We love to teach dance! We are absolutely passionate about it. But who is “SalsaCrazy”, and what is “DanceSF”?
Well, we’re a worldwide brand … and we’ve done some crazy, crazy, things. 500,000 DVDs? Over a million students?! An online dance school with 10,000 paying students? 20+ million dollars?! Whoa, whoa, whoa – I though I just arrived at a dance website that was going to teach me how to social dance.
Well, yes, you did. But we have a unique, and quite prolific, history.
And you took an incredible first step! It’s really all about just signing up and getting started, we’ll take care of the rest. We’ll show you a world that’s exciting, passionate, fulfilling and might just “change your whole life”. It certainly did ours.
You’ve arrived at a school with a long, and crazy, wild road of a business built from passion! You won’t believe our story. Hell, we barely believe it.
Salsa Dance
Our first love was Salsa Dance. It literally changed the trajectory of our whole lives. Entering our first salsa club, hearing our first salsa band, and falling in love with the passion of salsa music, set us on a trajectory of taking salsa dance classes seven days a week, for over 10 years. Yes, we barely ever missed a single day in that time.
We’re talking over 10 years of dancing, seven days a week.
Over time, and a great deal of cajoling, we started teaching salsa dance classes in the late 1990’s. Yes, that’s right, 1990’s. Over decades, countless DVDs, the worlds first online dance school, and endless events all over the world, DanceSF was born as our home in the San Francisco Bay Area, where we could spread the joy of dance to our local community.
Now it’s your turn! Come and join us for salsa lessons.
Bachata Dance
… and then bachata dancing came along, and at first, we were not fans. We were die hard salsa dancers after all. It took us quite some time!
We get it now. We’re total converts! But not in the way you might think. We teach traditional bachata technique, as a close partner dance, focussing on lead and follow fundamentals versus endless body rolls. Over decades, as you see the progression of salsa dance, and now bachata dance, social dances seems to evolve into harder and harder core basics, leading to technique over fun and the loss of the basic passion of the dance. This “evolution” often leaves social dance behind as people turn social dance into performance dance, limiting it’s overall social dance reach.
As with salsa, we focus on the social dance first! We get people dancing as quickly as possible, socially, perfecting our lead and follow skills to dance with multiple partners, regardless of skill levels (ie adaptability). There’s simply no one else who does this, and yes THIS is the basis of growing a social dance scene.
In the early 2000’s, and yes, 1990’s, this was the basis of both salsa and bachata dance, worldwide. More culture, camaraderie and a far easier dance to progress in. There was way less “ballroom”. As years pass, the dances evolve into more and more practiced, difficult, and “elite” versions of themselves limiting the dance’s appeal to new people and it’s overall appeal as a social dance entirely.