Tuesday, 5 September 06

Today's class only had 2 students.

I asked if either of them had been to the Bumbershoot festival on the weekend. Yumi went with her host family to see Steve Miller and the Pacific Northwest Ballet performances. She rated Steve Miller as a little bit of an oldie and I concur completely.

Last week I had suggested that I take the class to the weekly Children of the Revolution flamenco concert at the Capitol Club tonight. All students were non-commital about going and we planned to check in with each other in the evening to see if they could break away from their homework.

At this point Grace asked "What is the difference between flamenco and salsa?" (first we worked through mispronunciation of "flamenco" versus "flamingo"). An excellent question! The basic difference that I can discern is that flamenco is a very structured dance which requires extensive training, even from the beginning whereas salsa is more of "general public" dance, i.e. it has steps, but the form of the dance is more free and can be learned and put into practice more quickly. I found this article about flamenco versus "Latin music" and while it's tone sounds more like an explanation for why flamenco is cooler and superior to other forms of dance, reading between the lines gives insight to the differences.

Here are the Wikipedia entries about the two types of dances: Flamenco | Salsa

I illustrated the differences between the two types of dance using the Children of the Revolution concert at Seattle City Hall from August 22nd since the band features both types of dancing in their show. Unfortunately I can't bookmark straight to the parts of the concert where the dancing takes place, but you can forward to them yourself: flamenco starts at about 25 minutes and 46 minutes; salsa starts at around 1hour, 2minutes.

If that is too much work, naturally YouTube has lots of videos of flamenco and salsa dancing. Knock yourself out!

The only "song" we talked about today was "Hips Don't Lie" (video) by Shakira. Grace said that she likes how Shakira sings. I mentioned that we have talked about Shakira previously in the class, too. Seems she is the most popular artist among my students so far.



In the evening I did go to the flamenco show and it was excellent!! Only one student came with me and she was enamored with it. She and I agreed that the other students really missed out on a great show. Well, there will be more chances for them from November on (the musicians are going to Spain for 6 weeks to study flamenco).