Salsa night at the Avalon
By Luca Zuccato
The ballroom lights dim, the salsa music begins and the crowd is ready to dance. Kyler Ruane roams the dance floor.
“I feel like I’m in high school again when I have to find a woman to dance with and approach her,” Ruane said.
Every Thursday night from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m., salsa aficionados come to the Avalon Ballroom on the eastern side of Boulder to learn to dance salsa. Tonight, the salsa dance style they are learning is called Cuban Rueda de Casino, where everyone dances in a large circle and rotates partners clockwise. The instructor remains in the middle, calling out different dance moves like Cucaracha, which is a stomping motion, or Un Fly, where everyone claps. After an hour of the lesson, social dance time begins.
With the lesson over, fluorescent purple lights filled the room as a mass of dancers arrived to mingle and move. It was Caroline Dahm’s first salsa night. A man who was apparently an advanced dancer wearing a purple monochromatic suit with his hair slicked back, asked her to dance.
“I told him this was my first class, and he was like okay I’ll find a new one,” Dahm said. “Then he said he was just kidding, immediately spun me around with my arms spread out and said, ‘I call this the titanic.’ It was a funny experience.”
The main ballroom is large with the lighting so dim, one can only make out silhouettes and hardly see their partner’s face. A smaller ballroom is located in the back where they do not dance salsa linearly, but rather in the traditional free-form Cuban style.
Heidi Mecklenburg says she’s been dancing salsa at the Avalon for nearly 20 years. She has danced in New York and Paris, and prefers the intimate small space of Avalon’s back room.
“People are down to earth and genuinely love to dance and form community,” Micklenburg said. “It’s not as pickup-y as everywhere else, and we love welcoming beginners.”
Dahm walked into the back room and began to dance with a Cuban woman.
“She told me to practice my hip movements in the mirror every single day because homework is temporary and salsa will live with me forever,” Dahm said.
The Avalon Ballroom offers other dance classes in tango, swing, jazz, Scottish country and even waltz. But remember, Thursdays are reserved for salsa.
Edited by Linus Loughry
