Like many students at Longwood, I've heard of Latin dancing. However, before the Salsa Magic event that took place in the Mac Gym of the Health and Fitness Center at 8 p.m. on Friday, March 2, I didn't have a concrete definition of what Latin dancing was. I knew there were different types, such as Tango, Flamenco and Mambo, but I had never heard of Bachata.
Walking into the gym, the first two people I saw were Kat Aguilar and Lee "El Gringuito." Hailing from Fairfax, Va., they have been dancing partners for two years. The pair was dressed very nicely for the event. Aguilar, 25, was dressed in a tight-fitting black and silver dress complete with black high heels. Lee was wearing jeans, as were all of the students, with a white button-down shirt and a silver vest to top it all off.
Aguilar and Lee are no rookies when it came to teaching Salsa to Longwood students. They've been here before. Junior Anna Rigg, communications major, said, "We've worked with them in the past, and they've been here before. [Lancer Productions] thought the students would really like [Salsa dancing]. It would be a fun thing as a late night programming event to blow off steam from the week and dance troubles away."
After a little stretching, Aguilar and Lee jumped right into the dancing. The two would dance one-eight count of steps and show the students a couple of times before they would put the steps together. By the end of the night, students were dancing a full salsa routine. All of the dancing was under the Latin umbrella, but every half hour, Aguilar and Lee would switch to a different style. We danced to Bachata, Salsa, Kizomba, Zouk and the Argentinean Tango. The entire event lasted from 8 p.m. until around 10:30 p.m.
Aguilar and Lee have been dancing for a long time. Lee said, "I took a salsa class back my sophomore year at George Mason University. Once I took that class, I fell in love with Latin dancing and started teaching. So pretty much my only real training is one three credit class."
However, Aguilar has been dancing since she was little. Kat said, "My parents didn't have the means to pay for lessons. So, when I was 15, I started working for this lawyer. He was paying me really well for a 15-year-old, and I pretty much paid for dance lessons on my own. And the same studio I did private lessons with offered me a job as an instructor within a year. From there, I've just been learning and taking different dance classes, but my specialty has always been Latin since I'm Latin American."
While dancing is all fun and good, Aguilar and Lee have a good message behind it. "Dancing brings students together. The nice thing about doing shows is that we see students interacting with each other. When we ask them to switch partners and find somebody you've never danced with before, all the sudden their small clique of 10 people gets turned into 50 or 100, depending [on] the crowd size. That has value because later on campus you can walk up to somebody and say, ‘Oh hey, we met at the Salsa class.' It's nice for students to see that."
Aguilar and Lee are a part of a dancing company called the D.C. Bachata Congress where every year they host a Latin dancing festival at the Washington Hilton. For more information, contact them at 703-599-3017 or email dcbachata@gmail.com.
