Rekindle the fire
When I decided to take a break from event organising for Tango earlier this year, I never imagined that I’d be right into the thick of things within a year – well, about 7 months as a matter of fact.
Ironically, as if coming to a full circle, the venue for my reentry is none other than Xen Bar, one of the long-term Tango venues since the early days of Singapore’s Tango community, albeit at a new and much larger venue. More significantly, the owner of Xen Bar was a Tango dancer himself and has long supported Tango despite catering to a relatively small market even now.
Well, given the enthusiastic response of last night’s first milonga (over 40 people for a milonga held on a week night) with me back as the DJ at Xen Bar, there are at least grounds for some cautious optimism. Hopefully Xen Bar can once again provide the needed springboard for the initiation and retention of new-comers to our Tango community. After all, with more people in the “system”, perhaps we can finally see the long-hoped for growth that we have all been waiting for? But let’s not look too far ahead just yet… 😉
Layering
Some quick reflections after the past two weekends of workshops with Hsueh-tze Lee and partly due to the short discussion we had on the approaches to learning.
For someone not having the luxury of “Tango immersion”, either in Buenos Aires or in the various Tango strongholds in Europe or USA, from a purely technical point of view, I like to imagine the learning process for Tango as a little bit like an onion. An onion has many layers. At the core, there are the basic philosophical principles. The next layer out will be some generic techniques. Finally we come to the outer layer of “style” that is usually the first thing people see.
Active following
Over the last weekend, Hsueh-tze Lee had just completed the latest series of workshops in Singapore.
As on previous trips, she again emphasized the benefits of “active following” for followers. In fact, after having taken her classes as well as having danced with her in the milongas, I have very high regard for her excellent following and sensitive leading, and some first-hand experience of how active following can enhance the dance experience.
Now what do I mean (or what I understood it to be, from leader’s perspective) by “active following”?
The simple truth
Over the past weekend, I attended the first half of Hsueh-tze’s Art of Tango workshop series which will run over two weekends. I am happy to say that while some of the materials taught were already familiar to me, I was still able to pick up many subtle technical points. If anything, I think her demonstration of different ways of dancing to D’Arienzo’s “La Bruja” was well worth the price of admission, as they say!
Something that was mentioned in the class really stuck in my mind. A statement which Hsueh-tze attributed to one of her former students went something like this:
A good leader makes everything “simple” (for the follower).
Here the word “simple” can be taken to mean “effortless”. In other words, a key characteristic of a good lead is clarity, so that there is no ambiguity in the follower’s mind and no further interpretation is necessary.