Salsa: Not just for Chips!
Maybe you’re shy, or maybe you’re the last person in the world who would go out on a Wednesday night, but you can still lead a partner you’ve never met before to the dance floor and put your hand on his or her waist and start shaking and spinning to salsa music.
“On the dance floor, you can be whoever you want to be,” Juan Atkinson said.
Juan is the DJ for Salsa Night at Radio Maria on the dinner side.
Atkinson spends his days as, he admitted, a shy, stressed-out PhD student in physics. But on the dance floor, he’s someone different.
“When I dance — poof — everything goes away,” said Atkinson, a DJ at Cowboy Monkey’s salsa night. “When you’re dancing, it’s you, your partner and the music, and that’s it. Nothing else.”
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Along with its close cousins, meringue and bachata, salsa dancing can be found almost anywhere in the world, and people from all over the world are dancing it in CU. Atkinson, who moved to Champaign from Mexico for school, DJs or teaches salsa three nights a week: Wednesday at Cowboy Monkey, Friday at Highdive, and Saturday at Radio Maria.
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Atkinson said this makes joining the scene easy and to check out some salsa nights — they’re listed on the Facebook group Champaign Salsa — come without biases and “feel the music.”
“Here, the spirit is always welcoming,” he said.
The Salsa Champaign Facebook group
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