Recent report card
Observations of some subtle changes appearing in my Tango recently.
Embrace:
Lately I am beginning to notice a preference for a more flexible embrace – that is, a slight V-hold with, from time to time, about a finger’s gap between myself and my partner. I suspect this may be similar to the salon-style embrace often discussed on Tango-L, as I had mentioned before. While most of a lead is still done with the impetus from the chest, the arms (or more specifically, the bend in the elbow) are also useful (and critical in some situations) for the purposes of leading. There seems – and without any conscious effort on my part – to be a shift from a strict adherence to the close embrace I mysteriously picked up while in Berlin and subsequently adopted for social dancing for most of the past two years, to a more fluid approach, which Esteban/Evelyn seem to advocate these days.
Tango styles
From time to time, inevitably heated discussions about the different styles in Tango crop up on the Tango-L list. The following is a classification proposed by a regular poster to the list, which I in fact quite agree with.
Flamenco revisited
After a break of close to two months, finally managed to convince myself to go back to the Flamenco classes Monday week. In fact, up until the time I was leaving the office, I was still trying to come up with good excuses for not going. 🙂
I guess laziness is a common human trait… And another is the fact that once you have put aside something, it is in general quite hard to pick up again!? However, I am glad that I made the effort last week and this week, because the classes have been very interesting and challenging – especially since we have started on the castanets.
The matrix of dance
Have been going through the book The Structure of the Dance Vol.2: The Matrix by Mauricio Castro during my recent trip to Japan. In fact, I had initially started with “Structure of Dance”, which is the first volume in this series, but became a little impatient to go through all the exercises. 🙂