Toan Hoang Blog

Building a Salsa School (Part 2) Customers

Running a Salsa School is just like running any other business. In the previous article, we talked about the need to understand your own purpose which will give you conviction during the inevitable hard times. In this article, I want to talk about the Customers of the Salsa Scene, how to reach them and the implications of not catering to...

Connection in Salsa

The second part of my leading series is about connection and will cover how I create a physical and emotional connection with my partner. In the physical connection section, I will talk about my ideas behind preparation, initiation, development and finally the lead. In the emotional connection section I will talk about mood, energy, empathy and how this ties in to create an...

Empathetic Leader

A lot of people have asked me to explain how I lead in Salsa; and more often than not it is not what I do but how and why I lead certain moves. I have been dancing Salsa for 13 years and refining my understanding of the leading and following dynamics. In the spirit of sharing I have decided to...

Reboot

I have retired from public teaching but still dedicate more than 10 hours a week to train those who (I hope) will be the next generation of Salsa instructors. For the most part, I work with new TNT students who are recommended to me by Nicola Lambert, owner of TNT Dance, but sometimes I get approached by those that have...

Statements of Change

After 13 years within the Salsa community, I have attended hundreds of classes from a wide range of teachers. Though these classes have been extremely useful in building my vocabulary as a dancer it was often the things that were said to me personally that changed the direction of my dancing and had a larger impact. In this article, I...

A Response to La Epoca (Part 1)

On Saturday 14th May 2011 TNT Dance Hosted the second ever Salseology Live Music Social and we wanted to do something slightly different. Instead of having a regular class to kick start the night, we decided to show a movie about Salsa, La Epoca. This movie was recommended to me by a friend and was being talked about a lot...