TED 02 | DJing & Changes in the Scene with Pierre Henry - Part 2

Episode 2 – Pierre Henry Part 2

You've done a lot of teaching, a lot of experience in this area, but you're also a DJ, as you mentioned, and you DJ  all over the place.  Uh, yeah, yeah, I am a bit. Um, I started off  In my teens, as a sort of house party DJ, wedding DJ, um, pop music, house music, um, on decks and property and tables and stuff.  Um,  and I used to be in a band, so I used to sort of DJ between sets at my gigs.

Um,  did a bit of DJing at university. Um,  and so when I got into the teaching side with my wife, I started DJing at our local clubs. URGH.  And just went from there really, uh, but now I get booked equally as much as DJ as a teacher. So that's all good. Um, my son's even got into DJing as well. Yeah.  He's now 14 years old.

He's going to be DJing at ABC with me next week. 

One of his first gigs, he was nine years old and he was DJing me, DJing with me at the Berlin Salsa Festival.  So it was like one o'clock in the morning and he was on the decks,  like in the bachata room and everyone kept looking over there like, Is that kid deejaying? He's got to press that button. Yeah, I was like, yeah, he's deejaying.

He's got it. Okay, so when we talk about people now fast tracking these days, I think you're all over that.  Well, no, he didn't fast track. No, no, I'm teasing. He was sitting on my lap since he was two years old. Yeah. So he's 14 now. And so he's actually got 12 years experience as a deejay. Okay.  I take it back.

I take it back completely.  It's got more experience than most seasoned DJs have these days. No, that's good fun. Does he prefer salsa or bachata to DJ? Uh, I think he prefers bachata, but he does DJ salsa as well. So  he's going to be DJing the afternoon social on Sunday at ABCD. Is he going to, are you going to be there supervising? 

I don't supervise him. He does his own thing.  That's incredible. How long has he been unsupervised DJing? That's really, really cool. Uh, at least the last two years. That's fab.  What a responsibility. Yeah. Isn't it?  No, big shout outs to Fadi and Mo and Mauricio, like all these guys that do the UK events. They put a lot of trust in him.

Um, and that's really good from my perspective as his dad. Yeah, yeah. Bet you're really proud. Yeah, so  they'll happily put him on the DJ rotor and they'll give him a good slot as well. Aww, that is really decent. Well, you know, if he's good, he's good. Yeah, he is. They can see that, so they're happy.  That's really cool.

Sometimes, like, he's on the DJ booth and then I cut one and everyone's like, No, no, no, no, get together, mate. Aww,  it's a bit early for him to be kicking you out, isn't it?  It's quite nice, actually. I can just chill out and go dance.  Fair play.  I still get paid though, so that's fine. I like that one.  And you're also responsible for the,  all of the routines and shows, music as well.

Yeah. That is a tonne of a task. Yeah, I think we've got about 20 odd shows. Um, at the event this week and I've been chasing all the artists for the last month to get their music to me and some of them have only been given it to me today, you know, um, but, uh, it's quite common, um, like when you have that many tracks, uh, yeah. 

You've always got to  chase for them before time because it's not just the shows, you've also got  the tech rehearsals to do. And when you're doing tech rehearsal for 20 shows, you don't want to be wasting time.  Can you email it to me? Can you airdrop it to me?  Have you got a USB stick? You'd be there for hours, wouldn't you?

Exactly.  You want to get all that done and dusted before you turn up for the rehearsal.  Definitely.  That's what I've been doing.  Nice. That must be keeping you very busy this week. Yeah.  It has indeed.  What's your favourite part of a festival? A weekender?  Uh, sleeping. For me it's the social dancing.  I've always, that's why I do this.

I really enjoy social dancing.  I've never performed  In, in dance, I've always been a hundred percent social dancing and teaching. Um,  all of my performance was done before I started dancing behind a guitar, behind a keyboard, behind a microphone. So I got that out of my system nice and early and I just focused on the social dance. 

There is magic in social dancing.  Yeah. Don't get me wrong. I love a good performance. I love watching good shows. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Um, um, yeah, but it's just not for me. Uh, I much prefer the social aspect. Mm, social side of it. And I think I know the answer, but in social dancing, salsa or bachata, Pierre?  Oh, that's like asking you to decide between your children.

Yeah.  I love them equally.  Um, but I think that's to do with the way that I started dancing actually, because when we, when I was dancing, the scene was, it was much smaller and more, um,  cohesive. So like, when I was learning to dance, I'd go out every night of the week. I think my longest stretch was like 42 days in a row.

Oh my gosh.  But on one night, I'd be learning crossbody salsa. Next night we'd be doing La Raida. Next night we'd be doing cha cha cha. Next night we'd be doing, um, Cuban salsa, like,  you'd be learning everything at once and you'd go to the parties, you'd hear all sorts of music, cross body music, Cuban music,  bachata, kizomba, like a little bit of everything in the parties.

So, yeah. For us, that's what social dancing was about. You had to know all of these dances, so that when the DJ dropped a bachata, you're going to dance a bachata. When he drops a Cuban salsa, you're going to dance a Cuban salsa.  So we had to have all of these strings to our bows so that we could go out and dance to any song with any partner. 

Um, and it's only over sort of the years where the scene's expanded, that it's segregated as it's expanded. Um  For me, that's been sort of good and bad, I think.  Yeah, I mean, it's good in the sense that everyone can do what they like, but it's bad because what we liked, that, that generation, what we liked was a bit of everything,  and it was very hard to find that then.

This is one of my favorite nights, when it's all in one room.  Yeah, but that's what I'm saying. Even if you do have an event like ABCD, which is amazing, it caters for all of those styles. But if you want to dance, you have to go from one room to the other. You have to go and find those dancers, rather than it being just in one room. 

And as a DJ as well, I like DJing multi style events.  I like DJing bachata, but when you're DJing bachata, after bachata, after bachata, after bachata, it's like I've done some events recently where I've done a  four hour slot of just bachata.  Um,  yeah, um, it's, it's great. I love bachata. I can do it. It's great, but when you have the opportunity to change genres from, go from bachata to salsa to gizombo to cuban salsas, throwing a  vereda, maybe dropping a merengue or something.

But when you get to put all that together, it makes the set much more dynamic. Makes it much more interesting for me as a DJ. Mmm, I can imagine, yeah. Yeah, because a three hour stunt, it's still quite a long one to do as a DJ. Four hours is next level.  Yeah. No, let's go.  Because like, at most events nowadays, you get given a one hour DJ slot, maybe a two hour DJ slot.

Okay. Which is Which is okay. You can play a good set in an hour or two hours, but you don't really get to develop  the  journey for the dancers, right? So when you're working with a four hour set, you actually get to  take them on a journey over that four hours  from taking them to different musical places, giving them different highs, different lows, throwback to old songs, bring them back to the future, and move it all around. 

So I enjoy those longer sets as well. You make it sound beautiful.  Yeah,  it's good fun.  And that's why you do it, so that's cool.  What other changes have you seen recently in the last, over the last 20 years? Besides the segregation of parties kind of getting one room events and stuff like that, what else have you seen change? 

Um,  it has been like, uh,  I think it's like the social media effects, to be honest,  I mean, since social media came along in sort of. 2007, was it? Well, that's 2007 when it was when YouTube came out. Right. And like when people started posting videos on YouTube, that was great. You'd go to Congress, you'd film all your classes, you'd put them up on YouTube.

Maybe a few people had watched them. But then when sort of Facebook and.  Okay, but no, YouTube was 2004, wasn't it? Facebook was 2007. Yeah, I grew up in rural Ireland, so it was all just too far away from me. I was on dial up for years in those years. It's like nowadays, like, 

Social media has sort of,  it's done wonders for promoting the dance, bringing in a much wider audience, we've got much, a much greater variety of events, um, so many more students, such a bigger reach, especially for bachata.  I mean, bachata has grown sort of exponentially over the last sort of 15 years. That is the word for it, yeah.

Yeah.  So in one way, that's good.  In other ways, it's bad  because it's sort of,  um, quantity versus quality  and the sort of the effect of diluting the source.  So, um,  yeah, it's bad because it's, it's diluting is a, is a good word for it because it's. Different influences and different people bringing in their styles, which on one hand is great.

It's evolution. But on one, on the other hand, it's also like, oh, but the purity is changing. Yeah, um, and like the reasons for why people dance and the reasons why they become teachers,  it's all changed. Um.  Like,  it just feels like people are in a rush to become, especially in the Bachata scene, it feels like they're in a rush to become a teacher, because it means that they get to travel the world, they get paid to attend festivals, and it gives them this sort of lifestyle where they can travel around Europe, do some teachings, see people, get that validation that they're craving, and  they're teaching.

Not to create students, but to demonstrate what they know.  Yeah,  it's a nice distinction. It just feels  very superficial on some levels. Right. The why? Yeah. So the  why  I teach not.  Not to sort of demonstrate what I know.  I know a lot, I think.  But my goal is to actually make my students better dancers than I am.

So I want them to be better dancers. I don't want them to be cockers of me,  but Like you look at the dance floor nowadays and I can literally look at a person I can say, okay, you learned that from this teacher, you learned that from this teacher, you learned that from this teacher.  And you can tell  who they've learned from just by watching them dance.

They, they turn out to be carbon copies of their teachers rather than. Becoming individual dancers themselves.  Um, I think that's something that's changed over the last 10 years in particular as well.  Um,  but yeah, I think  it's, it's partly to do with social media, media, but it's also to do with the commercialization of the dance. 

It's like now sometimes you go to  events and it feels like  there,  there are more customers than students. Right. Okay.  So we've commercialized the dance to the point where it's no longer,  um, about education. It's about selling a product.  Right.  So, as a dance teacher, I'm not teaching you to dance bachata, I'm selling you my brand of bachata. 

Right. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Um,  so,  I understand why people do it, but it's, it's, it's a difficult economy. People want to earn money, but the system seems to be geared in a way  that is more about  generating income for teachers.  Yeah, there's a lot of models within the market at the moment, even like the, uh, the model of,  um,  like certifications, student teams, all of these things that they're kind of like mini pyramid schemes that are going on within the scene where money, money sort of funnels up.

To the top level teachers and whatever that you've got to pay for costumes, you've got to pay for all of these other things going along the way, and it's all about generating that passive income from, from your YouTube videos, from your Facebook, from the revenue.  So there's all these things driving  people's motivations to become teachers, which are not necessarily to do with creating dancers.

Yeah. Yeah. So that will harm the community. Yeah, so that's what I've seen over the past 10 years or so, and it's not that I regard anyone that at all, but it does change the dynamics of what's going on within the scene. Yeah. So, yeah,  I think that's the biggest change that I've seen. I, I can, I've seen that reflected a bit in different, in different lessons and different styles.

Um, for me, I always notice the why, the reason why is someone doing this.  That driver, you can see sometimes that it's, it's motivated by different things and  surely if you're teaching something, the motivation should be to just to share knowledge, to see someone grow in whatever area you're teaching and you're celebrating. 

And yeah, it does change the dynamic hugely.  Yeah.  Um, but like,  so you have  like, say the, the student team model, right? So when you, when you go back sort of 10, 15 years, a student team was not a bunch of beginners and improvers.  Like when you think about, um, like Fernando Sosa and Tropical Gem,  they were amazing dance team, still are amazing dance team, but their student team is full of advanced dancers. 

They are still students, but they are, they know how to dance already, yeah, whereas the students he modeled now is aimed more at the other end of the market, the beginners and improvers.  on the promise that by attending a student team, they're going to become better social dancers,  which is kind of backwards in itself.

But, um, it also means that the quality of shows in general has dropped because rather than a bunch of advanced dancers performing student choreography, you've now got a bunch of Bunch of beginner improvers dancers dancing that choreography and  like  to me, that's not a show. To me, that's a recital.  Right.

So in, in like the ballet world, like my wife, she currently teaches children how to dance ballet. Yeah. And at the end of the term, they'll have a recital where they bring the parents in to watch the ballet recital and they clap very politely. Well done. Yeah. Showcase their learning of that semester or whatever term.

Exactly. And that's, that's basically now what we're saying is a show. Yeah. Yeah. And.  I've got, again, I've got nothing against these people learning how to dance and putting on that show because it takes a hell of a lot of guts to get up on stage and do a performance, yeah?  Nothing against it at all,  but what you've noticed over the last 10 years is the amount of people who want to go see shows, there's no stock,  because they don't want to sit through 15, 20 recitals. 

Yeah,  when we used to go to shows, the standard was so much higher,  it  engaged you, it was like a spectacle, you'd enjoy going to watch the shows, because you knew that you were going to be, wow. Yeah, you're going to be spellbound by it. Exactly. Rather than,  well done. Amazing job. You did so well. Right? So, again, that dynamic has changed because of the motivations within the scene.

Yeah.  So, I think, sort of, the monetization and commercialization of the dance has allowed the scene to grow. Yes. In terms of numbers, but in terms of quality of experience,  it's taken a massive nose dive  for me.  Yeah.  Yeah. I think, I think I see that bit reflected in new dancers coming in and then shooting up the levels  and they kind of think, yeah, I've done level one, I'm going to do level two now, then level three, then level four, whatever the name of the levels are.

Um, and it's that  we  want to have made it yesterday and  Is it that desire for, for progress to constantly feel like we're progressing? Um,  and it does, it does change the dynamic a lot, yeah.  So, yeah.  Yeah. That, that's my biggest observation.  I feel like I could honestly listen, listen to you for ages on different, different topics.

Things you've picked up and observed in the dance scene. Really makes me think.  I talk a lot. That's perfect. Anyone who listens, you know.  All right, Pierre. What, uh, what are you most looking forward to for this next year for 2024 in the dance world? What is either going to be like a I think you're thinking, oh, I can't wait for this.

I've actually  been invited over to San Francisco in June, um, to go teach at the San Francisco International Bacchata Congress, um, where the guy called Rod Chatter, uh, and he's one of the sort of OG Bacchata  teachers, um,  more traditional, um, than modern, but he embraces all the styles. Um, So, yeah,  I worked for him a few years ago in Vegas and we had a really great time over there.

So I'm really looking forward to going over there.  That's fantastic. Yeah. Amazing. But, no, I've got a lot of events coming up this year, um, and a lot of them are sort of UK based. And I'm really enjoying, like, teaching around the UK at the moment because there's, there's so many people out there that are actually hungry for knowledge at the moment.

I think that's one thing that I've seen in the last year is that,  like, I always use,  I always write on Facebook about how, like, learning to dance is more than learning moves.  And I feel that when we came out of lockdown,  There was this appetite for moves, so everyone wanted to go, I want more moves, I want more moves, I want more moves, but it's been now two or three years since we came out of lockdown,  and people have now been on that journey for three years, and they're starting to realize now that Moves aren't everything.

They need to learn the technique. They need to learn the musicality. They need to learn the connection. So they're going, they're at that stage now where they're looking to revisit that. And that's something that's been coming more evident over the past year. And that's something that excites me as well, because  That's what I like doing. 

Yeah. In London, like, it's just crazy. There's so many teachers, so many events. I think the students get a bit overloaded sometimes, but when I go outside of London,  appetite is just,  you can feel the hunger from the students when you go outside London. It's amazing. Fab. Yeah. Pierre, it's been really fab speaking to you.

for having me. Yeah, thank you so much for making the time to join. Yeah, it's been good.  We'll have to have you back sometime in the near future, um, to, well actually we'll have you back after June to hear how Vegas goes, no, San Francisco, sorry. San Francisco, yeah, that'll be good. That'll be really cool. I'd love to, I know very little about the dance scene in the US, so I'd be really keen to hear and share what you've, what you've  done this time around.

Yeah, I'd love to, yeah. Thank you so much. Oh, thanks for having me again. for listening to the Empowered Dancers podcast. If there's an aspect of the dancing you would like to hear about, or a particular teacher you would like to hear from, drop me a message and I will try to make it happen. Make sure you subscribe to get every episode as it comes out.

Thank you so much for the comments and questions you are already sharing. I really, really appreciate it and I look forward to serving you in next week's episode.