About Us

Many people ask how company Dancing With Grace Productions started. Just like so many salsa instructors out there I (Grace) was dancing at a very popular salsa location when the owner of the location asked me to teach salsa to his customers. I immediately thought he was insane because I had no teaching experience and was only a good dancer who could follow well. After I said no I seemed to be bombarded by people at the night club offering to pay me to teach them privately. I figured at that point God was trying to tell me something so I decided to take the offers seriously. After researching how to learn how to teach salsa I noticed there was no venue anywhere that taught you how to teach other than going to an institution like the Peabody but even then they had no Salsa instruction. So I began training myself more intensely searching out the leading instructors. During this time I asked my “boyfriend” Hugo to teach with me. He immediately said no just as I did, but I asked him to come to see an instructor teach at a night club and he did. The instructor was not trained and hardly knew how to dance salsa himself. He was making people hold hands in a circle and step to the side to the left and right during the class which made no sense to either of us since we knew how to dance. Hugo immediately said, “I can do better than that” and we began to train together each learning the lead and follow. Luckily we both had many skills necessary to be great instructors. Hugo was very technical and I was very descriptive. Hugo was an engineer and got his masters in Computer Science which led to the creation of our www.dancingwithgrace.com website and the www.salsawithgrace.com website as well (Go Hugo!) I had lots of experience teaching and tutoring and many years of entertainment experience as I used to sing with an Orchestra called La Predilecta. I also did Radio Voiceovers in English and Spanish, Television commercials and modeling in my youth. With the combination of my husband’s talent and my entertainment and teaching experience (medical transcription training) we made a comfortable transition into teaching dance.

Hugo and I then decided that we needed to continue to train and become certified. We also wanted to learn more about the history of salsa and its other styles. We were already making good money and didn’t need to become certified but we wanted to set ourselves apart from so many dancers who are making themselves what I like to call “overnight instructors” with no experience in training or communication. Before we became certified to teach salsa we had been teaching for over 5 years; we had already created an incredible infrastructure and dance team to include 8 other instructors and I also became an agent for hundreds of dancers from every kind of dance background. Certification was a great experience and we continue to educate ourselves yearly on being better instructors.

Around that same time we also started purchasing instructional videos from as many instructors as possible so that we could see their methods of teaching but noticed some disturbing things. All of them rushed through all the basics and weren’t thorough enough. One video was called a salsa video but was a rueda video that didn’t even teach the lead. Many videos focused on patterns before teaching a left turn! Another video we purchased was a complete cumbia video by two people who didn’t dance well at all. More than 75% of the videos we saw were obviously done in someone’s house or basement, not professional in the least and gave a very bad name to salsa as a dance and to Latinos everywhere especially if you compare them to professionally produced videos of other dances (ballroom) on the market. Some videos even cut the instructor’s feet off! We couldn’t believe how badly people were getting cheated. Hugo and I then decided that we were going to produce our own salsa instructional videos that were detailed and specific. It included real salsa music and I say this because most videos don’t have real salsa music; how can you learn without listening to the music? We also focused on creating a video that was not just teaching combination after combination and the video turned out quite nicely if we don’t say so ourselves! So that is how we came to be instructors, and how we began developing a business of salsa instruction throughout Baltimore, Nationally and Internationally.

We hope that our videos will give you the strong foundation you need to feel comfortable dancing socially wherever you may be and that these skills will help you add Joy to your life!

Sincerely,

Grace and Hugo Badillo
Partners in Salsa and Love For Life!