good evening i'm goldstein and welcome to another edition of focus on tonight my guest is mike and the you know who is the founder of the still dance studio in philadelphia and we've been talking a lot about dance and mike's background and his profession  that the audience is interested in and we'll be getting to them in the year in the in the weeks to come in the months to come and but but today we want to focus on dance and hopefully you know have a good time and hopefully you enjoy our session today so mike thank a little about you tell me all about your biography and so they get to know you before we start talking about important things mike was born in manhattan but he was raised in ecuador and he moved to west new york in his early teens he was first introduced to salsa in two thousand but by two thousand and one his passion for dancing led him to become both a performer and with his background in teaching and a valuable dance instructor through dedication creativity and skill mike quickly earned a reputation as one of the east coast finest he's a soft weed and smooth moves has made him a very popular choice while his unique styling and shines make him one of the smoothest dancers on the floor his knowledge in latin dancing spans be answer also includes other popular styles such as mambo the charter the chacha and casino rwanda he has traveled extensively performing at salsa congresses both locally and internationally if you look at the large crowds which now make up the salsa scene you'll find dino teaching right in the center his inspiration is evidenced by his large following as i said before whether stew in the five years old or eighty five years old mike is known to help the beginner level dance a feel more comfortable confident and improving the skills of the more experienced dancer also but he always reinforces the most important role in the ethic and that is to have fun although always following might work hard take his christer asli his drive motivation let him become a founding member of art in motion latin dancers in two thousand and four and later that year he launched a successful children's dance group kids contest deal by two thousand and six much motivation led him to open his own studio own studio still dance studio in philadelphia where passion for teaching and dancing continues today as well as the large number of students who lined up to be inspired by his dancing so my first with that said my main question of my first question is what inspired you to open up your dance  so the studio i actually do was i was in something that was planned at first i started taking dance lessons to hope my current the relationship that i had of that time i did not grow up dancing i  music was part of my culture and i you would hear it when my parents were played at home and i would go to family parties but it wasn't something that i was really engaged to until i got to college and i had a roommate who would play music and play specifically s absolutely you know i i was born here and i was raised in south america and africa or when i came back here it was like as if i was here for the first time i had no memories of my childhood when i was here  so although i was born here it to me it was like a whole new country and it was tough being an e s l student not know when any english so you do everything that you can as a kid to become as american as possible so in the process i actually did not want to speak spanish anymore i did not want to deal with my culture because i wanted to be part of america and salsa brought me back to my roots and it was  the pending a what region of the of the world or even this country so in new york there's something called dancing on two which is the mambo you know here in philadelphia we mainly dance on one which we also dance on to quite a bit but there's other styles like as you know where that and of course this word our parents teachers which is we just dance to whatever we hear in the music and we just go there's no structure which is have fun and just go with it all the styles and we have  or goes from right to left or left to right and there's a lot more body movement involved to it the music is a little bit slower and the meaning of the music is a little bit different in sol so usually by chart that deals with a breakup or it has brought two types of communities together the people who take lessons whether it's salsa or all the forms and then the people that just were just do it at home but child that was like the melting pot that brought everybody the few just to those two communities together so when you go out dancing the make most of the time about ninety percent of the time you're going to hear it or cells are all but shut down the dance floor so what's your favorite dance some people are going to be happy to hear this but i more creative and and so also something that i can just dance for just about everybody but yet there's a little bit more personal to me at times and a lot of the movements could be a little bit repetitive and the music's a little bit slower it's it's great to do it in smaller sessions where cells are something that you can do it for six hours straight and you the different the music changes so often salsa is made up out of seventeen different sounds where the chart the has about eight different sounds so the mixture of the music is more insults of them which up ok so i know you teach a lot of different students you know what is the range age range of students that you currently teach so at the studio in philadelphia now we start them out as early as three years old or three years old three years old well and we introduce them not just i mean to the culture but you know it first is there more skills but in embracing them into how to develop their body so we teach them salsa hip hop and ballet at that age they don't know what they're listening to we do a fusion of those three and when they get to be about five or six years old then they go into three different classes which one for salsa one for ballet and one for hip hop and and as far as how much older can you be well it depends on what can dance that's my that that that's my motto if you can walk you can dance the worst of the sarg benefits of dancing that's a great question where can i start in the physical aspect is the most obvious one enough credit to is what it does for our brain it attacks and i use the tag because sometimes you know we need to focus on parts of our party that we don't use and i feel that taking dance lessons and listening to music attacks a part of the brain th creative part because this is not a choreography this is not we do the same ten steps every single song you hear music and you interpret it and what we give you the platform to interpret that music so it attacks the creative part of you and the other part that we don't realize is that you have to be able to memorize combinations and burbage and different styles and be able to remember some of the songs and what goes to what so some of us a college unless we have training in our jobs in this we do something on our own we just don't take the time to learn and to memorize into used to the learning part of our brains so that's the other part that's also does it keeps your brain learning and always trying to memorize and and in and of course the social part of it if you are half michael my kind of personality which means that i was very shy i am not the kind of guy walks into a room and makes twenty five friends immediately but it's also allows me to just because i can dance to dance a few songs and ladies who asked me to dance in makes me ask other people to dance so if you're like me you know you now you can walk into a social event and few more comfortable was it hard growing up you just said that you're basically you know more shy person than actually more interest in an extroverted person yes absolutely  right is it hard when you're doing something that's you know more of a sort of social nature to let yourself go into that extroverted mode where you're teaching and you have to you know put yourself out there and you know help an individual learn to dance or dancing actually make it easier for someone who maybe is referred to actually get out there and be able to express themselves in a different way where formal they want to do that yeah i think that one of the things that makes us do is makes it more confident and i believe that if you're confident anything in life it makes it easier to to be able to interact or do do what you have to do so learning how to dance does that you realize that right just because you know how to dance you're able as if you're a man you are able to lead people into moves and and the beautiful part of that is that you when you lead somebody that you don't know that you don't know their name you just shift ahead and you say would you like to dance and you make their body move in a certain way and they smile at you that's that's like having a great conversation with somebody and making that connection and that's hard to barest themselves and i mean do it absolutely and you can walk or you can dance it's very structured so it's not one of these things that you know we just teach us step and say figure it out we teach you the a b c s and once we teach  c s we teach you small words and then we give you ideas of how to make short sentences and then large sentences but it's up to you now when you go on the dance floor to make words and sentences on your own and this that's what they are to stick part comes and you hear the music  find your way your partner can and cannot do and then you create those sentences with the moves and vocabulary that we give you in dance bill carrier that you tend to repeat so you build you know muscle memory absolutely and muscle memory  and that's where the men memorizing the moves first it goes from your head and you force your body to do certain movements and after a while it's just like walking i describe it as being in your house with the lights off if you have steps or if you have whole way to certain size with the lights off you know how to navigate in your own house because of your muscle memory the way you hold your phone the way you sit in your car you know exactly where to reach and how far to reach for things if you do something twenty one times in a row they say that it becomes a habit but and so that's why i strongly recommend anybody to please take dance lessons it will it will it will enhance your life in every aspect and it will make you healthier happier person happy people always  time you don't have to you don't need a partner if you have a partner that's great bed you won't be dancing with your partner the whole time we rotate in class we rotate partners so you would do a part of the combination with one partner and i will save rotate and then you slide over and be there for the next person so you're probably dance with that partner maybe five or six times an hour but and you and the idea is you learn how to lead and follow different personalities in their hands everybody's hands feel different it's like shaking somebody's hand some people have really aggressive the way shake their hand some people are really soft and easy going dancing is the same thing but you have to be able to learn everybody's handshake and be able to adapt to everybody's handshake to be able to communicate t dance so have fun you meet wonderful people and you build self esteem that's great so you have a lot of events studio in other words the day after someone has learned you know some of the steps and have repeated them over is an opportunity for them to do rehearsal or performance well we most studios have a social social gathering once a month sometimes some of the studios have a twice a month so that's that's today we encourage all of our students to come and practice and but also meet all the other classes sometimes you only know the people from your class so if you only come to me on mondays the people that come to me and to them why is it there is friday other days and we all come together on friday it's also a way for us to invite your friends and family and the people who say you what do you go every monday and be like you know what we having a little party in the beginning of every party what i do is an introduction lesson for anybody who is brand new and so they can meet the e four different studios so one of them is in bristol p a call a dance studio and one here in lawrenceville which call hot sauce a hot i have my two studios and in philadelphia and then as far as the social aspect i partnered up with a lot of the night clubs and philadelphia and even here in trenton where every night we begin with a salsa lesson and we anybody who's never done that gets a trite my advice my students to be part of the lesson shouldn't meet other people and then the night continues into song time is you know the pending what time the night finishes it could be twelve probably clock or sometimes two o'clock in the morning so it's like you have an unusual sleep schedule yes changes from night to night absolutely it sounds like you're very busy the yes they do it does keep me busy some of the events are once a month some of them are twice a month some of them are once a week so the schedule does change a lot and i also get to make different guest appearances in different areas that does keep me entertained well let's talk about some of those events to have an up and coming events where people can function every third friday of the month i have an event at my studio and that's the one in the fishtown location in philadelphia that's every seventy to one hundred people in that class but we always have about forty students at the beginning of every month we bring a live band every so many months it's a great event it comes with food and that event usually closed at around twelve o'clock midnight i but other than some though some votes mr little later yes the night clubs normally begin the doors open up on nine o'clock and i do normally do a dance lesson around one thirty in the ends around ten thirty and that's located right in the heart of all city right underneath the bend brandon benjamin franklin bridge that's on second and chestnut street that plays i've been working for them for almost twenty years because started back in one thousand nine hundred seventy and i got on board with them at the end of the year two thousand and it's been twenty years running and it's we do it four nights a week and it's been very successful it's been it's been the pillar to the south the community in philadelphia these help me starting my businesses over there ok what made you first this is something that you wanted to one of the things that i've done my whole life without realizing is i've always taught my to fact my degree is in secondary education history from growing university and i didn't go to rowing to become a dance teacher i really wanted to be a high school middle school teacher and you know the way things work in life is that you can't you do something and when i left when i started teaching i really didn't enjoy teaching high school so i sort of do in corporate america teaching and while i was doing that corporate american teaching is what's also came into my life  opportunity came up for me to start teaching salsa and it wasn't something that i wanted to do was people were asking me continued to ask me to teach them and before i know it i was working forty hours teaching and forty hours in corporate america and i said which one do i enjoy the best w e do i have a bigger impact to change people's lives and solve it was a no brainer celso what's exactly what i was meant to do so it was tough to make the total transition yes in the sense that you know you're leaving a great job i was very happy with the job you leave in the benefits i saved up some money and i took the plunge and you know i wasn't easy but you know when you don't have any kids and your student loans are paid off retired from the nightlife ten years from now i want to be able to say i still teach dance in a limited basis right now my work schedule has me working sometimes sixty seventy hours a week between traveling in the night scene different studios ten years from now i want to be a guest at different events but i don't want to be the one who organizes promotes manages  i want to just teach i my local town and have a limited fifteen to twenty hours of classes because teaching is something that i see myself doing into i physically can't as a teacher do you see more young people getting involved yes matter of fact you mentioned in the beginning that one of the things that got me started was i started a kid's group called kids going to steal me for well how did they ask you to call this to advance to you there was a dance group and one of the things that i saw that i tried to  bring to our youth is to put them in touch with their with their culture something that i was lacking that i was losing so we do make them do a little bit of research on what country they come from and they hear from everybody else and we do speak a little bit more spanish and courage them to mentioned the connection that you make with you with your parents with your grandparents you know with a lot of my grandparents all speak english so how many i we come to this a lot we have the grandkids that can speak to their grandparents but we want to make sure we can maintain that and we keep that their studio or phone number where they can contact you absolutely if you guys want to learn the dance also you can go to the website dance studio dot com and still spell e s t i love their studio dot com the phone number is six zero nine seven one one thank you for watching tonight watch for us in the future weeks that we have a guest on another subject that we're talking about but until then stay active stay healthy and i'll see you next week another edition of focus on