Salsa Freak Bootcamp Testimonials

Dear Edie,
Traveling clear across the country from Milwaukee, Wisconsin to Dallas, Texas, to come to your workshop was one of the best decisions that I have made in my Salsa career. Although I have been teaching for years, I try to attend classes because I can never stop learning if I expect to help my students to become great Salseros. I walked away from your class with a wealth of knowledge.

There is more to learn from you than new dance combinations. You taught me about sustaining the heart to teach through the years, and the commitment to the business of Salsa. I in my career, I have met hundreds of good dancers, and many good teachers, but only a handful of business owners committed to Salsa. I have never witness anyone who gives more of themselves to her students, and you absolutely excel in all three areas. You have my complete respect and I look forward to working with you in the future.

Tu Hermana en Salsa, abrazosos fuertes,
Christine

Hi Edie:

This is Rahm.
I wanted to thank you for the awesome Salsa Bootcamp in Denver. You totally blew my mind.
rsaran_la

Hi Edie,
I attended your Salsa Bootcamp (both days) this past weekend in Arlington. I just wanted to thank you for a wonderful experience. My 40-year-old body hurts a little :), but I loved the experience and look forward to learning and dancing more Salsa. I also really appreciated what you shared about yourself and your comments at the end about dancing with your significant other - no one seems to talk about this in dance and they should. I've been married twice also and just recently broke up with a boyfriend I had high hopes for - so I think I could use some Salsa in my life.

Thanks again and good luck in your travels as you bless others.

Student

Edie,

After completing your "boot camp" I want to thank you for what a great job you did. My background has been more ballroom style than salsa and your camp helped answer a lot of questions I had in making the transition.

What impressed me most was your invitation to the students to ask you for a dance in the social setting. When I spotted you out there I waited till the song was over and grabbed you before you ever hit the carpet. If you were a Porches with six gears, I think I may have gotten to second gear, which is a start.

I have had instructors in the past that I avoid like the plague in social settings. That is because if I make a timing error they are going to jump on it. It is embarrassing and takes the fun out of the dance for me. You did not do that, so Thank you.

I am going to focus more on Salsa now by hiring a good instructor who specializes in Latin dances. I hope next time I see you there will be improvement and I will get you into third.

Good luck with all of your marketing ventures.

Mike

Edie,
Really enjoyed the class, you do a great job of balancing the overwhelming information for the boys, keeping the girls interested, providing a positive environment for those who are at some point in time going to get frusterated and the high tens could be just the ticket out, telling stories to let the info sink in those fresh minds, and breaking down salsa into simple, yet advanced moves. I've been taking classes for 2 months total, I really love it and salsa gives me a great energy in my life. Also a divorced one, wasn't interested in being with guys, but needed the human touch and positive energy. Its been great.

- Student

Edie,
I have been RAVING about your bootcamp course out here in New Hampshire. I appreciate your style of teaching and your charisma throughout the entire day with such a versatile group of people at different levels. You are truly appreciated as there are few of YOU in this dynamic world.
Francesca

Hi Edie!
My boyfriend and I dropped in on the first half hour or so of one of your beginner bootcamp classes a the Palm Springs Salsa Mambo Festival. (Wish we could have stayed longer, because you really are great, but our cha cha cha was pretty abysmal. Had to go to that class, haha.) Anyway, you were talking about "how to change a man." Or rather, how you can't actually do that, and how trying to emasculates men, etc. "I trust you, I respect you, I submit to you." I'm sure that wasn't the first time you gave that talk, and know what part I'm talking about.

Anyway, Philipp and I were absolutely dying during that lecture, because everything you said was absolutely true. We intentionally live by this philosophy. I've never heard anyone teach it so matter of factly. You should write a book! Everyone came to that bootcamp to learn salsa, but I hope they were listening, because you were throwing out pearls of wisdom. Life lessons with Edie. Relationships and life in general have an awful lot more in common with partnered dance than people usually think. I started dating Philipp because the way he leads told me something about the kind of man he is...he didn't know it at the time, but the way I follow says a lot about how I am in a relationship. Trusting and respecting my partner. and allowing him to lead. Some people say "all the world's a stage." I say it's a dance floor. Too bad more people don't live the way they dance. Err, the way they're supposed to dance.

Anyway, just wanted to tell you how much we enjoyed your classes We also took 10 deadly sins, and I took ladies styling. And yes, he tells me I'm gorgeous. And I tell him he's the man. Even when we're just dancing in his living room. And we both remind each other to stand up straight. :)

Just wanted to say thanks, and I'm sure we'll be seeing you again! (Philipp was the guy who won a free pass to the next festival, when that blonde chick tackled him during the "salsa," "mambo", "festival" game...not sure if we're coming back in July or at New Year's again...maybe both, lol!)

Kit and Philipp

Edie, "Thank you,,,"
After completing your "boot camp" I want to thank you for what a great job you did. My background has been more ballroom style than salsa and your camp helped answer a lot of questions I had in making the transition.

I am going to focus more on Salsa now by hiring a good instructor who specializes in Latin dances. I hope next time I see you there will be improvement and I will get you into third.

Good luck with all of your marketing ventures.

Mike

Hi Edie,

Blog by a Student...
SalsaFreak bootcamp day 1

We arrived just before 9am on Saturday.
I got us lost on the way there (this street is probably a good idea... not ) and, as the bootcamp was supposed to start at 9, we ended up cutting it very close.

Registration went really smooth thanks to Silvia from Salsa-Emocion.
In a previous life I have been involved with event organisation and I have to say, Silvia and Ibo did an amazing job organizing this weekend.
Rarely have I seen an event go this well. I'm sure there were some things that came up and had them running around but as participants we never noticed it.

The bootcamp started with Edie introducing herself.
She told us how she started dancing Salsa (by accident, who would have thought) and then explained how the music is build up, using stories to make it more clear.
Aside from the fact that I though her stories were hilarious I did indeed learn more about the music which I'm sure will help me in the future.

Edie also spend some time explaining something that I think is very important for a lot of beginners, finding the 1 (no, not the beautiful girl with long legs, the beat).
In my experience not enough attention is paid to this. Just take a look at social dancing videos on YouTube and you'll see how many people are dancing off beat.
As I still have some trouble myself from time to time (ok, regularly) I found this very helpful.

Finding the 1 didn't seem to present any problems for most of other the people there which would have completely blown me away normally.
60 Beginners instantly getting it. Wow!

As it turned out though, most of the people there weren't beginners.
Out of 60 people there were 4 absolute beginners (they had never danced salsa before) and another 4-6 people that had been dancing less than a year.
All the other attendees had been dancing longer which made me wonder what they were doing at a beginner bootcamp.
I guess they wanted/needed to improve their basics or maybe they just wanted to take Edie's bootcamp to see what it is like.

After the introduction we did the basic step for a while.
I liked the way Edie taught it a lot. The people that hadn't done any salsa dancing before were doing a basic step before they even realized they were doing. I'm sure this helped bringing their anxiety level down.
When everybody had the basic down it was time for an inside turn followed by 'he goes she goes'.

Everything that we learned was first practiced without a partner.
And when I say practiced I really mean practiced!
It seemed like we would go on forever doing the same things.
In the 5 to 10 minutes that we spent on it I've practiced the lead for an inside turn more than I have in all my time dancing so far,

This was probably also the most valuable lesson that I learned that weekend.
Dancing, like martial arts, is about repetition.
If you keep practicing a move after you've become fed up with it,
if you keep practicing after your arms and shoulders have become tired,
If you keep practicing after your arms and shoulders started hurting,
if you keep practicing after you've started wondering why you wanted to learn at all,
if after all of that you still practice some more then you will probably never have trouble doing the move again.

Ok, so we didn't go that far but my shoulder did start to get tired by the time we were done and it worked. If I think of an inside turn now my arm will automatically start leading the move.

While I was doing martial arts I'd never expected anything else but I guess I thought things would be different when it came to dancing.
Lesson learned, repetition pays off.

We then practiced Cross Body Leads (thousands of them?) .
This was just more prove that repetition pays off as nobody, including the new people, had any trouble dancing them to music.

With these basic elements under out belt we started combining things.
Everything went fine for a while but eventually 2 of the beginners started falling behind.
I'm not sure whether that was because of the amount of information they had gotten in such a short period of time or because they didn't pay enough attention in the beginning.
I do hope they had a good time regardless.

Edie, Silvia and Ibo definitely made it a fun filled day that helped correct a couple of mistakes I was making consistently.
Would I recommend the bootcamp to beginners? Definitely!
Although maybe not to people that have never danced at all unless I know they are willing to put in the effort.

Day 2 of the bootcamp started relaxed.

We woke up early enough to enjoy a calm breakfast.
The workshop wouldn't start until 9 and by 8:30 we had eaten, were all packed and ready to go.

Then it hit me. Daylight savings time !
Saturday night the clocks had gone forward an hour so instead of having enough time we were suddenly very late.

We rushed through check out, got the car, drove as fast as we could (the whole 3 blocks) and ran inside.
By the time we got through registration and had made it to the room it was clear that we'd missed a lot already and we needed to catch up desperately.

Luckily we spent quite a bit of time spinning during the SalsaLife workshop so catching up was relatively easy for me.
Spin left, spin right, spin left, spin right... so far so good.
Double spin left... ok. Double right... still ok
Triple sp... oops, balance gone! At least I managed not to trip over my own feet and fall down so I still consider it a small success.

It seemed I wasn't the only one that was having problems and it seemed like there were more beginners than the day before. Or maybe there were just more men and women that weren't too experienced at spinning yet.
As we kept on practicing everybody seemed to improve a bit more and after a while everybody could pull off at least semi decent double spins. Most people were even doing triples without too many problems.
That was when it was time for the ladies to practice spinning with a partner.
As there were 3 times as many women as there were men at this point the ladies made a big circle.
They alternated practicing their spins with a partner and alone.
Given the amount of spins they ended up doing I was happy not to be in their shoes.
I'm not sure I would have still been standing at the end of the morning.

During lunch some of the men complained that the women weren't making an effort and had to be pulled through the spin but at the same time I heard that some of the men didn't prep the spin or even waited for the girls to be ready before starting the spin.
I think this might have been partially because of a language problem.
Some of the men on Sunday spoke little or no English and they didn't ask for a translation.

After lunch the Ladies Styling session started.
First Edie tweaked the women's posture a bit. It's amazing how much difference that makes.
After they were done they looked like completely different.

As the afternoon progressed a some more men arrived but there were still a lot more women. The ratio was about 2:1
Luckily Edie had a solution for that.
While I was thinking that we would probably make a circle again she explained that the men would be dancing with 2 women at the same time. That would solve the problem.

WHAT?!?!? The night before I had enough trouble trying to lead just 1 girl and now she expects me to lead 2 at the same time ? ? ?

For a second I thought she was kidding but no such luck. She was serious.
I tried to figure out how to sneak out quietly sneaking so I could hide in the hallway for the rest of the day but it was too late, 2 women were already standing next to me.
There was nothing left for me to do but dance.

The first 30 seconds were awful.
It wasn't that I was doing that poorly.
Edie was counting slowly and the girls knew what to do so as long as I moved along in the right direction I didn't really have to lead. It's hard to do things poorly in a situation like that.
However, I was so nervous I could barely move.
As I realized I was doing ok I started to relax and things got better.
Even though I messed up plenty of times and our dancing was more circular than linear for a large part of the afternoon I did learn a lot about leading and as my leading improved it got easier.
Both for me and the girls.

I think I probably learned more about leading in a couple of hours on Sunday than I have in last 3 months together. It was a lot easier than it normally is.
I didn't have to worry about music (at least not in the beginning) or about learning new moves.
All I had to do , once we started dancing to music, to make sure that my lead was clear so the girls would know what to do without running into each other.
As that was all I had to focus on it was much easier to see what I was doing right and wrong.
Especially because leading slightly different with one hand than the other showed completely different results instantaneously.

So what did think of the bootcamp?
Edie is one of the best instructors I've seen so far.
She's clear when explaining and always willing to explain something 1-1 during the breaks.
Her energy throughout the bootcamp was amazing.

It was definitely a great experience and I wouldn't hesitate recommending it to beginners.
Maybe it's not for absolute beginners (people that have never danced before) if they are not willing to put in the extra work (that is definitely required if you haven't danced before) but if they are willing to put in that extra little bit I think it will be a great experience for them as well.
That said, they will be part of a large group so they'll definitely have to be willing to ask if they don't understand something or they will fall behind.

Do I feel it was it worth the money? Absolutely!
Even if Sunday hadn't been free (men didn't have to pay as they were needed to help the women) just learning as much as I did about my leading would have been well worth it.

If you're not sure whether you would like to take a bootcamp try to make it to a Ladies Styling Sunday to get a taste for it. Keep one thing in mind though, you may not have to pay an entrance fee but in return you will be expected to work hard.
After all, you get to go for free is because you're there to help the ladies!

Chicago Review... click here

Blog by a Student... SalsaFreak bootcamp day 1

Blog by a Student...
SalsaFreak bootcamp day 1