Salsa club needs men to come dancing

Women are going crazy to learn salsa in Shropshire - but persuading their partners to get up off the settee and onto the dance floor is proving an altogether more difficult task.

At one dance class in Telford, women outnumber men by three to one. Recently out of a group of 10 women who turned up to the beginners' class eight had partners - but not one managed to persuade the men in their lives to come along.

Dance tutor Sylvie, who runs a class every Wednesday at 7.30pm in the Venus Suite at Pussycats nightclub, urged men to ditch the gym and come dancing instead.

"There is a definite shortage of men and I don't really know why that is," she said.

"Salsa dancing is as popular as it has ever been for women in Telford, we have never had so many interested in coming along.

"It's easy to see why, they can have more fun here than they would at the gym and probably lose more weight."

She said: "We normally have three women to every man in our beginners class, which means two have to wait on the side to take their turn and the man becomes exhausted because he has to dance with all three in succession."

Sylvie said she believed TV dance shows may be putting men off.

"I think men look at these professional dancers on the TV and they think 'there is no way I can do that'," she said. "They are right, they can't. But the people on the TV are show dancers, we don't teach that.

"We teach social dancing, it's fun and people learn at their own pace."

By Wayne Beese