Awesome, I didn't know such notation existed. I dance and teach (Cuban) salsa, and I've been wanting to write down a "repertoire" of moves that I know and teac

Awesome, I didn't know such notation existed. I dance and teach (Cuban) salsa, and I've been wanting to write down a "repertoire" of moves that I know and teach, to give it some structure. Here the system I'm inclined to use: The space of patterns/figures you can do in salsa is really not very big. You can break each figure into a sequence of positions at which to be on beats 1, 3, 5, and 7 (I guess you can choose higher or lower granularity, but I think this level of granularity is just right for most people). Then, in my mind, a figure is merely a directed path through a graph where each node is a "known" position (~20?). Assuming you know how to get from one arbitrary position to another one (safe assumption for anyone in an intermediate level), then you can just read and write any figure you want. I think this kind of structure would allow students to learn much much faster (and is basically the method I used to improve my own skill very quickly, except I used a spreadsheet instead of graph). You'll realize that most of the new stuff you learn is simply: - composite paths made out of other paths you already knew. - existing paths where you take detours and do something else in the middle. Those detours always start at a node, so now you can use the detour in any other path that goes through that node. - new ways of getting from one node to another. Similarly, now you can apply this new knowledge to any move that utilizes that node, not just the move that you're learning at the time. Where I also think this shines is in developing the dancer's (esp. leader's) creativity, which I think is one of the hardest part for most people (technical stuff is easy, creative stuff is hard!). Having such paths laid out makes it really easy for someone to mix and match, and to create potentially endless combinations by simply choosing a different path forward once you get into a known shared position. And for fun, I'm sure you could just draw out a random path and see if you can make it work into something that looks reasonably good :)