As I thought about the problem, I realized that salsa dancing (and most partner dances) is really a finite-state machine. We have X number of states (the positions that you end up in on beat 1), and transitions between the states (twirls, etc.). Naturally, I thought of creating a diagram with states and transitions and tracing paths through the diagram to come up with new sequences. This way, if I could memorize a few positions and all the different transitions between them, I could come up with lots of sequences on my own without ever having to memorize a two-minute series of steps. Each set of steps would be at most 8 or 16 beats long.

Still, I didn’t know exactly what to call each state, what precisely is considered a transition, or most importantly, how to present this information in a usable manner. Last week, I was again thinking about this and realized that since a finite-state diagram is also a directed graph, and the web is a directed graph, a webpage made perfect sense for a presentation mechanism. Moreover, if I used a wiki, I could start adding pieces very easily, even if I don’t know the best terminology or have the perfect definition of each state. Plus, other people can add their own moves to the wiki and eventually, we can all learn from each other.

Thus, yesterday morning, I started a new website: salsa.wikidot.com. So far it’s not much; I have a few positions and moves described, and I plan to add more. I feel a little bit like I shouldn’t actually be the one adding content, since I’m so new at dancing and don’t really know how to describe everything. However, I also think that a lot of times we just need to start doing something even if we don’t know how, so there it is. I have it set up so that it will be easy to add photos and videos of the steps if I ever get that far. Should be fun. Hopefully this helps someone someday.