Thoughts on bad posture
Don’t know about your neck of woods, but visiting teachers will generally insist on dancing with a good posture during their classes. However, from browsing clips on YouTube of well-known (usually very old) milongueros and teachers, what I saw during my trip to Buenos Aires, and perhaps the little streak of rebelliousness in me(!?), sometimes I really wonder what’s all the fuss about having a good posture??
I mean, it is not difficult to find clips of the so-called maestros dancing with an apparently imperfect posture and yet able to move musically and perhaps with a dash of showiness. What’s the catch? Why is it that “they” are allowed while “we” (the “uninitiated”) are barred from copying their examples to the dot!? I mean, if these famous dancers can manage to dance well with slouched backs, bent heads, etc., why can’t I do the same… 🙂
Actually, despite the slightly tongue-in-cheek introduction, my conclusion from all this is that good posture is not just for aesthetics but serves important functional purposes. For me at least, the fundamental principle is simply:
Provided that you do not disturb your partner’s axis or balance, slight deviations from the ideal posture are not only permissible but actively encouraged.
I believe that, just as we should walk with our unique personality, so we should dance with as few constraints as possible, or else we will all become mere robots on the dance floor – stiff and straight, able to move to the rhythm of the music precisely, but nothing more.
Shopping for teachers
As any Tango community slowly matures, inevitably more and more people will decide to join the teaching ranks. Consequently it can get very confusing for new-comers wanting to take up Tango. How can they choose who to learn from?
Under the circumstances, a commonly cited advice is to “watch how the teachers dance”. While this is not too bad, I feel that it is insufficient. Firstly, the correlation between dancing skills with teaching/analytical ability is not always guaranteed. Secondly, to the untrained eye, as long as someone seems to be able to move with some degree of confidence (even if he is throwing the partner around, or she is back-leading her partner), everything seems well. Or is it?? 😉
The following list, perhaps not exhaustive, is how I usually advise a new-comer when I am asked the question. For simplicity, I will assume the teachers always teach as a couple. By the way, obviously this list implicitly excludes anyone who starts teaching after having learnt for a year or so, no matter how “good” he/she seems – unless we are talking about very young communities of less than 1-2 years old.
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Tango and soccer
Combining the two passions… Probably will mean no shortage of men in future at milongas whenever a soccer match is on!? 🙂
What is Nuevo in Tango Nuevo?
During a conversation I had a few weeks ago, it suddenly occurred to me that it is actually very difficult to explain what is/is not “Tango Nuevo”? Just to be clear, here I am talking specifically about the styles typified by people like Fabian Salas, Chico, Pablo Inza, not so much the styles danced by the younger generations like Pablo Rodriguez. It surprised me that I could not – and still cannot – put a clear definition to it.
I mean, when I begin to seriously think about it in terms of usual categories such as embrace, sequence of steps (from what I had actually learnt but no longer use) and music:
- Embrace: well, salon and Tango fantasia has been doing open/fluid embrace long before anything became Nuevo-ish…
- Fancy steps: colgadas are already used in Tango Fantasia, and even by some milongueros; colgadas have been seen in Tango Fantasia, or even some Tango Salon. Other steps?
- Music: I have been to quite a few so-called Nuevo venues where Golden Age music (albeit with a higher percentage of strongly rhythmic and driving music) was the flavour of the night. As a side note, one common element, irrespective of the style, is that good dancers invariably were able to interpret and express traditional Golden Age music well. In fact, to my eyes, even Nuevo dancers looked much better when expressing such music compared to dancing to some monotonic electronic music – but just my artistic preference… 😉