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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 through the use of a Tango House. The podcast is free. 😉 Enjoy. Click on the picture above to ‘hear’ the podcast.

Tango Topics Podcast Excerpt:

“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.

One dancer in particular decided “I’m just going to open up my house and have people come over and hang out and we’ll do our thing”. And it wasn’t a “I’ll set this up and do this to piss people off”. It became an outgrowth of them hanging out a lot, it just so happened that this particular person had a house all to themselves, they had all this space and they just moved all the furniture out, and ended up dancing in the available space. What essentially grew out of that was a small group of dedicated people that started to follow this one particular person. It was maybe five or six people at the beginning and then it slowly grew out to like 8 or 9, and then 10, and then 12 and then it started to grow exponentially. So much so that it quite literally outgrew that house and they needed to go look for a practica space. And that started weekly classes and then group classes and workshops and so on and so forth.”

Related Terms:

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Alternative

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La Cumparsita

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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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The Talking Cabeco/Mirada

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If you’ve been dancing a little while, or for many years, at some point along the curve you’ve heard the word ‘Cabeceo’. Which roughly translates as a slight nod or nodding of the head (Cabeza) for the Lead to invite a Follower. The Follower’s side of that same invitation is referred to as a ‘Mirada’ (to look at, or ‘looked’). It’s an oddity that almost no one knows about the Follower’s side of the equation, that the Follower can ask for a tanda, employing the same methodology. It just has a slightly different name.

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The Male Follower

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This post isn’t about the benefits of Following for the Male that dances, of which there are many, such as hyper awareness of all the things you do not want to do. No. Nor is this post about dancing in heels (which can be quite educational on many, many levels), nor the benefits of actually doing that work. Nor is this post about the simple fact that some men do enjoy Following quite a bit (the author included) and are actually (contrary to what you might believe) pretty good at it. No. Today’s Tango Thought is all about Men That WANT to Follow and some pointers that you want to think about doing.

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The ‘Connection’ Fallacy

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Getting To Buenos Aires

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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!

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