by Apple Tropical NY
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This year was the forth year of NY Salsa Congress organized by David Melendez. This year the event was held at the Hilton hotel located right in mid-town Manhattan. New York has been one of the most important cities in the development of salsa history since the early 1960s. It has become a hometown for many famous salsa artists such as Tito Puente and Celia Cruz. New York also has known as a melting pot city. For example, when you ride subway in New York, you look around and you will find out that most people are from different countries and cultures. It is one of the reasons why New York has played a crucial role to promote salsa an internationally hit and dominated other Latin music around the world. Moreover, when Eddie Torres has introduced New York style or On 2 style salsa which combines the element of Jazz together with traditional salsa movement, it has enhanced the popularity of salsa music through out the entire city. Until today, you can find many clubs each day that play salsa music a lot of people dancing On 2 style. |
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Talk about difficulty of NY location Most people would think that New York would be a perfect location for hosting such a big event like Salsa Congress. Well, let's look at this. Because of expensive rental cost and insufficient space, it is very difficult to find facilities composed of hotel, auditorium, and especially dance hall that are able to accommodate people from 2,000-3,000 with in the reasonable rental fee. In the first two year of NY Salsa Congress, it was located at Catskills, upstate New York. The location was so isolated and not convenient for people who did not drive. Although it was a nice facility, the attendancy was very low. Starting from last year, NYSC (New York Salsa Congress) organizer has changed plan strategically. They has found a new home for the congress where is accessible for everyone. Especially, this year that David Melendez has signed a contract with the Hilton Hotel to host NYSC for the next 5 years. In my opinion, there is no other location that would be better than this because when you look on the right hand side, here you go, the Museum of Modern Art, on your left is Time Square, on the north is the Central Park and on the south is Empire States building. Although, it is still not perfect, I hope that they will learn from this year's experience and improve it for the next one. |
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Activities Comparing to LA Salsa Congress, most instructors who participated in NYSC are from New York City with a small selection from out-of-town instructors. The famous names that everyone known were Eddie & Maria Torres, Frankie Martinez, Duplessey Walker, Juan Matos, Thomas Guerrero and Edie and Al etc. The workshops were $60 per day for 7 lessons (7 hours) which was reasonable. The most interesting to me was the panel discussion about "Preparation for Performance" workshop hosted by Jami Josepson. This was an open discussion about how to be the best performer and what involved. Guest speakers included Frankie Martinez, Candy Mena, Edie and Al Espinoza, Mambo Mama, Ismael Otero, Mario B, Jimmy Anton and Albert Torres. It was a good opportunity to hear about what these performers had in mind when it comes to putting a performance together. They talked about music, dance routine, team members, do and don't etc. There were not many people attended this seminar, but I had a feeling that it was something that will be required more in the future. |
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| Performances There were 4 nights of performances: Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Most major dance companies performed on Friday and Saturday night. I went there on Thursday night at 10pm and everyone was ready to dance, but there were no lighting set up, so everything was so bright. It took them about an hour to figure out what the good lighting setup for dancing was. NYSC used a small auditorium for dancing and performance on Thursday and Sunday night and a main auditorium for Friday and Saturday where most attendants were expected. There were many defects for the main performing hall this year. The room was in L-SHAPE, so the stage didn't look grand and only part of audiences could see the stage directly. Most people had to watch performance from LCD screen and you wonder why you paid money to watch performance from TV. I have some images that I took from the screen because it was so crowded that I could get the seat.
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| There were many retails in NYSC this year, but it looked quiet. One of the vendors said to me that the fee to get in there was expensive and he didn't know if he would make profit. However, this year NYSC made 2 New York Mambo caledars. One is NY male top performers and another one is NY female top performers to help NYSC to generate incomes. I was frustrated with the performing stage. The stage for the performance was too small for the big group and the decoration was plain. The lighting was not well-designed, so you can not see some performance groups very well especially if their costumes were in dark color. I hope that they would take all comments from this year to improve NYSC next year. |
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Performances Most teams are from New York, New Jersey, Washington D.C. and Boston area with the combination of groups from out of town such as Los Angeles, Texas, Philadelphia, Japan and Italy. |
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| Dance Companies from New York | ||||
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| Dance Company from Outside New York | ||||
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| Live Bands and Social Dance | ||||
| The dance hall was much improved from last year. The organizer used small dance floor for Thursday and Sunday night and large dance hall for Friday and Saturday night. Surprizingly, it was not that crowded at all. There were plenty of spaces to dance every night and it was kind of empty after 1am (most nights finished at 3 or 4 am). This year I had to give DJ (Herry Knowles) big credits. The music played at NYSC was much more suitable for dancing than at LASC. About live bands, I was not excited about them at all because each break they played very short and the MC didn't introduce the band so well. | ||||
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There are a lot of things that NYSC organizer can adjust in order to improve it next year. However, because they are not perfect, so we have something to talk and laugh about. Otherwise it could be boring, don't you think? I left the dance floor on Sunday night around 3am. My apartment was in queens which at this time of the night, it could take me 1.5 hours to get home... Oh god, at this point, I didn't want to think about going work the next day. Buona noches! |
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