Adriane Jaeckle

In early 2001, I found myself at Caliente, a Latin dance club in Nashville, Tennessee. I had just moved from my home in Texas and Caliente was the only bar I knew in town, so I kept going back even though I had never seen Latin dancing and wasn’t particularly interested to learn. But that’s where I met Raul Martinez, a tiny 54-year-old man from Costa Rica. He didn’t speak any English and couldn’t understand my bad Spanish but every night I’d sit beside him at the bar and often times during the week, we were the only two people in the club. And one night, tired of hearing me babble to him in unintelligible Spanish, he decided to teach me to dance.

It was an awkward process, I’m not graceful by nature and I’m not a fast learner. Since we couldn’t talk, Raul used “push-pull” instruction, yanking me around to beats I couldn’t hear. It was slow and frustrating and magic all at the same time. In the three years we danced together, I never had a conversation with Raul, but we found ways to communicate, with hand squeezes or winks or just in the feel of the dance.

Salsa for me is a celebration of your life and the great feeling of doing something you never thought you would or could do. It’s a chance to meet people you might never otherwise meet, people from all over the world and from all walks of life. It’s not about perfectly executing patterns, it’s about the challenge of synchronizing your body’s movements with someone else’s and about having a special, non-verbal communication with someone maybe you’ve never met before. I like to dance the way Salsa makes me feel, vibrant and alive and maybe a little out of control.

I have met a lot of amazing people and made a lot of incredible friends dancing Salsa, and I met my husband and soulmate Salvador on the dance floor of the Red Room. And maybe next week I’ll meet you. See you on the dance floor!