After moving to Los Angeles from Texas in 1987, Laura Canellias “stumbled” into a salsa club, made some new friends and found a new passion. About a year later, Canellias, who had taught ballroom dance in San Antonio and Houston, began teaching salsa.
Today, Canellias is known as the “Salsa Diva” to legions of latin dance aficionados. Students take part in her classes at Santa Monica College, where she’s been teaching for more than 20 years, and at By Your Side’s dance studios in Culver City and Marina del Rey.
She still teaches ballroom classes, and some bachata as well, but salsa remains her favorite. “I feel it in every fiber of my being,” says Canellias.
No matter your jam, dancing has loads of wellness benefits. There are, of course, the general benefits of cardiovascular exercise, like keeping blood pressure and blood sugar in check. Depending on the style of dance you choose, though, you might focus on improving your balance and flexibility or strengthening core and leg muscles.
Beyond any fitness goals you may or may not have, though, there’s a sense of satisfaction that comes with taking on a new challenge.
“It’s very rewarding to me as an instructor to see people learning to dance, learning something new,” says Canellias. “A lot of people have desk jobs. It’s important to use that other part of your brain where you learn to do something physical and you learn to do it with other people.”
Finding connection
Dancing with people in the same physical space also lends itself to finding a sense of community that you might not get through other forms of exercise. To do this, though, you need to find the style of dance and type of class that resonates best with your interests and lifestyle.
“We yearn for a sense of community and interaction with other people. Human beings need that,” says Canellias. “We’re social animals and we have to find a way to come together, and salsa is a great way to do that.”
Canellias regularly sees that sense of community in salsa. “You make friends. You recognize the same people that go out to the clubs,” she says.
Sometimes, people find their future partners on the dance floor. Canellias has seen multiple couples who met through salsa and ultimately married.
If you’re interested in salsa, you could dance at a club. But if you’re new to it, you might get more out of a class at a studio, where students who are of the same skill level practice together.
“Know that when you go into a class, especially a beginner class, everybody is a beginner,” says Canellias. “Very few times is there a more advanced dancer in there, unless they’re helping out.”
With salsa, like other dances that involve partners, you may be paired up with someone you don’t know.
“Initially, for someone who has never danced before, there’s a certain amount of anxiety,” says Canellias. “They get a little nervous about dancing with a stranger, but that’s how we make friends.”
‘Spiritual’ dimension
For those who are interested in larger group dances, hula might be the right option.
“Hula goes beyond dance. It’s spiritual. It’s emotional,” says Chase Keoki Wang. “It teaches them about life, no matter what age you are.”
In 2010, Wang opened Hula Hālau Nā Mamo O Pane’ewa, the Glendale school that his grandmother passed down to him. There, he teaches all levels, with some participants as young as 5 and others older than 80.
“Not only is it a physical dance, it’s also a spiritual journey for some,” he says. “Especially those who are from Hawaii, they find a connection, or what we call a pilina, with their ancestors through hula, through the discovery, through the old chants and things like that.”
As for the dance itself, hula can be quite challenging.
“Hula dancing is very physical. People don’t realize it,” says Wang.
Additionally, there’s a good amount of memorization involved, from the choreography to the chants. All of that has plenty of health benefits. Studies conducted in connection with the National Institute of Minority Health and Health Disparities showed that, for Native Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders, hula has a number of benefits for heart health — not just for the exercise, but also because people strengthened cultural and community ties.
At this school, Wang has seen some of the benefits that go beyond physical fitness.
“For some, it’s that connection and the camaraderie with what we call their hula sisters and hula brothers in each group, or their hula ohana or hula family,” he says. “The support that they give each other, whether it’s getting ready for a performance or competition, the gatherings that we have, the sense of community that we have is very important for many people, especially those from Hawaii.”
Do it for self-expression
If you simply want to move without the stress of getting the choreography right, a cardio dance or dance aerobics class might be your best option.
“Back in the day, I couldn’t find a dance class where I would let myself really try, because I was scared. I felt afraid,” says Emilia Richeson-Valiente, who founded the popular dance aerobics class Pony Sweat back in 2014. “What I try to do with Pony Sweat is make a space where you might feel less afraid.”
Richeson-Valiente, who teaches at Stomping Ground in El Sereno and Athletic Garage in Pasadena, has cultivated a “fiercely noncompetitive” atmosphere in her classes that has attracted a following far beyond Los Angeles, thanks to livestreams and video releases.
Music selection is key to the classes. Richeson-Valiente, who started by choreographing routines to songs from The Cure and Smashing Pumpkins, makes playlists that mimic old-school mix tapes.
“I try to have an emotional arc to it, like we did when we were in the practice of making mix tapes regularly,” she says. (For the music buffs, Richeson-Valiente also teaches a class called Exercising and Listening to Records, where participants bring their vinyl picks to class.)
Perfect isn’t the point
Beyond the mix of tunes, though, Richeson-Valiente’s “anti-perfectionism” outlook keeps Ponies coming back to class. “Because there’s so much emphasis on that, folks come back because they feel free, they feel secure to maybe not know how to do something and trying it anyway,” she says.
Ponies have told her that the classes help them honor their bodies. “That makes them feel closer to themselves and acknowledge parts of themselves that they might otherwise try to hide,” she says.
Richeson-Valiente adds, “I’ve witnessed that in the people that come regularly. There’s an expansiveness. People’s lives become changed when they find a way to be in their bodies.”
The community that forms inside the classes helps foster those kinds of changes. People are asked to read Pony Sweat’s core values and community agreements, posted on the class’s website, before attending. “The reason why this space feels supportive is because of the energy everyone puts into it,” says Richeson-Valiente.
The positive energy of dance class isn’t necessarily unique to Pony Sweat, though.
“Pony Sweat can be pretty cathartic in a lot of ways, like a lot of group dance experiences are,” she explains. “You’ll feel different when you leave the class than when you came in. That’s just the power of group dance, what happens when we dance together.”
