Purple Salsa was started by Emilie & Stuart in February 2006 - we have been dancing salsa since 2001, mainly cross body style - on 1, and teaching since 2005. We were lucky enough to have started our teaching career under Dean Maynard (creator of Simply Dance and DMClothing), former European Dance Champion, who guided us through those early days! Dean is a fabulous teacher and dancer, and if you ever get the chance to go to one of his lessons, DO IT!!

After teaching with Dean for a year, we then started our own company - Purple Salsa - which has been gradually expanding since its early days, and now has salsa classes from 'absolute beginners' to 'intermediate' levels, along with rueda classes, and occasional social events and workshops. Due to the arrival of our first baby, James, in September 2008, we have cut back to just doing our Friday classes for a while - but we hope to be back with a full schedule of events in the not-too-distant future!

At Purple Salsa, we aim for all our classes to be fun, but also to give a good grounding of skills so that our dancers feel confident to go out there and DANCE! We try hard to give the guys useful information on leading, as well as focusing the ladies on their own following skills. We also work hard on the positioning and timing of moves, and try to keep our routines short and simple, focusing on doing the moves well, rather than learning lots of them.
 
Purple Salsa is a small company, and started out with just Emilie & Stuart teaching the classes, doing absolute beginners, beginners and improvers levels. We then felt the need to push on to a slightly higher level, so started up the improvers plus (now intermediate) class. However, we then needed another teacher, so we recruited...
 
...Helen! Helen has been dancing since 2002 and has been teaching with us since 2006. She is friendly and approachable, and is well versed in the skills needed to get her message across in an accessible way. She is a great teacher with a fabulous sense of fun, and we are very honoured that she agreed to join our team.

Emilie & Stuart also spent a year from 2006-7 teaching beginners and improvers classes for another company, Candente Salsa, over in Newbury on a Monday night. Candente Salsa also share our love of keeping dancing fun, and are lucky enough to have Lee Wright teaching the intermediate class. Lee is one half of Lee & Shelley (European Salsa Masters Championships Silver Medallists 2006, Professional Open South-East Salsa Champions 2005 & 2006, IDO World Championships Semi-finalists 2006... amongst many other achievements!), and his classes are fantastic fun, well taught and extremely useful - well worth a visit when you’re at that level!

We hope this has given you a flavour of what we’re about, but do contact us if there’s anything else you’d like to know! Hope to see you on a Friday night sometime soon, and remember...