From nothing to something: A story of salsa in Harbin

Sean Boyce gives lessons at Ace, a bar in Harbin, the capital and largest city of Heilongjiang province. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

This is a story about my time in China in the last six months, a story in which I have made many great friends, had some great experiences and ultimately had one of the best years of my life.

We started with literally nothing. We started by dancing in front of the library during the summer. It all started with a conversation that went something like this:

"Wow, summer is here and everyone is away at home; what are we going to do with our time?"

"Errr....I could teach you salsa?"

"Yeah, that sounds like a great idea!"

And from that conversation, which started as an offhand joke, began our foray into salsa dancing. Me and a couple of friends started practicing salsa in front of the library every day.we would just set up some music and I would go through the basics with them. People would walk past, be amazed and take pictures of this unlikely group of foreigners dancing their time away in the warm Harbin summer.

We started growing through word of mouth. Many Chinese students would pass us by, take pictures and post them to their WeChat, and all of a sudden we had people asking us how much the classes cost, and if they could study with us. I kept telling everyone they were free and available to everyone, and Chinese and foreigners were shocked. Many of the Chinese students found it strange that someone would teach salsa dancing for free. The number of times people told me that we should be making money from this is uncountable.

The main issue, however, is that Harbin was getting cold, and we needed somewhere to continue practicing now that we had classes every week. All of a sudden this was becoming professional; a proper dance class set up in China and none of us foreigners had any experience in dealing with Chinese businessmen on a professional level. We were going to learn the hard way, I guess.

We initially started asking dance schools if we could use their studios to practice, however many of the dance schools refused to do it for free (as to why we wanted it for free, I shall come to later). We then decided to just teach in bars, looking for a reciprocal relationship, we provide customers in the afternoons and evenings when the bar is usually quiet and in return they provide us with a place to teach. The first place we started teaching was a bar called ACE on Qiaonan Street. The owners, ZJ and Yu ze were lifesavers and made the process so smooth and easy. They helped us set up music, taught us how the PA and sound systems work and encouraged us to run salsa parties, which we then began to do.

In just under one month we had become an international dance class with over 20 students per class, with four classes per week and salsa parties every week. It was all driven by the fantastic community spirit of everyone who attended and got involved. The main problem now was that we were expanding too fast and ACE isn't the biggest bar in Harbin. It was time to start looking for new spaces.