The end of the year had seen a little flurry of milongas: Biela Tango, Tango Secrets, Etonathon, New Year’s Eve at Negracha, and New Year’s Day at CamTango. The new year continued with a tango-themed dinner, and my first visit to Tango Cafe – on which more another time.

But it can’t all be play; there’s also work to be done …

There are two schools of thought when it comes to privates. One is to stick with a single teacher, so you get a consistent approach from someone familiar with your tango journey. The other is that different teachers offer different perspectives, and sampling more widely gives you a better shot at finding your own path.

I see merits in both routes, which explains my own history – which has been to have consistent teachers for extended periods, but also include others in the mix.

I was keen to try a lesson with Mauro Mol and Lucy Attwood. With any new teacher(s), my main brief is always the same: let’s just dance a couple of songs, and you tell me what I need to work on.

The news was good, bad and good.

The first good news was that they both said they enjoyed my musicality. The bad news was that they raised a lot of technique issues. The second good news is that most of these were rather subtle – for example, tilting the angle of my right hand back by a few degrees.

My tango brain is small, so I can only focus on one new thing at a time. When teachers throw a lot of things at me at once, my approach is to pick one priority item, and concentrate on that. Fortunately, the choice here was obvious.

A metaphor which creates dissociation

I’ve said before that mental models, or metaphors, are really crucial to the way I learn.

A lot of the time in tango, I find the key is the right mental image. That image doesn’t have to reflect the physical reality of what I do, but is something which triggers me into instinctively doing the right thing. 

Dissociation is my nemesis. Five years in, it still feels like I make about one millimetre of progress per year – and that’s with extended periods of daily exercises.

Mauro and Lucy had a metaphor which struck a chord with me: imagine that I have a single arm, with a hand on either end, and the centre section running across the top of my back.

When I pivoted with that image in mind, then something surprising happened. Instead of the degree of dissociation being something I needed to actively concentrate on, it seemed to happen automatically. I really did feel like I had the physical sensation of that single arm, and that dissociating felt more natural and obvious.

We then danced a song without arms. This is something I’ve done fairly often, and always found it a great way to focus on both dissociation and clarity of lead from my torso. But on this occasion, somehow I didn’t feel I needed to focus on the dissociation itself, only on that mental image; the actual dissociation seemed effortless.

Tango Secrets, the next night, provided an opportunity to put it to the test (while enjoying some really fun Russian tango music!). It proved doubly successful. First, the result. Tina said she could immediately feel the difference in pivots, and I could feel it too.

Second, the ease. My general approach is that lessons and practice sessions are the places to think consciously about technique, while milongas are places to focus only on my partner, the music, and the ronda. At most, I will remind myself about something a few times in the course of an evening, then immediately put it from my mind.

That night, those reminders were as fleeting as could be. Yet throughout the evening, I could feel I had more dissociation, and by the next morning the muscles in my core and hips were very vocal in providing objective evidence of same!

Like anything in tango, I’m sure it will take some time to embed into my habitual dance, but when I only have to think ‘single arm’ rather than about the relative directions of my torso and hips, the task feels considerably smaller.

Image: Kamran Abdullayev/Unsplash+