The energetic clang of percussions set the tone for the night. Swaying their hips to the Latin beat, many took to the dance floor and formed a circle.

“Facila!” Yuri Sohn yelled from the stage above the crowd. The women twirled out of their partners’ hands.

“Dame!” Their hands clasp together and the dance continues. Slowly, the circle of closed in as the couples shifted inward with each new move.

“Break!” Sohn, fashionably attired in a dark red shirt, announced over the music. The circle dispersed as graduate students, Champaign residents, and undergraduates grabbed a new partner from the sidelines.

Sohn and his substitute-teaching partner Mariana Silva, a graduate student, conduct this Latin dance night every Tuesday on the top floor of McKinley Foundation, Westminster Hall.

Since the fall of 2002, Sohn, tennis director of the Champaign park district, and his usual teaching partner Muge Dizen, a graduate student, have conducted Latin dance lessons. For $30 a session (five weeks), they offer a beginning Rueda (couples dance in a circle) class, and an intermediate and beginners salsa class, which meet individually once a week.

Tuesday night’s dance event is open to people of all skill levels, Sohn said. Younger students come to practice their new moves and meet new people while the veterans’ tightly knit group expresses their addiction to salsa.

Sohn’s main objective of the open dance is to create a laid back atmosphere where everyone would be comfortable. For new students Kim Chesterfield and Azzahir Ezhar, both juniors in Engineering, the environment was a place to brush up on their lessons.

The pair practiced off to the side because Ezhar couldn’t remember the steps.

“I can’t remember how to lead to teach him,” Chesterfield said.

She held his hands and tried to guide him through, but they kept stumbling and laughing over their mishaps. Another dancer who knew the moves came in to help.

“You spin, then you step,” Jacob MacLeod, an Urbana resident showed Ezhar.

Many others like MacLeod assisted the less experienced. The open atmosphere allows people to “have a good time, listen to music, and meet new people,” said graduate student Aishah Patterson.

Salsa is a very energetic and can force people to dance.

“The percussions just move me,” said Champaign resident Chakri Bajula while dancing in place.

“When I hear it I just want to get up and find someone to dance with,” said Mary Jacobs, a Parkland Community College student.

Sohn said the environment is set up so that people are comfortable asking others to dance. For many of the dancers that reservation diminished long ago, and now most are very close friends.

“All my friends are salsa friends,” Erika Vujasinovic, an Urbana resident, said.

Their friendship helps to build a community, Sohn said of the ethnically diverse group. Latin dance night participants are from all regions of the globe. Salsa brings people of various backgrounds together, Patterson said, “because (it) doesn’t really have any cultural boundaries.”

Rich Potter, a graduate student, was slowly running through some with his partner on the side.

“I’m having difficulties,” he said. In the five years he lived in Panama, he never took up dancing, until recently. After practicing it a few more times, he and his partner perfected their cross-body lead into a half spin.

It wasn’t until Vujasinovic came to the United States from Italy that she, too, began to dance.

“I started to get some exercise,” she said. “But once you get into the music, it’s an addiction.”

This addiction is what drove many of the dancers. When Sohn started dancing, he attended any and every social event, practicing six to seven days a week, he recalled.

“I would do any kind of partner dance – swing, salsa, tango,” he said.

Teaching others how to dance was a “natural extension” of his love for dancing, he said.

“It’s a good feeling to share my passion with others,” Sohn said.

Sohn worked with the Dancing Illini for five years and at the Refinery before teaching at McKinley.

Sohn and Dizen’s lessons were popular after the Regent Ballroom in Savoy ended their weekly salsa night they held for 10 years.

“During the salsa craze we would have 300 people show up,” said David Lin, owner of Regent, of their former event. This past November, the numbers dropped down to 60.

“We no longer have the need to do it on a weekly basis,” he said.

Lin attributed this drop to the salsa craze dying down, other venues like Lava and Cowboy Monkey having salsa nights, and the emergence of reggaeton (hip-hop), which doesn’t require the formal lessons Regent offered.

They still teach salsa, and Regent Ballroom will have an open salsa dance on March 25. Despite its dwindling fan-base, Lin said salsa will never die.

Like Sohn, other dancers are addicted to salsa, and will take advantage of every opportunity to take to the dance floor.

“Wherever they have salsa, I’ll go,” Vujasinovic said.

For some, dancing has become an integral part of who they are.

“Salsa is my soul. I don’t know what I would do without it,” Bajula said. “I’ve fallen in love with it. Often I think of myself in old age, and I am still dancing, but very slow.”