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How to Hold a Salsa Dance Partner

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From Quick Guide: Salsa Dancing Basics

Summary: Learn the best way to hold a salsa dance partner with expert Latin dancing instruction from a professional salsa dancer in this free online dance lesson and choreography video clip.

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By Erika Occhipinti
eHow Presenter

Erika Occhipinti is the owner of Salsa Caliente Dance Studio in Tampa, Fla. Since she opened the studio in July of 2000, Occhipinti has taught thousands of students and performed at...read more

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Video Transcript

"Now we have our basic step. We're going to show you how to do it together. First, we need to talk about how the man holds the woman. With his right hand, our gentleman is going to place it on the lady's shoulder blade. Now, contrary to popular opinion, the shoulder blade is not down here guys. You want to be respectful. Hold her up here. Not just that, there's a reason for this. We hold her up here. We press up and the lady presses down, and this creates the connection here. This allows the man to communicate what he wants the lady to do through his lead. Don't relax your arm and let it hang here, and then we have this gap here. No good. You want to press up and out to the side without hunching your shoulder. Don't hunch. Ladies, press down so you're both connected. Now, on the other side, we're going to use what we call a pistol grip. Many of you may have learned already the ballroom hold. That's okay when you're doing your basic step, but when you start doing turns, the pistol grip puts your hands in the proper positions. The men are going to pretend like they're shooting a gun. Extend your index finger and point it at the girl. You'll notice the rest of the fingers are at a 90 degree angle. Ladies, just take your hand, curl your fingers, and rest on top,. Here we have this connection. We're hooked on. You're not squeezing with your whole hand and your thumb and hanging on for dear life. You're just curling and hooking on. Now, we're going to pretend there's an imaginary wall right down the middle of the 2 of us. With this arm, we're both going to press forward against it the whole time we're dancing. It's not a push and pull as you're going forward and back. You don't want this arm going everywhere. We're also not going to do a wax on wax off crazy arms going everywhere. We don't want that. We just want to press steady forward the whole time we're dancing like this. Again, the purpose of this is to create that connection so that the girl can feel what the guy wants her to do. Okay."

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