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 …

I have finally managed to moderate my expectations for my following journey. It takes about six months of regular lessons and practice for someone to learn to follow to a basic level, and adding up the number of lessons I’ve taken, and the meagre amount of practice I’ve had, my total experience is nowhere close to that yet.

Sure, leading helps to some extent, but can also hinder! Letting go of my own ideas about how to interpret the music, and listening through the leader’s body, is still very much a work in progress.

But with my expectations set somewhat more realistically, I’ve learned to be pleased with the percentage I do follow, rather than beating myself up for the things I miss. So when Emma launched in with great enthusiasm, I was actually happy with how much I stayed with her!

In particular, I’m starting to really get the idea of just staying with the leader’s chest, and not worrying too much about what my feet are doing.

Filippo is bear-like in his stature, and Emma entirely elfin. Yet it’s surprising how similar they feel in their lead! Good technique is good technique.

Seesaw steps

I brought Emma up to speed on the posture work I’ve been doing with Filippo, how great it is when I manage it, and how much I struggle to maintain the ‘hips back’ posture throughout a movement. She gave me a new tool for doing this.

She had me take a back step in which I was moving from flat to toe with the front (pushing) foot, and from toe to heel on the back (landing) foot – and trying to ensure the two were in sync, in a seesaw motion. As one foot rises, the other falls. So for most of the movement, weight is split between the two feet and its smoothly flows from one to the other.

That specific seesaw movement only works when there’s no project-and-push; it’s just project-and-step. But the technique is essentially the same with longer steps – that we still follow the ‘flat foot to toe-push’ with the front foot and ‘toe to heel landing’ with the back.

This approach also makes it much easier for me to keep a forward intention toward the leader while stepping backwards, reducing my tendency to lean back from the embrace.

Additionally, this cured me of the tendency to overshoot, or to worry about whether I was being led to collect or to continue the walk. Focusing on that seesaw motion kept me focused on the present, with no spare attention to worry about what was coming next.

I now have (yet another!) solo exercise: I seem to be accumulating these at a frightening rate …

Learning to slow the leader

Regular readers will know I’m a great fan of collaborative dance, and one of the tools in the follower’s toolbox is to slow the leader. For example, if I lead a side-step and the follower wants to either slow the pace generally, or propose a pause, if they drag the foot so that their movement lags behind mine, it’s a signal for me to slow and wait.

There were times when I was getting lost, or getting behind Emma, and I suddenly realised I could do the same thing. She led a side-step to collect, and I just slowed down my own collection so she had to wait for me to catch up. I could then give myself pause to reset my posture.

The in-between moments

Both Filippo and Emma have been independently emphasising the moments between steps – the time during which weight is being transferred. Both pointed out that the periods when we have weight shared between the two feet should be the most stable, yet the tendency is to want to move quickly to the familiar tango territory of weight 100% on one leg.

While I like to choose the music in my leading lessons – having familiar music allows me to have my focus on technique – when following I actually prefer music I know less well, or don’t like as much, as it reduces my tendency to anticipate. Emma took care of that with some Gotan Project …

I love slow-motion dance, and Emma walked in half-time to music that was already languorous in nature. It was the perfect way to practice that slow heel-to-toe-to-heel weight transfer, but also underlined how there’s nowhere to hide technique issues when moving that slowly!

Two final songs, and another realisation

We ended by just dancing two final songs – a faster one, and then Pugliese!

Each had their benefits. The faster song (I don’t remember now what it was, which says something about the degree of concentration required purely on my movement!) didn’t give me any time to anticipate; the Pugliese made me realise that I’d been wrong in one of my theories.

Although it would be natural for me to be a collaborative follower as well as a collaborative leader, I’d had the theory that I must first start with a pure-follow style – in order to overcome my tendency to get distracted by how I would interpret the music.

Slowing the leader had taught me the first exception to this, and our Pugliese song showed me the second. I’ve always loved dancing Pugliese with Emma, because she hears the music the same way I do, and I realised this meant I could be a more active follower. Not anticipating her lead, but not just passively receiving it either. More like receiving a signal and then really going with it. I may have messed up the ending (doh!), but I really felt that was our best dance.

It’s time for to allow my body to catch up

I feel like I have about 37 technique issues on my to-do list, and am doing well if I can focus on two of them at once.

I think at this point it’s time for me to do my various solo exercises, and to try to get some following practice, before more input. I’m away for quite a few weekends, which means I’m not going to make it to another QTL milonga for a while, but I will take every opportunity I can do to some following.

Oh, and here’s Emma’s drawing, in its equally wonderful new frame (click/tap to enlarge)!