Argentine Tango consists of 3 steps, and only 3 steps: Your Left and Your Right. The 3rd is the Weight Change! 🙂 Another way that people talk about Tango’s steps is to say that the there are only 3 steps: Forward, Side, and Back. Either way you look at it, at some point, usually with the music, the dancers move from position to position via some kind of walking. The are 2 common walking systems in Argentine Tango: 1.) Parallel System Walking and 2.) Cross System Walking. In Parallel Walking, which is sometimes referred to as “Opposite Foot” walking, whereby the Lead steps into the Follower’s Walking paths with the Opposite Foot. For instance if the Lead steps with their Left, the Follower will extend with their Right, and so on. As Tango has grown, developed, and changed, while Parallel system is used as a good tool to get people up and dancing, the star of the show has always been Cross System Walking and Vocabulary. In today’s topic we’re talking about 4 Common Social Dancing Tools that use Parallel Walking as the entry point and NOT Cross System. Meaning ? We’ll start out using Parallel Walking system and then focus on the Transition point on the way to Four very common pieces of Tango vocabulary. So without further adieu, Tango Topics presents the Four Social Dancing Tools.
What are the ‘Four Social Dancing Tools’ ? First, what is a ‘tool’ as we’re defining it here ? A tool is a commonly used element that, and really it’s a transition from one thing to the next, that we use ubiquitously and don’t really pay a lot of attention to because it’s a stepping stone to the really cool thing we have in our minds. This is a tool. It’s the thing we use to make something else. Think of it as a Foundation, or a maker tool. A tool to make other things. And in this case, the Four Social Dancing Tools are maker tools with lots and lots and lots of variation built into them. 😉
These tools are the meat and potatoes of Social Dancing on the whole. While the cool vocabulary (think: Colgada, Volcada, Sacada, Gancho, Boleo, etc) is … ummmm … flashy, this stuff, the Four Social Dancing Tools that are sitting around them, or leading up to them and from them, is where the entire dance is at. Think of it this way, if you remove all the cool, flashy vocab from your dance, what’s left ? The Four Social Dancing Tools!
At the same time, those Four Social Dancing Tools, are really about the Transition points between going from Parallel Walking System to Cross System, most of the time. It should be noted that the Transition point is usually a point of inflection for a lot of dancers. Meaning ? It’s the point where most people have issues. By example the transition is usually where an in/experienced Lead will do one of several things, if not altogether, to get from point a to point b. 1.) They’ll compress the embrace (squeeze their Followers into them with their right forearm to hold them in place or to keep them close). 2.) They’ll rush their Followers and push them from position to position. 3.) They’ll haphazardly invoke leads to do X, Y, and Z, and not complete or follow through on the vocabulary, thinking that the Follower will just ‘get it’ and complete the half-thought that was invoked.
The Four Social Dancing Tools are:
Type 1: Parallel Walking > Milonguero Ochos
Type 2: Parallel Walking > Milonguero Turns
Type 3: Parallel Walking > Traveling Ochos
Type 4: Parallel Walking > Follower’s Molinete
Why Do You Need This Stuff ? Foundation, Foundation, Foundation. That’s why. Or put another way, because these tools work the foundation in a really good way, by breaking them down to their component elements. No one wants to admit that they need help. That their dance isn’t stellar. Furthermore you really don’t know that your dancing skills aren’t absolutely amazing until you see a room full of people all dancing way better than you are. There’s a reason those people have achieved ‘better’. It’s doing work like what you see in the video above. Being able to turn this stuff on and off as if it were a switch. A good portion of the time when we’re dancing we only think about the ‘cool’ toys in our dancing and we neglect the one thing that makes those cool toys possible: Our Foundation. That is, in case you’re not paying attention, this video series and others like it. By employing these four commonly used social dancing elements as your Foundation we work on the underlying elements as well, trying to make them cleaner, sharper, crisper, and that much more fluid. This isn’t about perfection, so get that thought right out of your head, but rather about making our dance flow more freely. There’s knowing the steps of a sequence, and then there’s dancing, and these are not the same things. You can know the steps, but dancing is a whole different thing. These four things can help with that process of ‘dancing’. Dancing does not happen on it’s own. It takes years of practice to create the seamless, flow, and fluidity that you see some dancers exhibit. Seemingly creating something out of nothing and wondering how that was done. These Four Social Dancing Tools are how that was done. By focusing on the foundational elements in each! So if you want your dance to improve, it’s not the fancy vocabulary. It’s make the stuff that surrounds it stellar! This is that ‘stuff’ that surrounds the fancy vocab!
About The Video. This video comes in a combined 50m:37s in length in 4 sections. There is no Lead or Follower Technique explained in this video at all.
Type 1: Parallel Walking > Milonguero Ochos (00:12:33)
Type 2: Parallel Walking > Milonguero Turns (00:13:55)
Type 3: Parallel Walking > Traveling Ochos (00:12:42)
Type 4: Parallel Walking > Follower’s Molinete (00:11:27)