SAOCO Reviews

St. Louis - Salsa Under the Arch
By Mark

St. Louis has four nights of salsa during the week at only three venues: Club Viva on Thursday and Saturday nights, Dantes on Friday and Atomic Cowboy on Sundays. You can find them all on www.salsapower.com under St. Louis. I did not see any rueda when I was there, but there is an instructor listed there on salsapower that supposedly teaches it.

The salsa scene is a bit different there than here. The classes at the clubs start the same times as here, but unlike here, if you want to dance to pure salsa with the better dancers, you have to get there early. They play some really good, pure salsa for about an hour and a half. Then as the evening gets later, and club starts to fill, the DJ's start to mix in merengue, bachata, cumbia and eventually reggaton. Being a town where beer is king, (Anheuser-Bush-Budweiser's hometown) this is the best way for salseros to retain their venues while at the same time allowing the bars to not loose their alcohol beverage buying customers.

At Dante's, in particular, it's almost pure reggaton after midnight. However, prior to that time, this club is the largest venue there that hosts salsa. It has a nice, huge dance floor and is usually packed on Fridays. The decore is interesting - looking like a cross between a vintage factory wharehouse and a cathedral, with nice chandeliers over the dance floor and large bar. Definitely worth seeing.

Atomic Cowboy is actually a large bar that has a fairly good size area to dance. The crowd was friendlier and usually consisted of the more seasoned salseros. Another benefit was that there was no reggaton played there as the crowd was definitely partner dance oriented. Only problem is that it closed at midnight.

Club Viva is in the lower level of a retail complex in a very nice area of St. Louis and had a very large group of regular salsero patrons. If you had only one place to get a feel for the salsa scene in St. Louis, I'd suggest Club Viva. This was the first club I visited and I had a deja vu experience when I was there. As I was leaving the club, a young lady was handing me a flyer on an upcoming salsa workshop she was promoting. We looked at each other and she said I looked familar to her. I said, "I'm not from around here, I'm from Washington DC." And she said, "I'm from Silver Spring, MD!" It turned out that the young lady was Lauren Wilmore who had taken classes with me from Piero and Jimmy and had performed with SCAM! What an amazing coincidence!

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