Sometimes lessons can pay unexpected dividends some time later. There can be things I didn’t really grasp at the time, which later make sense. Or things I thought were minor points, which subsequently reveal themselves to be far more important.
There was one of the latter in a private with Maeve. Indeed, I didn’t even include it in the blog post at the time, as it just felt like a reminder of something I already knew …
Continue reading Something else clicked: a way to encourage weight-sharing
It was on 28th October 2018 that I first ‘danced’ in a milonga at Tango Garden, after a grand total of five lessons, with the courage fostered by not knowing what I didn’t know.
Some fifteen months later, I figured the various broken limbs would have healed, and the building been repaired, so decided to pay a return visit for the 7th anniversary of the popular Saturday afternoon milonga …
Continue reading Returning to the scene of the crime, at Tango Garden
The theme of this week’s Tango Space intermediate class was advertised as a cross-system sequence. This would usually be enough to send me running for the hills but for two things …
Continue reading A minor mystery solved, and a bit of Tango Terror
There’s a Catch-22 with my plan to expand my core vocabulary. The stuff I’m now adding in to milongas feels less fluid, so I’m reluctant to interrupt the flow of the dance by using them too often – but unless I use them more often, they won’t feel more fluid.
That feels like a particular dilemma when I feel like smoothness and musicality are what I’ve got going for me right now as a tango dancer; if I put those at risk, I have nothing …
Continue reading Deliberately taking one step back to get two steps forward
Daniel Pereyra was DJing at Los Angelitos today, and while I hadn’t ended up his biggest fan last time, today was a complete contrast! The music could almost have been one of my own playlists.
I loved almost all of it, and danced all but two or three tandas …
Continue reading Today’s Los Angelitos was almost in Tango Terra territory
Thursday’s lesson was on ‘dancing to the pause.’ This was familiar territory to me, but was still a really useful lesson – partly for one simple movement, and partly as a reminder of how far I’ve come from my mathematical days.
The lesson started with the 8-beat phrase, and an initial suggestion to slow on the 7th beat in order to pause on the 8th. This is a very slight variation on what I usually do when walking to rhythmical sections, which is to decelerate on the 7th beat in order to do a weight-change instead of a step on the 8th …
Continue reading Tango maths revisited, and the fragility of tango heaven
There’s a delightful tradition in tango that, on your birthday, you get the dance floor to yourself for a vals, with a succession of partners coming to dance with you for perhaps 20-30 seconds each. This means you get to dance with maybe seven or eight followers in the course of the song, and have the entire floor to use as you please.
Of course, the downside to this is that you also get an entire milonga-ful of dancers as audience!
Continue reading Another tango milestone: surviving (and even enjoying!) my first birthday vals
