I’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 …

In a sense, of course, there is no leader or follower technique: there’s only technique. But approaching it from leader and follower roles certainly feels like starting again – especially when it comes to posture, which partly matches and partly mirrors that of the leader.

Mabel had given me a 6-point checklist whenever I was not moving:

• Hips over my heels, to create space
• Ribcage over my toes to remove weight from my heels
• Standing leg soft
• Free foot on the ground but without weight on it
• Check four points of contact (heels, calves, knees, thighs)
• Free foot tilted in toward the standing foot

Filippo added to these:

• Rolling the hip back, not sticking my bum out (I now understand why beginner followers do that!)
• Using the hip flexor muscles to do this, with no tensing of my shoulders
• Maintaining this posture in rebounds in particular

When it comes to easing gently into pivots, Mabel had me working on the classic cross; Filippo opted for the ocho cortado, which gave me a couple more bullets:

• Matching the dissociation of the lead, in both walk and pivot
• Rotating my right foot 90 degrees before crossing

That’s … a lot.

But there are four pieces of good news.

First, as Mabel said, I’m not expected to run all of the checkpoints after every step. Just get as far as I can in the time, and if that’s one bullet, then just pick a different one bullet to achieve later in the song.

Second, Filippo said it’s perfectly normal at this stage for the process to be ‘achieve posture, begin to move, lose posture, notice it, correct.’ I now have a great deal of homework intended to get me to the next stage with this.

Third, while I’d say that the longest time I actually maintained posture was a few seconds at a time, I am gradually getting better at noticing and correcting.

Finally, during those times when I maintained posture throughout a movement, Filippo said that it was like dancing with a different follower: I was massively more sensitive to the lead. I could immediately tell this wasn’t just flattery: where he was previously having to make a simple change of weight super-obvious, he could now play with tiny back-and-forth interruptions, and I was following almost all of it! That’s an amazing difference in a very short period of time.

But still … I have a huge amount of solo practice work to do on all these points before I feel like I’ll actually be able to progress beyond those few seconds at a time.

I do have one more private booked, with Emma, following her return from India. After that, though, I suspect I’ll need to focus on integrating the input I’ve already received before making room for any more.