Get to know us!

We are Raquel and Oscar, Spanish dancers and owners of Pasito Dance School. We love to share all our dance knowledge, and get a kick watching every student grow as a dancer, but also as a person through dance.

Our main focus is on bachata and salsa, two styles that we love and shape our way of life. As a couple, we are really focused in technique and progression and making sure everything we teach is doable in socials, regardless if your dance partner is your classmate. We keep our dance classes fun, but being super precise while teaching. We normally dance with all our students during class, since this is the best way to give real feedback that helps to improve.

We particularly focus on teaching leaders how to properly lead and build their own combinations by giving them the “LEGO” pieces that they can mix and match however they like as they dance. The focus for followers is on awareness and responsiveness to the different body moves, dancing from feeling and not memory, and being proactive with style and finding the appropriate space and time for it.

Raquel Garrido

Raquel is from Vigo, northwest Spain. She has been dancing during all her life different styles, including galician dance, ballroom and even gymnastics. She decided to focus in latin dance and has been teaching both salsa and bachata for more than 10 years. She has mostly focused on modern bachata and on2 salsa. Raquel is also used to teach on her own, so she is able to dance both as leader and follower. She was also part of the on2 salsa group Euphoria dance company semi-pro and pro team for some time.

In Spain, she was the second in charge in one of the biggest latin dance schools in Galicia (IDLS) for five years, where she also trained new teachers. One of them was Oscar, who initially learned methodology and salsa techniques from her, to later on do the same for her to get into sensual bachata.

At IDLS, we used a tested dance teaching methodology, developed by the owner Jonathan Gardon, and the IDLS team for more than 20 years, that was in constant evolution, with weekly meetings to develop and improve it.

More personally, you can always find her busy working on something, maybe dancing, creating dance costumes (check Lovelydress), video editing or whatever else you can imagine is happening around dancing. She is a 4x4 and a hard worker, eager to experiment and learn new things, super handy on many areas and super clumsy in life at the same time. She is the more social part of this couple and a spiritual person, and a lover of any details people may have with her. Also, if you were to get injured any time in classes, she is also a nurse, even though she chose to rather focus on her dance passion.

Oscar Garrido

Oscar is from A Coruña, also northwest Spain, and has been teaching for more than 5 years both on2 salsa and bachata, and actually learnt from Raquel how to do it. In Spain, he was mostly focused on modern bachata, using and mixing salsa technique,movements and turn patterns into bachata, as well as explaining and mixing dominican and sensual bases, since what we both defend as dancers was the mixture of everything into one style. After trying a lot of different techniques, he chose to base his dance on the style of Korke and Judith (K&J), the bachata sensual creators, and their ambassadors; using their techniques and ways to understand sensual bachata to build his own style around it.

He developed a deep understanding of the methodology we had for salsa in IDLS, how it works, and when, how and why to teach each move. Combined with his own training in bachata ,he used these to develop a similar methodology for this style. We have worked on this to make it easier both for students to learn quicker, but also to make it easier to train new teachers. and being the one in charge of that part in bachata in Spain. Our methodology in bachata comes from a mix between K&J and the one we had since we started dancing, although always in constant evolution and incorporating new influences. Oscar has level 1 and 2 certificates from their teacher courses, same with the pro course from Luis&Andrea, and endless training hours with Bachata Sensual ambassadors (Luis&Andrea, Pablo&Raquel, Chaves&Silvia,Truji&Gloria,…)

On a personal note, Oscar is the nerdy part of this couple, clumsy doing handy work, but skilful with technologies, and a real lover of fitness workout and all the otaku culture (videogames, anime), which are his two other passions. Even if he feels super active and enthusiastic on classes, out of that contest you may find him with no energy at all or way too much, fluctuating like weather, but difficult to find in a middle energy point. He is a project of automatic industrial engineering, with a really analytical and mathematical brain for everything, but a terrible memory.