You know, if it hadn't been for playing in the band, I don't think I'd still be dancing salsa regularly today.

Starting up what is now known as "Cuatro de Diciembre" is, in perfect hindsight, maybe the most serendipitous move of my relationship with salsa, and at the right time. Many of the crucial things were in place; I'd been teaching for many years and after having understood the skill of combination building, dance vocabulary had already taken second place to skills of movement and execution.

What I didn't realise at that time was that although my physical abilities were well matched with the intellectual, I still had a blind spot in that I lacked, for want of a better word, emotional rapport. That's not to mean that I didn't connect to the music - far from it. During those years, I enjoyed my dancing and it showed. But my quest which started out to identify the time-keeping components of salsa, led to appreciating the different salsa types, recognising the embedded cultural elements, and realising why salsa makes people want to dance. That's thanks mainly to being in 4 de Diciembre.

Most of all, it's made me feel.

And it's the foremost criterion I now look for in a person I ask for a dance - she has to feel something for salsa. Asking various regulars of the salsa scene here how salsa makes them feel, I get a mixed response from blank looks of puzzlement, to "happy". Not exactly articulate, I had hoped for something a little more insightful from the more experienced. So in my best "Sex in the City" moment, I ask, "Do we think enough about how we feel? Or what we should feel if at all?"

That's a knee-jerk apriori response. But then again, think upon this: I know two salseros who have been on the scene for a number of years now, both of whom would be classed as "advanced" dancers in terms of vocabulary. Both of them don't even like salsa music and confess to not listening to the music, only the beat to stay in time. They say they do it to be "social", not because they like salsa itself. They're not often short of people to dance with.

There goes that idea crashed and burned.

I've got this niggly feeling that I may've been barking up the wrong tree all this while.

Woof Woof.

Forever stubborn in the face of fact, I soldier on. And besides, I haven't finished my thanks to the music yet.

So contrary to conventional wisdom, I find myself reducing my dance vocabulary to a comfortable minimum. I tell others that it's because I'm getting old and that I'm now built more for comfort than for speed. That seems to bring a chuckle and no further probing questions. Dancing uncomplicatedly gives me the temporal space to say what I want to say. I would have called it reverse snobbery, but that would have been disingenuous about what salsa means to me.

I realise it's not fair to have come this far without articulating myself how salsa makes me feel.

"Salsa fills me with a need to share my interpretation of what I hear with my partner."

And everything I do flows from that.

In the end you could say that discovering music, and continuing to discover music, is what's been keeping me in the game.

Loo Yen