Only a tango couple could spend their third anniversary at a tango workshop …
Continue reading Giros, contra-giros and following with Los Ocampos
Category Archives: Following
A touch of BsAs in London, and dancing almost every tanda
I’d wondered how it would feel, returning to dancing in London. Whether my familiar milongas would now feel strange. Tonight’s didn’t: lots of friends were there, and I dived straight back in.
What did feel strange was that it had been four whole days since my last milonga! Technically, three days, I suppose, since we left Yira Yira in the early hours of Saturday morning and I was at the Tango Space milonga when it started at 8pm on Tuesday. As an added bonus, there was a touch of Buenos Aires to the dance …
Continue reading A touch of BsAs in London, and dancing almost every tanda
Patio de Tango, La Viruta and a magical evening at Salon Canning
You’ll have to excuse the blobby photos from milongas. I’m really trying not to take photos this trip. Instead, I’m shooting very short video clips with my phone, and will then edit them into maybe a 5-10 minute overview of the whole trip. This means most of my photos are in fact screengrabs from video, thus not the greatest quality.
The daytime part of the blog is rather brief. We had breakfast in bed, then I lazed (apart from accidentally writing a blog post) while Steph went shoe-shopping for some very nice women’s leading shoes before visiting her Spanish teacher.
I made up for this laziness in the evening, managing one-and-a-bit classes and three milongas …
Continue reading Patio de Tango, La Viruta and a magical evening at Salon Canning
Improvisation, initiation, following, accessible Pugliese and the perfect ending to a milonga
I decided last time that Juan Martin and Steffi’s classes are so good that I had to take full advantage of their limited time in London, despite my determination to do fewer classes and more milongas. The classes do at least double as a way to get to know followers for the Los Angelitos milonga which follows, so I can kind of claim they are in the spirit of dancing more.
Today’s classes were again advertised as technique-focused, with ‘pivots and communication’ the theme, though interestingly that turned out to be more true of the beginner/improver class than the intermediate one …
Dropping the beginner class, and getting some bonus experience as a follower
Many years ago, I did an introductory scuba diving course. Known as the PADI Open Water Diver course, it took four days, and comprised about a day’s theory, some swimming pool exercises and then a couple of days of diving. Do that, and you emerge as a certified diver.
Want to become an Advanced Open Water Diver? Certainly: go on to do one deep dive (30m), one navigation dive (following a compass to swim in a triangle) and three other ‘adventure’ dives (eg. a night dive), and suddenly I’m an ‘advanced’ diver – with all of eight days in the water.
Tango gradings aren’t quite that bad, but schools definitely use inflated levels designed to flatter the student …
Continue reading Dropping the beginner class, and getting some bonus experience as a follower
All about the embrace
Today was going to be more following, this time with Bridgitta, in the practica at Tango Garden. As things turned out, we switched back and forth, me leading something and then Bridgitta having me follow the same thing to illustrate how different versions feel …
Michael Lavocah on Troilo, and more learning about leading through following
Sunday’s tango-related fun kicked off with a 90-minute talk on Troilo by Michael Lavocah, author of Tango Stories, Musical Secrets.
I couldn’t even begin to do justice to the talk in a brief blog post. Lavocah clearly has an immense breadth and depth of knowledge, and boundless enthusiasm for sharing as much of it as humanly possible …
Continue reading Michael Lavocah on Troilo, and more learning about leading through following
