The Follower’s Work

These words may come as a surprise to you dear reader considering that this page has seemingly ‘bashed’ or disparaged the role of the Follow in any number of ways, however: The role of the Follower is work.

This is by no means a complete list, but just a taste: A Follower must master in order to ‘dance’ with a particular Lead their stability, their walk backwards, and forwards, and side, without wobbling. They must master turning left and right, in close and open embrace, employing a Follower’s Molinete (the ‘grape vine’ turn) and or any of the 7 other types of turns that they’re led to. Their crosses must be clean (forward or back). They must not ‘plank’ in a Colgada, they must learn to ‘fall’ in a Volcada, and they must learn to step into their lead in a Sacada. They must master their disassociation and applied disassociation in the Ocho, which eventually leads to their ability to Boleo in Circular Boleos. They must adorn and embellish musically between the beats so as not to interrupt the lead (the action and not the person). They must constantly manage their space, their distance, their circular awareness around their lead with where they’re placing their foot and how so as to constantly manage the optimally position of the couple, and at the same time trying to not hit anyone. And all the while their embrace must not hang, pull, push, or constrict the lead’s motion in any way, shape, or form. 

That’s work. Hard work.

And all of that is done in 3 in heels, walking backwards whilst some sweaty piece of man has their proverbial meathooks around them, pushing and pulling this way and that, while ‘helping’ them (ahem…read that as ‘correcting them’).

Yup! That sounds like ‘fun’ doesn’t it ? Not to mention there’s so much ‘passion’ there, no ? Not!

Let’s be clear about something, this is ‘work’, all physiological work, it’s labor. A Lead (the person) may not understand just how much work this is until they do the job themselves, and they have the misfortune to ‘dance’ with a lead as characterized above. And at that point their perspective changes. Radically. Why ? Because they don’t want to be that guy. This moment is usually an awakening for the lead because they become Follower sensitive. Their lead changes from force, tension, and resistance moving gradually towards intention, suggestion and invitation.

As to the Follower’s work, it is never done. They’re constantly being challenged by L/leads that are not clear in what they want, and when they are clear usually the L/lead is employing and asking for resistance from them. They must put up with the Lead that talks in their ear while dancing with them (this is talking, not dancing). They have to deal with the lead that squeezes them and then pulled them off balance constantly. While at the same time having a Lead that is watching their feet, and their head is usually pressing against them. They must interpret an unclear beat between two masters (the music, and the lead’s interpretation of that). They must constantly work on their walking technique, forwards, side, and back. Let’s not forget the sensual/sexual issues that come up. And that’s just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. 

In short, it’s work.

The Tango Topics Opinion: Follower Technique. The very words spark either abject fear of not being good enough, or another yawn at the prospect of hearing the 10 most common things from some yahoo that knows absolutely diddly about what it means to be a Follower, or their internal voice about not doing enough, not detailed enough, not…. while at the same time they compare themselves to the latest, hot, wild Follower that totally does it for everyone else watching a performance on YouTube. Uuuugh. A nasty, ugly cycle. In all of that mishigas there’s work to be done. These are not mere words, but the reality that real work has to happen. The work, so that we’re clear, is all about 3 steps, and how one takes those steps (extends their legs), how to land the foot in socks, then in flats, and finally in heels. Forward steps. Side steps. Back steps. The step that drives about as much debate as does the debate over peanut butter and jelly or peanut better and _______, is the Back Step and how it should or shouldn’t be done. There are about as many theories and practices about this one step as there are, seemingly, grains of sand on a beach. Everyone has a theory and a YouTube video of a moment in a said video with said Follower did X which all of a sudden proves the point that one method is better than the other. None of it…none of it is true. What is true is the reality that in that moment something had to happen to generate the necessity for a particular type of step to happen. And this is where the “work” of the Follower really begins.

This isn’t about training one kind, or one type of step. It’s about training one’s body, conditioning it, for MULTIPLE kinds of steps in the most common situations. There are steps for the Follower’s Molinete that are ideal. There are steps for the Follower’s side of the Milonguero Turn. There are types of Steps for Traveling Ochos, etc. Hmmmmm, types of steps may be a bit of an overreach. It may be more appropriate to say that these steps are accommodations in each situation. That different situations call for different accommodations, and the Follower must build a LIBRARY of ACCOMMODATIONS! (Ummmm hence the MULTIPLE part) 🙂

In the end, all of this work, is a lot like what happens in the Television Production world which is: Hurry Up and Wait! You do all this work, stream sweat, cry blood, and then you wait for a Lead that is capable of actually leading what you’ve been working towards. And instead the Follower is met with “meh” for their Local Leads that can barely walk without blaming the Follower for X. That rush to do X. That push their Followers to do Y. That Pull their Followers. That squeeze the living daylights (uuuugh) out of their Followers and aren’t even aware that they’re doing it at all! All the while creating situations where the Follower has to accommodate their “peculiar proclivities” of their idea of an Embrace, a Traveling Ocho, an Argentine Cross, and the Follower’s Molinete to the Lead’s Giro! Situations ? Like for instance: The Lazy Man’s Turn ? The Armpit Dancer ? The Five Errors of the Cross ? Just to name a few of the many places where the Follower’s work isn’t on the ideal execution of their Technique, but rather an accomodation of how to deal with a particular Lead’s ‘issues’ which gets labeled as a ‘style’, when in fact it’s something else entirely different than that.

That said, the Follower has an enormous amount of work to do not just in the execution of Technique but also in dealing with a Lead’s ego.

MORE REMINDERS

Practice (part 1)

For most people the idea of practice is about practicing the dancing part. Not about the actual "practicing" part. Practice really wants to take apart what one does, how one does it, while asking for feedback & input. Then asking questions, and then figuring out where things aren’t working and why, to smooth out the rough edges of something, and then continually refine, and refine, and refine it so that it becomes effortless.

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The Tango Haus

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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More Classes

At some point along the curve of your tango life, continuing to take classes seems like a really stupid idea. You’ve learned everything you need to know to get around the floor. Practice isn’t really that important any longer. And going to Milongas is really the important part, so who needs to practice ?

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Tango Accents

You may not realize this but you have an accent. The place that you live in, the people that you dance with, the teachers that you have studied with, and last but not least, the variation of those ideas from the original, creates a local tango ‘accent’. Every city where Tango is danced has an accent which is specific to that place and to that place alone. Boston, San Francisco, Paris, London, Berlin, Moscow, etc. They all have one, up to and including Buenos Aires, especially Buenos Aires! The difference between your local flavor of Tango and say Boston, Paris, and London, is like night and day within a spectrum of ideas.

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The Blame Game

The dance starts out on an even footing. It’s quite clear two steps later that one of you is clearly better than the other. Usually the Lead believes that they’re all that, and the Follower is just trying to survive the compressive embrace, let alone actually dance. In reality…well let’s just say that no one is perfect and leave it at that, shall we ?

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Giving Feedback

This is probably one the most important things in Argentine Tango that you can do for yourself and the people that you dance with. Giving constructive, clear, concise, clean, direct, and most of all, honest feedback. It is what is required. While feedback is subjective, it is not personal, it’s what is going on for you in the construct of the dance, the walk, the embrace, and how someone moves in relation to you.

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Getting To Buenos Aires

You’ve been dancing for a while, and you keep seeing these posts about Buenos Aires. Your dream has slowly developed to go to Buenos Aires, to experience for yourself what all the fuss is about. First there’s the dancing, you’ve heard it’s the best. There’s the shoes! OMG the shoes. Then there are friends that have been and rave about teacher X or Milonga Y. You’ve see the videos of performances at Salon Canning (but didn’t know it was Salon Canning), the pictures from Milongas, and thought to yourself that it didn’t look all that challenging than your local milonga there are just more people. You’ve heard that Spanish isn’t necessarily a requirement because there’s a lot of foreigners that speak English, and a good portion of the teachers speak it too. So you if you went, you wouldn’t really need to learn Spanish. 

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Tango Reputation

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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1.) Free Users get to see 5 of the 125 Different Tango Topics on the site. Plus you get access to the entire Tango Reminders and Tango Ideas sections of the site. These are short form Topic descriptors with a little detail about the topic and the video.

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5.) Basic, Premium, and Premium+ users get the ‘Dancing Perspectives’ & ‘The Soup’ sections of the document you just read (Lead, Follow, and Dancing) which are open to you. And that’s where all the good stuff is at. 

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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 dancingWhereas 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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