Reading The Tea

Last night was one of those nights… Got to class, brushed the cat fur off my shoes (How? How do they get their fur on my tango shoes?) and couldn’t dance at all. Couldn’t follow. Couldn’t embellish. Couldn’t keep a good posture. Nada.

That aside, the classes were interesting. First I took Robin and Marika’s Tango 2 class. Usually I do a Tango 2 then a Tango 3 class at Empire, but with how I was dancing, I opted for Adam and Chico’s Tango Musicality class.

In Robin and Marika’s class we worked on ocho technique in close embrace, with embellishments. We were transformed into dancing cheese sandwhiches, with a piece of yellow paper between each couple. Marika talked about how the hip in close embrace ochos needs to take up the space in the embrace, rather than leaving a gaping void of space. (What most other teachers I’ve head refer to as “sticking your butt out.) Somehow that clicked for me more than it has in the past. We also discussed embellishments, and how the follower needs to take time, or she won’t be given it by the leader. For some reason that was really hard for me. For those who know me, I’m a fairly assertive dancer. Maybe that’s why I work hard at really listening to the lead, and feel weird taking time I don’t feel that I’m given? Marika pointed out that until your hips are in the right place, he can’t lead you to the next step. Robin also said that you can think of leads as a to-do list — you check off one thing before you go on to the next, even though you know that there are other things on your list. Another thought about ochos in close embrace: the embrace is like opening and closing a book. The bodies stay together, but the connection shifts.

In the musicality class we worked on different ways to listen to the music, and accent beats w/ movement, and different ways to time the cross/ embellishments to compliment it, particularly on the two. The hard thing with embellishing on the two is not rushing the next step, or giving it a false urgency, but feeling the underlying beat. It was a nice small class, so I lead Chico a bit, too. I still have a tendancy to overlead the cross a bit — should be more subtle. As with everything, I have a problem with tension in tango. (My clarinet teacher once told me “I can’t believe I’m saying this to a student, but don’t work so hard!”) Adam gave me an interesting mental image to loosen my walk a bit without making it seem artificial — practice walking with my arms swinging like I’m throwing something underhand. Then I don’t overdo the shoulders, but everything else loosens.

“Don’t put your follow where you want her [or him], open up space that you invite her to fill.” 

Last night D & I took Tango 2 from Adam Hoopengardner at Empire Dance. Even though I alread knew how to lead the steps themselves (ocho cortado and variations), Adam brought some really interesting thoughts about leading it to the class, ways of making it an advanced step. When first learning it, you can step with your partner, taking each bit as it comes, in traditional timing. Later on, you can start to play with the rhythm, hearing the music. To really make the step advanced, you play with the dynamics, and give the follow room to have a voice. To me dynamics are different than timing. Timing is long or short, 1 count or 2. Dynamics are feeling — stacatto, legato, playful, melancholic, nostolgic. Then you are really dancing. Someone once said to me (referring to ballroom) that beginning dancers want to dance intermediate steps, intermediate dancers want to dance advanced steps, and advanced dancers want to practice the basics. I would take it a bit further and say that there are no advanced steps — just advanced performance of steps.

Julie Taylor’s autobiographical, lyric look at the experience of violence, both public and personal, explored through tango. It’s effective and affecting. Though it was a bit hard for me in the beginning to get into her style, by the end the book had absorbed me.

Whenever I’m performing obsessive searches for tango-related books, I get really irritated when tango is used in the title, but the book has nothing even remotely to do with the dance or the music. I was relieved, then, when this one did. It’s rather trashy chick-lit, but the descriptions of dance and the dance world are interesting. Living in the NY area, one gets to experience the warm fuzzies of recognition when Palmer mentions gossip about classes at this studio, or milongas at that one. It’s a sherbert book — sweet, sticky, enjoyable, but not really filling.

Often in social dance, stretching is ignored, but I just came across a useful guide of stretches put together especially for argentine tango. It doesn’t have anything revelatory, but it’s a great reminder, and clearly put together.