by Kaydee Namgyal from Sikkim, founder and president of the Salsa India Dance Company (SIDC).
Salsa means sauce in Spanish and those au courant with the varieties of dance forms know salsa music is a fusion of African, Cuban and other Latin-American rhythms that travelled from Cuba and Puerto Rico to New York.
The salsa fest in Mumbai was the third that Namgyal organised, dipping into his own funds to host foreign participants from Texas, Poland, France and England with names like Super Mario, Shaka Brown and Magna; plus, a string of deejays led by DJ Henry Knowles, who steered dance enthusiasts through 35 performances and workshops (not only in salsa but also other Latino dance forms like flamenco and merengue).
SIDC was first established in April 2000. Today, Namgyal oversees a total of 11 salsa studios with over 500 enthusiastic students in Delhi and Mumbai alone. Namgyal has also helped popularise salsa in places like Pune, Bangalore, Indore and his native Sikkim. He has also reached out to enthusiasts outside India in Nepal, Hong Kong and Thailand through numerous workshops.
