Thursday 5/27/04:
Made it to Logan airport with much time to kill but not enough to pick up shoes forgotten at home. The highlight of an otherwise uneventful flight from Boston was the aerial view of “Salsa Land” as we were about to land at LAX. Salsa Land is the tent village set up in the parking lot of the Hollywood Park Casino and to be home for all the dancing activities planned for the congress weekend. I was curious how it would work out having all the workshops there instead of at the hotel as in previous years.
A couple of hours later I was approaching Salsa Land on one of the frequent shuttle buses from the hotel. Registration was a breeze at that time in the afternoon. Salsa Land is a large perimeter of small colorful tents for vendor tables, food and other services. Inside the perimeter are two large tents – one for the shows and the other for the social dancing to DJ and live music. There’s also an outdoor dance area underneath a saddle shaped span structure.
I had a decent seat for the two sets of evening performances. All told there were some 25 routines that night. My favorite was a number called “Bones on 1” by Liquid Silver Productions. It was three masked dancers in skeleton outfits dancing to “Welcome to the Party”. Too bad Frankie wasn’t at the congress to see it. I would have bet that two of the dancers were Al and Edie, but when they took off their masks as they took their bows, they were three female dancers I haven’t seen before.
The two sets of live music were excellent. The first was a band composed of select participants in the ATP Musicians’ Seminar which had been going on since Monday and under the direction of Johnny Pacheco and Oscar Hernandez. It was great to see the talents of people like Cha Chi of Caribbean Soul and Joel Massicot recognized.
Now about the social dancing scene. There was ample space in the dance tent (Thursday wasn’t yet a full house). Some areas of the dance floor had a slight slope (parking lot had a grade to drain rainfall). The floor wasn’t sticky, except for occasional shoe borne grit from the asphalt areas. Personally I didn’t have much success at either getting ladies to dance with me or getting satisfaction dancing with the ones that said yes – they nominally danced on2 if at all. That was mildly frustrating, but I figured there were still three nights of the congress left to go.