Salsa classes in Naples, Florida for adult beginners

If you have been meaning to learn salsa and keep putting it off because you have never danced, you do not have a partner, or you think you have left it too late, this page is for you. None of those is a reason not to start.

Who these classes are for

Adults who want to learn to dance salsa and bachata socially. Most people who come to us have never danced before. Many started after thirty, forty or fifty. Most of the room will be roughly your age, and there is no hard cut-off.

You do not need to be a dancer. You do not need to be athletic or flexible, and you do not need a natural sense of rhythm. A sense of rhythm is not something you are born with. It is a skill, and it takes a few weeks to build.

You do not need a partner

About half the room comes alone, and that is completely normal. We rotate partners during class, so you learn to dance with anyone rather than with one person. Couples are welcome too. You can stay together if you prefer, though we recommend rotating: if you only ever dance with one person, you adapt to their height and habits, and dancing with anyone else gets harder.

What you actually learn

Not memorised choreography. We teach social dancing: two people meet on the floor and create the dance in real time, to music neither of them chose, without knowing the sequence in advance. One person leads, the other follows, and the roles are not about men and women. Anyone can lead or follow, and it helps to try both.

We start with how to shift your weight from foot to foot. From there the program builds step by step, in this order:

• Foundation level
• Basic skills
• Partnerwork
• Musicality
• Social dancing

The group finishes a level and moves to the next one together. The best time to start is the beginning of a season, but you can come to your first class on any Tuesday or Thursday and we will catch you up.

Who teaches

Oksana Ponomarenko and Sergey Stepaniuk. From 2010 to 2021 they ran the Latina Club studios in Alushta, Yalta and Kharkiv, teaching group classes, individual training and social practice, mostly to adults. They moved to Naples in June 2024.

They teach the method of Irina Yasnogorodskaya, founder of the Latina Club school, which is built so that an adult who has never danced can start calmly. They trained in it in 2010 and became certified instructors, and later studied at ISA in Havana during the Baila en Cuba festival.

They teach together, so you see both roles at once: how the lead is given, how it is answered, and how the two connect. A single instructor has to play both parts, and some of that gets lost.

Prices

One class is $20, any Tuesday or Thursday of the season. An unlimited month is $100 and runs from the day you pay through the same date next month. A month has eight or nine classes, so it works out to about $11 to $12 a class if you come regularly.

There are no packages, no memberships and no contracts. Nothing is charged automatically. When a month ends, you decide again.

When classes run

Classes run in seasons. The current season is September 1 to December 1, 2026. The next one is January 5 to February 9, 2027. If a month you paid for runs into the break between seasons, those days carry over to the next season.