Tango Life

Our teaching phrases change over time as we find better ways to describe the same thing. Here are our current ones with some clarifying text for both leaders and followers. These apply to both close-hold and open-hold. The only difference between the two is that open-hold is much more demanding to dance well, whereas you can stumble around the floor equally in either close or open if you have no idea what you're doing. Here they are: "We don't teach steps, we teach Posture, Connection and Movement." Posture - "Stand up tall, build a bridge"- Build a bridge to your partner with your chest, rolling forward from the ribcage upwards, no more than 1-2 inches/3-4 centimetres. The bridge has to have strong foundations i.e. soft floppy knees won't work. Try changing weight a few times with soggy legs and see if your partner even notices it. Try it again with strong legs. SURPRISE! - "Weight on your heels or mid-foot"- Weight on your hee...

A common complaint of tango teachers is that their local scenes don't recognise the teachers' ongoing improvement, and still think of them as Bob and Jenny from down the road, whereas they themselves feel that they are actually accumulating more knowledge and experience and becoming more valuable as teachers. This becomes a problem if one is trying to earn a living in one's hometown as a tango teacher, but if one still has a day job then it's just a burden to one's pride. Living in a relatively small tango scene as I am, I'm reminded of this quite often. I'll be dancing with a newbie (or experienced dancer) who hasn't been taught much more than nudge-and-guess, and who cheerfully pulls me off axis with every un-led weight shift and overstep, while gaily telling me that I have "such an unusual style". Oh dear. At times like these I console my bruised ego with my being a popular leader in whatever country I visit, and and having enjoyed the...

This blog arose following an exchange with a new friend who lives in a small city in the US. He's struggling with learning this amazing dance and is frustrated by being so far from good teachers. I put together the following advice for him, which I have found to be consistently true in a range of countries. You may feel that you are at the end of the world, tangoically speaking, however if we can become good dancers in New Zealand then you can certainly do it from Smallville, USA. Private lessons are the only way to learn, group classes simply don't work. Our first trip to BA had us doing 30 days of 2 x 2-3 hour group classes each day, followed by hours of dancing every night. We took classes from a range of teachers of different ages and styles. None of them covered the essentials of posture, connection and movement. We kissed a lot of frogs before we found our prince, and we have been focused on private lessons ever since. You also need to be prepared to kiss a lot ...