Link: Doing the Mumbai salsa-Deep Focus-Sunday Specials-Opinion-The Times of India.
Six days of the week,
Starters & More opposite Churchgate Station is like any other overpriced
downtown restobar. It’s cavernous interior is filled with the rich and the
wannabes, who insist on inflicting their tuneless karaoke skills on other
diners. At such points in the evening, as Hotel California is slowly murdered
one more time, the restaurant’s abbreviated name, S&M, seems painfully apt.
At the far end of the room, the barflies, mostly Nariman Point jocks on their
way home, slouch over their whiskies. It’s corporate after-hours.
But on Tuesdays, something happens.
As the clock ticks past ten o’clock, waiters busily begin to move some of
the chairs and tables to the landing outside. A first-timer could well be
fooled into thinking that it’s closing time but, in fact, the show is only
about the begin. The music changes and so does the mood as the clearing is
filled with lithe bodies in skirts, jeans, leotards and pointed shoes, all
moving to the alien yet deeply intimate moves of the salsa.
"My partner Andrea-Jo Franco and I started singing live here about four
years ago. Thankfully the management allowed us to combine dancing with our
singing," says Kieran Athaide, who started the dance sessions at the
restaurant in 2003. The curly haired goatee-sporting 32-year-old, who plays a
Korg PA 80 keyboard, chanced on the idea after chatting with diners and
discovering that their passion for music extended to dancing.
If the Cuban mojito reigns at the cocktail bar, this flamboyant Cuban dance
form has swallowed up the floor. Within a few weeks of it being introduced at
S&M, salsa became the hottest step easily edging out the cha-cha-cha, jive,
waltz, samba and foxtrot. By 2003, the commercialisation of salsa was well
under way, it having already been introduced in Mumbai by Sandiip Soparrkar who
recently made the headlines for teaching Beyonce a few dance steps before her
underwhelming performance at Bandra-Kurla. Soparrkar was a Tuesday regular
until "he had to leave with his troupe because they were bad",
according to a dancer.
The SS troupers may have exited but other teachers and their troupes still show
up every Tuesday. Although you can dance for free, S&M has proved to be a
great recruiting ground for salsa teachers. One of them, Kiran Fhriyan, declares,
"A guy should be able to lead a girl to the dance floor. If he can’t
dance, he’s not a gentleman." What Kiran doesn’t add is that for the Rajus
to become Gentlemen they have to first take expensive salsa classes – teachers
charge anywhere from Rs 3,000 for a combined two-month beginners course to Rs
1,000 for a single private session.
S&M is where Sunny and his group meet up. Sunny (Manpreet Singh on his
certificates) is assistant organiser of the Mumbai Salsa Meetup, a group on the
popular networking site meetup.com. "We formed the group to let salsa
lovers know where and how to dance in the city, and it’s become one of the
biggest groups on meetup," says the 29-year-old garment exporter from
Ghatkopar. "We’ve been coming here with our members from 2004. Dancing
with all these teachers and their amazing dancers helps us immensely." The
Meetup group used to groove at
Bohemia
in Juhu but shifted to Banana Bar in Bandra temporarily when
Bohemia
closed for renovation. When
Bohemia
re-opened and
decided to charge the dancers for using the space, most of the pack migrated,
this time all the way south to Churchgate. Starters welcomed them, probably
because the management and Kieran had an understanding but also because, as the
manager
Lawrence
says, "It’s good to be different."
Dancing can get dirty so the group has its rules. If someone asks you for a
dance you don’t refuse. "It’s actually an international rule,"
explains Haanssa, a starlet whose ringtone buzzes to a number from the Richard
Gere film Shall We Dance?. "The atmosphere must be kept healthy,"
says another member. "Basically, we need dancers and not oglers. Over time
we know exactly who is here for the dance and who is here just to get their
hands on everything apart from the dance." Potential gropers are thus
weeded out allowing the salsa devotees to then dance with a gay abandon.
The group is a mix of the almost-famous and the regulars. There is the Jhalak
Dikhla Jaa runner-up Shweta Salve, DJ Aks, Ashwin Mushran, who spoofed Greg
Chappell in The Comedy Show…Ha Ha Ha, and Haanssa, who has acted in Page 3
and Tom, Dick and Harry. "Dancing keeps me sane and makes me feel like a
woman," she says. "It’s very sensuous. Your body should move with the
rhythm-it looks very bad if you don’t match it with the music." The rest
of the group do their own thing during the day as event managers, lawyers,
engineers and restaurateurs. There is even a voice-over artist and a horse
breeder.
Not all the dancers come with their beloveds, but, as one woman explains,
dancing is about dancing, not about dating and mating. Haanssa agrees.
"Once a guy came up to me at a mall and began to act all friendly. I
couldn’t remember who he was," she says. "When I asked him, he said
he had danced with me once. Thing is, I don’t remember who I dance with since
all my energy and focus is on the song not my partner." Others simply
dance to forget. "I wanted to do something different after I had broken up
with my long-time boyfriend," admitted one young dancer.
The group plans to participate in the Salsa India Festival, a four-year-old
national competition that has been held in
Delhi
and Mumbai. Haanssa participated in the
UAE Salsa Festival last year. "The South Americans asked if I was
Latina
after watching me
dance. It felt great to be thought to come from the place where it
originated," she says.
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