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 gradually expanded from its early days, until we had 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 had to cut back to just doing our Friday classes for a while, and temporarily suspending our Friday intermediate class - 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 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. As we have downsized for the time being, Helen is having a well earned break from salsa teaching, but we hope that she will rejoin us when we get back to doing a bit more again!

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 have great classes up to intermediate level, and a really friendly crowd of dancers and teachers.

Until the end of 2008, Candente salsa were lucky enough to have the wonderful Lee Wright (one half of the amazing Lee & Shelley – European Salsa Masters Championships Silver Medallists 2006, Professional Open South-East Salsa Champions 2005 & 2006, IDO World Championships Semi-finalists 2006, brilliant teachers, lovely people... amongst many other achievements!) teaching their intermediate class. Lee was killed in a car accident in November 2008 and we want to take this opportunity to remember and honour him. For those of you who did not know him, his classes were fantastic fun, well taught and extremely useful. He was also the most amazing personality, truly loved by all and larger than life. He was our mentor and guru and we miss him like crazy. Thinking of you Lee – we know you are looking down on us and laughing, and you are, and always will be, our inspiration!

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...