Drunk tango can be a lot of fun; hungover tango, not so much.
After very much over-indulging with neighbours on Friday night, I was still feeling exceedingly delicate by the time my private started at 4.30pm on Saturday. The first song was so bad I think Julia was planning to send me back to the first beginner’s class …
Continue reading Calesita and planeo fun, despite an unpromising hungover start!
In Luis and Natalia’s intermediate class, we’d been playing with the contra-giro over the past few weeks, so they decided to do the same with the giro tonight. Or, more specifically, a medio-giro.
You can obviously enter a giro from any step – forward, backward or either side. The version I’ve used so far has been from a side-step, and the one we used tonight was from a back ocho. We played with a few different variants …
Continue reading Connecting some dots, and returning home to Tango Terra
If Tango Terra and Los Angelitos are the milongas that make me feel like a grown-up, The Light is the one that made me feel like a toddler! It was the highest level dancing I’ve ever seen in London.
I danced exactly three tandas, all with the same friend. The rest of the time, I just watched …
Continue reading A trip to The Light, a milonga way above my pay-grade
I love that milonga so much.
Emerging after four hours of almost non-stop blissful dancing, you feel like it’s about 2am. But it’s still 8pm, and even allowing the obligatory blog post and time needed for the buzz to wear off, you can still be in bed at a civilised hour …
Continue reading Mmmm … Tango Terra! And a more streamlined approach to the blog. Maybe.
Sometimes lessons can pay unexpected dividends some time later. There can be things I didn’t really grasp at the time, which later make sense. Or things I thought were minor points, which subsequently reveal themselves to be far more important.
There was one of the latter in a private with Maeve. Indeed, I didn’t even include it in the blog post at the time, as it just felt like a reminder of something I already knew …
Continue reading Something else clicked: a way to encourage weight-sharing
It was on 28th October 2018 that I first ‘danced’ in a milonga at Tango Garden, after a grand total of five lessons, with the courage fostered by not knowing what I didn’t know.
Some fifteen months later, I figured the various broken limbs would have healed, and the building been repaired, so decided to pay a return visit for the 7th anniversary of the popular Saturday afternoon milonga …
Continue reading Returning to the scene of the crime, at Tango Garden
The theme of this week’s Tango Space intermediate class was advertised as a cross-system sequence. This would usually be enough to send me running for the hills but for two things …
Continue reading A minor mystery solved, and a bit of Tango Terror
The emergence of my half-speed dance – one step every two beats – has been my single biggest breakthrough in tango. It’s given my dance a distinctive feel, and given me much-needed time to decide how best to interpret what I’m hearing, and to focus on technique to a far greater degree than I find possible at a faster speed.
I’m pretty sure a lot of the miradas I’ve received from new followers have been as a result of seeing that slow-motion dance, and either liking it from a previous experience with another leader, or simply liking the look of it …
There’s a Catch-22 with my plan to expand my core vocabulary. The stuff I’m now adding in to milongas feels less fluid, so I’m reluctant to interrupt the flow of the dance by using them too often – but unless I use them more often, they won’t feel more fluid.
That feels like a particular dilemma when I feel like smoothness and musicality are what I’ve got going for me right now as a tango dancer; if I put those at risk, I have nothing …
Continue reading Deliberately taking one step back to get two steps forward
Daniel Pereyra was DJing at Los Angelitos today, and while I hadn’t ended up his biggest fan last time, today was a complete contrast! The music could almost have been one of my own playlists.
I loved almost all of it, and danced all but two or three tandas …
Continue reading Today’s Los Angelitos was almost in Tango Terra territory
Thursday’s lesson was on ‘dancing to the pause.’ This was familiar territory to me, but was still a really useful lesson – partly for one simple movement, and partly as a reminder of how far I’ve come from my mathematical days.
The lesson started with the 8-beat phrase, and an initial suggestion to slow on the 7th beat in order to pause on the 8th. This is a very slight variation on what I usually do when walking to rhythmical sections, which is to decelerate on the 7th beat in order to do a weight-change instead of a step on the 8th …
Continue reading Tango maths revisited, and the fragility of tango heaven
While my longer-term goal is truly improvised dance, I am of course mostly dependent on figures for now.
But the two are in any case very closely linked: the more of my existing figures I can call upon in dance, the more experience I’m getting of different movement possibilities …
Continue reading A systematic plan for expanding my core vocabulary
After yesterday’s work, it was time for the week’s second instalment of Tango Terra fun.
My new shoes had finally arrived, and they were absolutely gorgeous
Continue reading Tango Terra was heaven again, even with overly-tight new shoes
There’s bad news and good news with pure technique lessons. The bad news is that, because you’re always working with the fundamentals, it can feel like: what, this again/still? And today’s lesson was working on basics:
Continue reading A private that was hard work for all the right reasons
I’ve written a number of times about the problems with sequence-based lessons.
The bottom-line of most beginner and improver group lessons is that both leaders and followers alike are taught steps. Each knows what they are supposed to do, so there’s no real need to lead a figure (only to do enough to identify it to the follower), and no real need to follow (because the follower knows what’s coming) …
Things have been pretty non-stop of late, and I did briefly consider skipping the class to just go to the milonga – but I’m so glad I didn’t!
The Thursday intermediate class is always excellent, and tonight we started with what had to be the most ironic exercise ever for me …
Continue reading A fabulous lesson as always, and some (likely explicable) magic at Tango Terra
Ever since I started considering dropping the Tuesday Tango Space milonga from my weekly schedule, just to calm things down a bit, it has been conspiring to prevent me from doing so …
I’ve often said that my primary audience for my blog is me. It’s a way of reminding myself of what I’ve learned in particular lessons, so I can revisit them from time to time, and of tracking my progress. Anyone else finding the posts interesting is a bonus.
More so than most, this post is a memo to myself …
Continue reading My parallel learning tracks: a particularly diary-like post
I know, a lesson in improvisation sounds like a contradiction in terms, but it was a private I really needed!
In trying to work toward truly improvised dance, I need a better understanding of the core elements and the possibilities. I also need to find ways of freeing myself from auto-pilot. I can kind of do that when dancing quickly, but slow dance tends to gravitate back to my core vocabulary …
Continue reading A lesson in improvisation, switching between lead and follow
There was a discussion on a tango forum recently about how much focus we should have on technique during a milonga.
There were two schools of thought. One, that technique should always be a focus. Two, that milongas are places to have 100% of your attention on your partner and the music …
Continue reading Technique in milongas, and taking my chances with Troilo
I wrote a post about Brexit on my mostly-neglected non-tango blog; you can read it here if you’d like to.
Continue reading Let’s try to make our tango embrace just that little bit warmer this month
ben lovejoy 