April saw the return of Emma from her Great Indian Adventure, and with excellent timing too, as it also gave her the opportunity to see her framed drawing, which I’d picked up just a few days earlier (below).
While Emma is gentler than Filippo when it comes to feedback, she wasn’t taking any prisoners in the warm-up dance we did! She was straight into mixing in interrupted steps and changes of speed …
Continue reading Seesaw steps, and learning to slow the leader when my following gets lostI’ve always been in awe of following as a skill, but never more so than after my last couple of privates. If I combine the technique input from Mabel and Filippo, I now have 11 bullet points on which to focus!
This is problematic given that my tango brain struggles to cope with three things at a time, but there are four pieces of good news – including what both Filippo and I felt was a night-and-day difference in the sensitivity of my following …
Continue reading A massive increase in my following sensitivity, sometimes for several seconds at a time!My following adventure had some rather large gaps, caused by a mix of general life stuff, and two of my teachers fleeing the country. But a third one hadn’t yet reached that level of despair, so the fun had recommenced.
In my last lesson with Filippo, I’d managed to follow him surprisingly well when he stuck to steps and rebounds and upped the speed, and Irina subsequently led me in a milonga song at Tango Secrets, also with remarkable success (all in relative terms, you understand!). It was now time to see what magic Mabel could muster …
Continue reading Which way are we pivoting again? Mabel gave me six things to think about while I figure it outThe past two years, I’ve spent the whole of March in BsAs, and this year my hope was to stay for April too. Sadly, having my flat on the market, with no idea when it might sell, made it impractical to be away for two months this spring. I’m hoping instead to be there for October and November.
But if I can’t be in BsAs, there’s no other place I’d rather be than The Feast …
Continue reading I’d normally be in BsAs now, but The Feast is for sure the next best thingI did religiously do my solo practice work on the technique bullets I listed last time, but my progress had been at worst undetectable, and at best slow. That saw us start by working on the same things as last time: a posture check to start, another halfway through a step, another at the end of it.
It was still more common for me to correct my posture after losing it than it was for me to maintain it throughout, and I was still struggling with pivots. I asked Filippo if he could slow these right down, taking four beats to lead a 90-degree pivot, so that I had time to be clear on the direction and degree of pivot, and could then actively focus on my posture throughout …
Continue reading Slow, slow, quick – a frustrating then exciting continuation of my following adventureLearning to follow still feels to me like an absurdly ambitious goal, but even at this early and utterly incompetent stage, I’ve started to see some signs of progress.
One of these is finding that an approach which was wrong for me when I first started this adventure is now exactly what I need …
Continue reading Returning to a centimetre-by-centimetre approach to following, this time at the right momentI last week mentioned my relationship status with milonga: “It’s complicated.“
There’s still a huge gap between what my head would like to be doing, and what my body feels it can lead at milonga speeds, alongside a concern about a possibly equal-sized gap between follower expectations and my reality. On the other hand, there are followers who knowingly drag me out onto the pista for milonga tandas, and even a couple who specifically seek me out for them.
While the focus of my current privates is following, Irina Zoueva expressed her confidence in upping my milonga leading game several levels – and the resulting private turned out to give me a little following practice too …
Continue reading Making my simple milonga a little less simple, and a little more milongaKapka Kassabova probably frustrated every other tango author and might-be tango author when she snaffled the absolutely perfect name for a book on the topic: 12 Minutes of Love. (Which I really must review sometime soon.)
Last night’s Tango Secrets was four hours of love – or rather, three hours and 48 minutes, as the inconsiderate Elizabeth Line schedule means London-based visitors have to skip the last tanda …
Continue reading Three hours and 48 minutes of love: A perfect night at Tango SecretsWordPress tells me that I’ve written 408 posts in this blog, with an average wordcount of 2,600. That’s, um, more than a million words; I have no idea how that happened.
But there are times when somebody else’s words are so perfect that I have nothing to add …
Continue reading Dancing milonguero-style – a Tango Mentor blog postI was rather shocked to see that my last following lesson was way back in September! I had another private with Emma in the diary for a week ago, but unfortunately she caught a nasty bug and then disappeared off to India. (Bit of an extreme way to avoid subjecting herself to my following, if you ask me.)
I knew I desperately needed more practice, but I’d felt hesitant about doing more than extremely occasional intercambio tandas at milongas, for two reasons …
Continue reading Solving the problem of how to get more following practice, with a visit to Queer Tango London
ben lovejoy: journey of a trainee tanguero 
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