I more or less knew this day was always coming. I never expected it after only a year, but here it is right in front of me. As students we grow very close to our teachers, more so if the instruction you are getting is really good, and you walk away feeling like you learned something after every lesson. When we really find those teachers, we don’t just tell people about them, we blog them, tell our friends, form emotional attachments with them, and yell out to the world, you have to try this person I found.
A good foundation is essential to learning to dance, so how lucky am I that someone was able to help me get a great foundation? It might have taken me a little too long to really understand that a good foundation has nothing to do with “learning the steps” and a lot more to do with walking, breathing, axis, and music. It is not until after this we get to focus on our partner, then the connection with our partner, while enhancing our foundation.
At some point it has to happen, you have to find your own dance, your own way, your own tango.
My focus has changed a lot on this trip, I knew it was going to, but I still put up a bit of a fight. From this point out, while I am still working on my foundation, though I am vastly scaling back. I have started working on how to achieve my goal with my partner without being focused on technique. Yes, I wrote that correctly. I am backing away from technique for now, I will pick it up again at some point, my guess is in a ballet class, which is to say the last thing I ever imagined doing.
One of my biggest problems today is that I am a bigger guy, 6’0 and a lot of the girls in BA dancing tango are around 5’2″ (I am for the most part talking about Argentine woman). By a lot, I mean way too many. How I get a girl that is 5’0 to do a turn is totally different than how I do it with Ms. Long legs 5’8. On that note, the connection point for someone less than 5’3 for the two of us is not our chests, it is her chest and my stomach. The book of how to learn tango wasn’t made for this difference.
This trip is where I am starting to be able feel everything my partner does. I know where she is, I asked her to go there. I am learning to wait. Not just slow down, but wait until I have been told, “Hey, I am here, we can move on now, together.”
I don’t think this can be taught, if it could I would love to meet that teacher.
While I am not leaving my teachers, it is time to scale back a lot, and change the focus of the classes. Working in classes will mean a lot more group classes for me, learning the steps, then trying to apply them to every woman I dance with. Private lessons now will focus a lot more just on musicality, really digging in and learning the different composers, orchestras, and the meaning of the songs. The later, of course, means learning Spanish. They say that more than half of understanding the dance lies within understanding the words in the music, and that hearing the translation just doesn’t get the full meaning across.
Anyway, inspiration at 3:00 in the morning can only mean one thing, time to head back to the milonga!
the making of a tango god 