I don’t do many group classes or workshops, as the vast majority of them are very sequence-based. But if you wanted to title a workshop with me as your target, you really couldn’t do any better than From Embrace to Step: Exploring Tango from the Inside Out.
Further reassurance was provided by the fact that Valentina Garnier & Juan Amaya are known for their milonguero style dance, even in the majority of their performances …
For example:
It’s so rare and beautiful to see a performance danced in sustained close embrace.
Floorcraft and embrace
Juan claimed his English wasn’t very good, despite demonstrating this was entirely untrue. But he did deliver some of the class in Spanish, with host Lucy Attwood acting as interpreter. The pause between Spanish and translation brought back fond memories of doing a few group classes in BsAs and being amazed how much I grasped just from the physical demonstrations and the tiny bit of Spanish I understood.
They had us dance a song, and I was amused that their first piece of feedback was on the floorcraft – especially as it was a huge room with only about 15 couples in it! ‘Dance toward the outside of the room, not the inside.’ Amused, but pleased: it’s a point sorely needed in London tango!
Next up was the one aspect of my tango I do feel confident in, despite my overall rustiness: a rounded embrace. They used the familiar mechanism of starting with a normal hug, then changing it as little as possible while morphing into a tango embrace.
Using the left hand as part of the lead
This was followed by something very subtle but very interesting!
I’ve written before about everyone teaching us not to lead with our arms, and then teachers later having to introduce the idea of arms playing a role in the lead. Juan talked about using the leader’s left hand as the first part of the signal. Retaining the frame, of course, but using very subtle hand movement to indicate the direction in which we’re about to move.
I wasn’t confident I understood just how much signal he was suggesting, so I had him lead me, and then understood. It was indeed subtle, but just enough to feel, and to help prepare me for the movement.
This is definitely something I’ll be experimenting with.
A consistent frontality
Skipping ahead, they demonstrated a walk where the leader moved from same track to outside walk to the left then outside walk to the right. The point they were making is that, in outside walk there is a tendency for leaders to end up to the side of the follower, instead of maintaining exactly the same frontality, just with an offset.
I could immediately see that I’ve been guilty of that. Practicing switching between inside and outside walk without squishing the embrace was surprisingly challenging, and it was clear looking around the room that the flaw he’d highlighted was incredibly common. I’ll need more practice for sure, but can absolutely see the value, so will be doing that.
A walking turn – and some magic!
Between the two, they demonstrated a walking turn. I’m sure I’ve encountered it before, but it looked a little complicated and my tiny tango step brain briefly panicked. They were using it only as a means of working on a technique issue, but it did bring back uncomfortable memories of struggling so much with a sequence in a group class that I never got the chance to focus on the technique.
However, when I tried it, some magic rather quickly materialised! I have absolutely no idea whether I was doing the steps they’d demonstrated, and yet, somehow, we were doing the overall movement they wanted. I realised that I wasn’t thinking remotely about what my feet were doing, only in the idea that we wanted to continue to walk forward but turn 360 degrees as we did so.
The enormous irony here is that I’d sought guidance only a few days earlier on a clockwise giro without opening the embrace, and here I was doing a clockwise giro while walking forward without opening the embrace, and without feeling like I needed to give the slightest thought to anything other than the overall shape of the movement.
I checked with Valentina in the second song whether I was doing what they wanted, and she said yes, simply touching my right shoulder in a way that reminded me to relax it.
Juan said there’s a tendency for leaders to dissociate in exactly the wrong direction, because we are thinking about our own body and what seems to make sense for the way we need to turn. What we need to do instead is think about how the follower needs to move – and focus on getting our shoulder out of the way.
I’ve said before that mental models and language can make a huge difference, and this was one of those cases. I could think of plenty of times when a teacher has told me to open my shoulder, but when I instead thought of it as ‘my follower needs to move in this direction, but my shoulder is currently in her way, so how do I get it out of her way?’ then it was blindingly obvious what I needed to do.
I don’t exactly have vast amounts of dissociation available (especially at present), but as many teachers have said, it’s not about the amount, rather the very clear direction – and this exercise was a very good demonstration of that point.
What was particularly pleasing to me was one follower toward the end who said that it was the first time she’d successfully followed it. I strongly suspect that this was precisely because I was focusing only on the direction of the movement and the technique. I’m pretty sure a number of leaders were in the step hell I used to find myself in group classes.
Sold on Valentina and Juan
I loved the workshop, and was very much sold on Valentina and Juan. They’re only visiting from BsAs for a few days, so I wasted no time in booking a private with them for the next day. Watch this space …
ben lovejoy 