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...

I tend to agree with Rick McGarrey on a lot of things, and this is one of them. Style? Really? Is that different from posture, connection, musicality? Or is it just a means of selling you something? Milonguero, Villa Urquiza, Tango Nuevo, Neotango, Apilado...Good grief.... Tango is straightforward as long as there is a leader and a follower. They are two sides of the same mirror, and learning one means that one has largely learned the other. It's a bio-mechanical relationship based on simple rules of posture, connection and movement. This simple relationship makes it very easy to lead and follow complex movements at a range of speeds to fit tango's expressive music. On-axis, off-axis, it's very easy and straightforward as long as there is one leader and one follower, and it's also easy for the partners to change roles mid-dance if they wish. Moving from the lead-follow model to an interpretive model with a "man's role" and a "woman's r...

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 ...