Toronto Salsa Festival on St. Clair Brings Out the Dancer in Everyone

Dancing on the Street is Good For the Soul

Toronto Salsa Festival on St. Clair Avenue July 14, 2013

Toronto’s famous Salsa Festival on St. Clair opens up the street to Latin life, food, music and dance in a participatory way. It’s not a performance, it’s natural theatre art better than anyone could create for the stage.

Age No Barrier in Street Dancing

Looking at today’s turn-out of urbanites happily stepping up their Salsa moves with partners, people of all ages sweating it out in 32° street heat with joyful abandon, there are many, many men and women who are doing salsa and loving it. They are young, old, from every corner of the world, mixed ethnicities, good dancers and bad dancers all strutting their stuff on the Toronto summer streets. 

Anyone at all can turn their romantic sides on and try to move to salsa music. Yesterday and today St. Clair Avenue, the street in my neighborhood where I buy my groceries in Toronto, was turned into a Salsa Festival, and the music transformed our hood into a South American paradise. It was soul-healing and uplifting to watch the whole city click up its heels to such joyful music.