Friday night lights: dimmed with Latin music through the pub sound system. An audience builds three-thick around the long bar, single-spaced on the balcony. The salsa social dancers have come to colonise The Empire. They have practised at home before coming out, working off bootleg DVDs, or pairing up in the recesses of the large public room under the confused gaze of the bouncers and drinkers as they weave their moves between the tables, oblivious of others but also grandstanding in their movements and contortions in front of the beginners. They flow in front of the flawed novices who have come to drink, break ‘craic’, meet and romance to an exotic beat. Soon they will hear the clave call: a call to arms that breaks free from the sectarian binaries that surround the streets of Belfast. In dance we connect.