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Basics

There are 5 basics for both lead and follower: 

1.) Walking.
2.) Ochos. 
3.) Turns. 
4.) Crosses. 
5.) Embrace. 

The 1st is the golden fantasy of Tango, not the reality on a modern social dance floor.
The 2nd is usually Traveling Ochos, and infrequently Milonguero (“Lazy”), there are 8 kinds of ochos!
The 3rd is modern Tango to a ‘T’, the Turning Dance. 
The 4th is usually done in Parallel Walking System at first, and later on, Cross!
and the 5th causes more problems than it’s worth, mostly due to instability, compression, tension, force, and resistance.
The 3rd and 5th are where you’re going to spend all your time.

MORE REMINDERS

The Tango Haus

August 31, 2017 No Comments

What’s below is a small snippet of 13m:06s audio podcast of Today’s Topic on the benefits and detractors of building community using the idea of a Tango House. “What I refer to as the Tango ‘Haus’ idea. In this case this is the German spelling of ‘HAUS’. I just like the way it sounds. But we can use the American spelling of ‘House’. So a few years back and I may be bastardizing some history here. There was a tango house, and I’m not going to name the city, that grew up out of a U.S. based city. This community, at the time had a number of teachers in its area, and they were all using the typical model of how they wanted their students to learn to dance.

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Head Tilt

November 30, 2016 No Comments

The tilt or position of one’s head (for lead or follow) is far more important than you might imagine. First and foremost, where the head points the body tends to follow. There’s a reason for this, your equilibrium, contrary to popular belief your balance is not generated in the center of your belly. This ‘myth’ is better known and often repeated as to indicate your ‘core’ muscles. This is a lie.

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The Female Lead

July 8, 2017 No Comments

This post isn’t about the benefits of learning to lead for the woman that dances, of which there are many. No. Nor is it about the hyper awareness of all the things you do not want to do as a Follower, which is going to happen by default. Nor is this post about the supposition that women of a certain age swap shoes and end up leading because no one wants to lead them anymore. Not. Nor is it about the fact the simple fact that some women do enjoy leading quite a bit and are actually (contrary to what you might believe) pretty good at it. No. Today’s Tango Thought is all about Women that WANT to Lead! (Just as a side note, most of this stuff also applies to the male lead too, you need the reminders).

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Tango Cities

February 18, 2017 No Comments

Today’s Tango Thought covers a labor of Tantalus … where is Tango danced and in what cities ? What follows is by no means an exhaustive list of places where tango is danced, it only scratches the surface.

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Tango Reputation

February 1, 2017 No Comments

No matter how hard you try (positively or negatively) you’re going to acquire a ‘Tango Reputation’. Meaning ? How you engage socially, how you dance, who you dance with, how ‘good’ you are, how often you dance, if you teach, where you teach, who you teach with, whether or not (if you teach) you dance only with your students or with others, if you teach others while dancing (tsk, tsk, tsk), whether or not you dance milonga, how good your milonga skills are, whether or not you lead and follow or not.

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La Cumparsita

October 8, 2017 No Comments

At the end of nearly every Milonga in the world, that you will ever attend, while you will hear more than a few familiar songs, there are a handful that have very specific meanings. One of them is played at the end of the night to signify that the Milonga has come to end, which should be a cue to find your favorite partner and to dance with them. The song ? “La Cumparsita” or as it is translated into English, ‘The Little Carnival’.

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Floorcraft

December 4, 2016 No Comments

What is Floorcraft ? In it’s simplest form, as there layers and layers to this stuff, it is how to navigate the floor while dancing with your partner and not hitting the couples ahead, or behind you. As well as not touching the tables, and chairs. All the while interpreting the music, concurrently interpreting the beat and the musical pauses to fit the tango vocabulary while maintaining the spacing between the couples.

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Proprioception

February 20, 2017 No Comments

According to Webster’s Dictionary the word ‘Proprioception’ comes from the latin word ‘proprius’ meaning “one’s own” or “individual”, and ‘capio’ or ‘capere’ meaning to take or to grasp. The word itself means a perception of one’s own body in space and time, as in the awareness of one’s body in space and time, as it refers to bodily position in space and time.

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Keep something in the back of your mind: What you’re seeing in a youtube video is a couple that is performing for the 15th row for a room full of people. They’re not social dancing! Whereas this website is all about ‘Social Tango’  or how to make things function on a social dance floor. Social Dance floor ? Your local milonga! They are showing you flashy moves as a presentation, to show off! But not stopping and talking about how this works which is what you need to see. This website and all of it’s content show you the how and  why you’d want to put that piece of vocabulary there, or how to make things work. This website is all about those things and more!

You could watch Tango YouTube videos and thereby spend your time, trying to infer, and figure out how things may work in that particular situation. Bend your body this way or that, twist and force this position or that. Place your foot here or there and figure it out. This is known as Tango Twister.  Which can be a lot of fun, but more than likely it won’t help you, because you’re missing something: The explanation from an experienced teacher showing you how to properly excute this stuff from a Leading Perspective as well as from a Following Perspective!

The goal of YouTube videos is to get you to study with those teachers in person. The goal of Tango Topics videos allows you to work at your own pace, in the comfort of your own space, so that you can play them over and over again to improve your understanding of the vocabulary or technique being described to therefore better your dancing experience. The goal of classes and workshops is to get you to come back over and over and over again, thereby spending more money with that teacher. This website and the videos under it are here to act as a resource for you to help you to improve your dance. Pay once and you’re done.

Eventually, one way or another you’re going to pay for this lesson, either here and now, or with them. TANSTAAFL! The difference between that lesson and this ? Is that you get to play this lesson over and over and over again. Further still, there are supporting materials (other videos) that help to explain the language and the underlying technique of how and why things work, so you can easily reference those things in the corresponding articles that go with the material, and or any language in the Tango Topics Dictionary. 

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