Women love a man who can dance. But a lot of men don’t seem to know that. Sage Robinson has struggled to recruit male students since he started a salsa dancing class in October.

“My guy friends say they’ll come and they never turn up,” said the 22-year-old. “I really don’t know why.

“Maybe in Bermuda it is not a typical thing that guys do. It’s a shame because it’s a great way to meet women. It’s a conversation starter. Dancing is a bridge between people.”

He has sometimes been teased a little by his friends, but his attitude is: “If I like it, who cares?”

“It’s fun,” he said. “I love the energy of the music. I love that there is always something more to learn.”

He has ten to 12 regular students and several others who drop in.

“It can help you get fit, but you don’t have to be fit to dance,” he said. “You just have to know how to move your body right — which I can teach you.

“If you don’t have a partner that’s OK, because in the classes there is a rotation. It allows dancers to be able to adjust to any partner.”

Mr Robinson plans to open a dance school, Movements, next month.

“I feel like a professional dancer should be well-rounded,” he said. “I want to be able to compete and have my own team, and teach. I am trying to get the hype out.”

He took his first salsa dance class as an extracurricular activity at Warwick Academy.

“I didn’t even know what salsa was,” he said, “but a bunch of us showed up for the class. Back then, it was pretty evenly split between guys and girls.”

As the year progressed, numbers fell off, but he kept going with it. Eventually, he joined the Bermuda Touch salsa team, representing the island at a congress in Tampa, Florida.

“They have different congresses all over the world where you can dance and take workshops,” he said. “I saw the prestige around it.”

Still, it was only a casual hobby until he went to university in New York to study insurance and risk.

“Insurance was first for me,” he said. “In my spare time I joined dance teams and did a lot of social dancing.

“New York is the epicentre of dance. There, I was exposed to so many great dancers. That is when I wanted more. Now I’m addicted to salsa.”

In May, he went to the Dominican Republic with a dance group, Island Touch.

A video of him dancing salsa there went viral, gathering 20 million views on Facebook.

“It was fun performing down there because we had that island vibe,” he said. “We got to see the culture. Sometimes everything would shut down.

“Stuff like that happens. The lights would go out and then the generators would kick on and the lights would come back on. It never happened during a performance, but it did happen during social dancing time.”

As Bermuda’s salsa dancing scene is small, his plan was to become a professional dancer in New York. And then in October, his student visa ran out.

“I tried to find a job out there, but I couldn’t,” he said. “So I had to come home. It was unfortunate, but everything happens for a reason, I guess.”

Mr Robinson’s next salsa classes start in January. The cost is $50 for a six-week term.

Look for Sage Robinson on Facebook or e-mail sage.robinson@hotmail.com.

• The Gentlemen’s Corner runs every other week in Lifestyle. Contact Jessie Moniz Hardy on 278-0150 or jmhardy@royalgazette.com with tips on trends, hobbies and events specifically for men.