My post-Feast tango famine had left me feeling a little rusty, so I’d booked a private with Laura for the second day of my stay, to work on my technique before I hit the first milonga.
I’ve been incredibly lucky with my teachers. For me, a great teacher needs the ability to combine three very different qualities …
Continue reading Day two, and time for a tune-up with Laura HerediaWhen it comes to resolving my tangistential crisis, Filippo had given me a way forward which seemed to be working. Namely, take one element of my less-used vocabulary at a time, and figure out alternative resolutions for every step. Practicing those would then give me the confidence to use them in crowded milongas, knowing that I always had a plan B.
Another aspect of my crisis, however, was feeling unsure how far all my technique work was going to take me …
Continue reading Balance is just technique – working with Diego on the calesitaI talked last time about my tango existential crisis, a phrase which clearly demands an abbreviated form.
Part of it was how, as the space in milongas gets squeezed, so too does my vocabulary. I had one theory about the reason for that, but in tonight’s private, Filippo came up with a second one – and a fun/sadistic way forward …
Continue reading A really fun private, addressing one element of my tangistential crisisDifferent teachers have given me different things. David, for example, was absolutely fantastic at giving me variations on things I already knew. At helping me connect the dots – something which has made my dance both more varied and more fluid.
With Filippo, I’m working almost exclusively on technique. But five hours of dancing on Sunday made me realise there is something rather fundamental missing from my vocabulary, so tonight I asked Filippo to provide a solution. It worked out better than I could have imagined …
Continue reading Joining some more dots – in cross-system!I kept saying, throughout my extended tango high, that there had to be a crash around the corner. It was a surprisingly long time coming, but when it did, it was an impressive one.
Let’s start with the good news …
Continue reading A tango crash after the high, and a wonderful new teacherBeing a tango teacher must take a special kind of patience. Learning to dance takes so long that the only way it will ever happen is via shortcuts. Things that are good enough to work, to get people to the stage where they can dance.
Along the way, they have to turn a temporary blind eye to really fundamental technique issues that will need to be addressed further down the road. Things like learning to stand, walk and turn …
Continue reading Three years in, learning to stand, walk and turnI wrote last time about the excitement I feel, at finally feeling like I might start to enjoy rhythmical tandas as much as lyrical ones. But there’s also the other side to this, which is why I choose the above image for this post.
There are times in my tango journey where it feels circular: Oh, this again! But it’s of course really a spiral. We learn something on one level, then we return to it later and explore it on another level. And we continually get deeper into each element – like revealing the fruit beneath the peel. (Hey, this metaphor is worth what you paid for it!)
Turning my attention now to rhythmical dancing is like revisiting everything from scratch …
Continue reading Rhythmical dance is bringing me back to basics in a whole new wayI’ve long favoured lyrical tango over rhythmical – legato over staccato. While most songs of course contain elements of each, there’s a huge difference between say Fresedo’s Buscandote and D’Arienzo’s El choclo. The former has me leaping out of my seat, the latter shrinking back into it.
Partly that reflects my musical tastes. My non-tango music is dominated by singer-songwriters, so it’s natural that my tango tastes would lean heavily toward songs where the singer is the focus. But there’s a second factor …
Continue reading An unplanned, and very exciting, focus on rhythmical danceLong enough ago that I can’t find my blog post about it, I did a group class with Winston and Silvia on the back cross. Since then, my hit-rate on leading it has been somewhere around 50%, so decided it would be good to work on this during tonight’s private with Filippo.
Janet said she has no real preferences in what we do – her focus is purely on posture and technique, and she can do that whatever the topic …
Continue reading The back cross, and the power of not thinkingRegular readers will know that I am a bear of little brain when it comes to steps. That’s one of the reasons I don’t really pay much attention to sequences – it takes me an age to get the hang of them, and there’s zero chance I’d be able to do them in a milonga, even if there was room and it worked with the music.
My ‘lego block’ approach to learning – where I try to understand the individual components, and play with those – works far better for me. But tonight I did want to have a go at a short sequence …
Continue reading A somewhat ambitious private that I think paid off
journey of a trainee tanguero 
You must be logged in to post a comment.