Romancing Latin dance: How Bengaluru got its salsa guru

Lourd Vijay graduated from copying steps from video tapes to studying under a diva in Canada. In the ’90s, he brought forms like salsa and bachata to Bengaluru, and mentored a legion of dancers. Drishti Rakhra charts his fascinating 30-year journey

Located on the fifth floor of a business park in Bengaluru, Lourd Vijay Dance Studio (LVDS) is bright and open. Vijay smiles as we settle down in a corner of his studio.“My mother says that my first time on stage was when I was 3,” he begins.

One wall is lined with a bench painted white and covered in grey faux leather. The opposite wall is lined with mirrors, so the studio looks like it goes on and on; the brown maple flooring making it look bigger still. High-rise buildings, interspersed with healthy-looking trees, peep out. It is quiet here.

Vijay comes to his studio in spotless white — trousers, a lapel shirt, and sports shoes. He teaches here only once a week, now recovering from his second kidney transplant.

“Another four months,” he says, when I tell him that I can’t wait to see him dance. He moves smoothly for the DH photojournalist, looking as natural as he does while sitting back in his chair — always at ease, always relaxed. 

A new way to move

Vijay started out in 1997, almost by accident. Anjali Sareen, who now runs a pilates studio in Bengaluru, invited him to conduct a workshop, which set in motion the making of a dance instructor. The first workshop was informal and led to more.

Vijay’s parents were big fans of ABBA and disco music, it was what he grew up listening to. His father worked in the Indian army, so Vijay spent his childhood in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, and Udhampur. The family finally settled down in Bengaluru. When his father was posted in Udhampur, Kashmir, Vijay had access to a lot of Pakistani television, “and most Pakistani television had American content.”

That’s where he came across Michael Jackson for the first time. Shortly after, he stumbled on a film that changed his life — ‘Dirty Dancing’. He has watched the film at least 1,000 times, he confesses. 

Vijay’s formative years and India’s economic liberalisation were on the same timeline. “I watched people like Jean-Claude Van Damme and Jackie Chan move, and I wanted to imitate them,” he recalls. Having watched them doing splits, he wanted to attempt it himself. He wasn’t then thinking as much of dance as of movement. In the process, his body became flexible. 

In the Bengaluru he grew up in, he was often surrounded by Anglo-Indian boys. He remembers a Christmas ball one year, where he was awed by the smoothness with which the boys danced with the girls. When he asked them to teach him, they shrugged him off. “We know it just like that,” they said. Finally, one of his friends, Marie Anne D’Cruz, decided to teach him, and rhythm entered his frame. 

Later, when he was in St Joseph’s College of Arts and Science, he joined the Western dance team. Western dance then was a mix of everything he now recognises as forms that require long years of practice. At the time, “it was just a hotchpotch of different moves.” You had jive, mambo, salsa, bachata — forms with unique rhythms but usually condensed into one broad category of ‘Latin American’. “We were dancing salsa to mambo, you know. All the beats were off,” he says.

Los Angeles team

In 1998, a popular spirits company launched a Latin music CD. It had music from Brazil, Cuba, and Mexico, all ‘commercial’ songs. The company then reached out to Vijay and initiated a collaboration that would fast-track his life-long tryst with dance. The group was asked to help promote the brand.

At the launch of a new product, the young team of dancers was introduced to Salsa Brava, a professional salsa group from Los Angeles. This was the first time Vijay saw what it meant to be a professional salsa dancer. Until then, his encounters with the form were local and interpretative — when he saw a step he liked in a film, he would pause, rewind, and play it again in slow motion. This careful repetition is what had trained him. 

The members of Salsa Brava were fascinated by his skills. To see an Indian so quick at picking up new dance forms was a treat, and they took him in immediately. It was with this group that he got a chance to visit Toronto, where he met someone who would become a long-term mentor: Nicole D’Silva, a Bolivian dancer. For a trip that was supposed to be only a week long, he stayed for four weeks. 

“She used to wonder who this guy was, coming in every day for classes and staying the entire evening,” he says. When she saw him take extra interest, she invested more time in him. That is when he learned salsa, ballet, even tap dancing. While he was in Canada, he stayed with a couple that his parents knew through the church community in Bengaluru. They lived all the way in Mississauga, so Vijay would make the 40 km journey to Toronto every day. First the train, then the bus, and then a long walk to Soles Studio. But he didn’t stop there. Toronto was full of dance studios, and he went to as many as he could. 

When he returned to Bengaluru, things began moving quickly. Yana Lewis opened the Lewis Foundation of Classical Ballet and he naturally fell into step. He went there ever so often, dancing in his time off. It was his passion project. Full time, he owned a bottled water company that was a franchisee. His trajectory took him to many places — he started out as a student of environmental science, found dance, did his MBA and got a job, before finally leaving everything behind to stay with dance. 

Creating spaces

“We are a dancing country. We dance at birth, we dance at death,” he says. LVDS began as an effort not to bring a new form of dance to Bengalureans, but to create more spaces for people to practise dance.

Latin American dance forms chart histories of colonisation across the globe. While the form most often refers to traditions of Central and Southern America, Spanish and Portuguese colonial influences are hard to ignore. So when a dance like this travels to India not through people but through popular media, who is to say who it belongs to?

In the 25+ years since he started, he has made friends for life. One of his best buddies met her husband through him. Some of his current students are children of his earliest students. “After 2008, things began changing,” he says. The IT boom brought in a crowd different from the one he was used to. The “old Bangalore” he describes does not exist anymore.

“Earlier, we used to get people who wanted to learn dance as a hobby,” he says, “But now we often have men who come to meet girls.” Some stay long enough to develop a passion for the art, but many don’t end up learning. 

His first studio was in a little coffee shop on Lavelle Road; it then moved to a pub at Shoolay Circle. The next stop was what he calls the ‘Wimpy’s building’ on Brigade Road, after which he moved to a restobar on Palace Cross Road. The current location is Cunningham Road.

He describes what it was like to host classes in a pub: “We used to have only Hotmail then, so we couldn’t even tell people if a class was cancelled. Orkut and all came much later.”

The pub often held events, so classes would often get disrupted. He stayed there for only a year. At the Wimpy’s building, a popular burger joint, hordes of people came, many just to eat chaat at the famous stall just outside. He grins as he remembers those days: “The classes would be packed!” 

Latin American dance is a social art form. For a man to ask a woman to dance, he has to be confident. “You must have courage to be a dancer,” he says. “You might get rejected once, but you have to try again.”

Vijay hosts socials for all his students at various venues, each meant for a different part of the city. Every few months, he also organises what he calls a ‘groove kitchen’ — an experience that brings together food and dance, in collaboration with a chef, usually a friend. The chef takes care of the food, Vijay takes care of the dance.

As a part of these efforts, he has found himself visiting Brazil and Cuba in the last few years, and is in the process of planning a Thailand trip for the Latin Bangkok Fiesta. 

The scene has changed, of course. Bengaluru is packed with Latin dance studios (many of them run by his students, he tells me). “Dancing is a selfish art form,” he says, but people forget that they don’t need to be selfish outside of the performance. He describes organising the Goa Salsa Festival, a standard three-day festival, but one that invited innumerable salsa dancers from across the world to conduct workshops. “We used to get thousands of people, but most festivals now only aim for 200-300 people,” he says.

Nicole D’Silva, his first mentor, is an expert in body dynamics and body conditioning. Vijay has followed in her footsteps. This is one of the many things that sets him apart from other instructors.

His documentary on kidney transplants, ‘Anicca’, was released three years ago, and can be seen on YouTube. He recalls that he barely drank any water when he was young. “Maybe that led to problems with my kidneys,” he says. From 2013-16, he was on dialysis. The cadaveric kidney, which usually needs replacement after a certain number of years, needed to be replaced in 2025. 

With folk dancers

Lourd is working on three projects currently. He is attempting to produce a Broadway-level show he calls ‘Dance Alchemy’ that will showcase the work of Karnataka’s folk artistes.

He cites the meagre compensation most artistes usually receive: “I want to create a project that will really help improve their lives.” When he had to go in for his second kidney transplant, a friend set up a crowdfund to finance the treatment. With the amount of money people donated, he felt it was simply his duty to pay it forward and do something similar for artists and performers who needed patronage. 

He is also working towards integrating dance in school education, so that young children are introduced to Latin dance forms. Instead of the fast-paced three-month course people opt for, he has designed a curriculum that slows down the learning process to make it easier for children. The final project is to build India’s own version of the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, an institution in the United States that integrates community building and music.

When he was making the documentary on kidney transplants, he organised an awareness drive from Bengaluru to Chennai. “Via Ladakh,” he says, with a cheeky smile. He hosted talks, and encouraged crowdfunding and spread transplant awareness. Eventually he stopped and stepped back to focus on his own health and practice.

His body is still recuperating. But the plans are endless. His newest obsession is West Coast swing, a descendent of another dance form called Lindy Hop, that originated in Harlem, New York, in the 1920s. For Vijay, the dance never stops.