Illustrated Handbook of Salsa Dance Patterns

This 293 page handbook contains 36 dance positions, 51 dance patterns, and 184 illustrations.  Each position is illustrated from multiple angles.  The author researched over 500 websites and online video lessons and curated the best 83 of them for beginner and intermediate students, providing a breakdown of common positions, holds, turns, and patterns.


Are you a beginner or intermediate level salsa dance enthusiast?  Do you want to expand your repertoire of dance patterns? Do you already have some understanding of the fundamentals of salsa dance and are ready to level up?  Have you started to accumulate a collection of dance steps, and are starting to forget some of what you learned?  Would you like to have a way to break down elaborate combinations into individual patterns? Could you use a refresher course on use dance patterns that can be used to create a diverse variety of combinations? Would you like to have a study guide to help guide your learning?  If you answer yes to any of these questions, then this handbook is for you.


A salsa dance combination is comprised of two or more salsa dance patterns, each pattern covering two bars of music. Every salsa dance pattern begins and ends in a dance position. One can view the salsa dance pattern as the artful transition from a start position to an end position over eight beats of music. Because salsa dance is made up of combinations, and combinations are made up of patterns, one can view salsa dance as an aesthetically pleasing progression through a series of dance patterns over the course of a song. Expert salsa dancers know how to get into and out of myriad salsa dance positions in interesting ways. 


Those amazing dancers that you see on the dance floor seem to have an endless knowledge base of elaborate combinations.  How can they memorize so many different combinations?  The secret is that many of them tend to use a small collection of patterns. They know how to get into and out of a position. If they have a combination that begins with some particular start position, they also know an interesting way to get into that position. Each pattern they perform takes them from the start position to an end position. They know how to take that end position and turn it into a start position for the next pattern.  They know how to mix and match patterns to create combinations that seem to be infinitely varied.


This handbook will help you get there.  If you are there already, and are looking for ideas on how to communicate your skills more effectively, this handbook will help you achieve that objective.


This handbook supplements expert dance instruction.  It is structured for quick reference. This handbook contains a compendium of basic positions and turns, a catalog of common salsa dance patterns, a collection of salsa pattern combinations composed of patterns defined here, and a guide to creating new pattern combinations of your own.


The patterns in this handbook can be used to create thousands of combinations. It is possible to combine these patterns into 227 combinations of length three without repeating a pattern within any of those 227 combinations. The number of combinations that can be created without repeating a pattern is even greater for longer combinations: 471 combinations of length 4, 952 combinations of length 5, and 1,820 combinations of length 6. Twelve combinations are provided to show how to create combinations using the patterns in the handbook.


This handbook is for salsa enthusiasts, instructors, and students. It can also benefit readers interested in ballroom dance and other partner dance styles.