Re: [TANGO-L] leading - the right stuff

[Jonathan Thornton <jnt @NOYAU.COM>]

On Mon, 26 Jan 2004  Tom Stermitz Stermitz  @RAGTIME.ORG wrote:

>Again, as I repeatedly claim, beginners doing tango with simple
>movements & vocabulary allows them to become more articulate &
>musical in short order, compared with constantly feeding in new, and
>more complicated vocabulary, which delays this process considerably.

I had chosen reading because I felt it was an example that would be
available to all the subscribers on the list. I know that not all who show
up at social dance classes have had any formal music education. I was not
intending a tight parallel between learning to read and learning to dance.
It was just an example I felt most people could relate to. And I think Tom
has a good point here about trying not to keep leaders constantly
struggling with more and more difficult material.

I have poor facility with learning steps and moves and do so very slowly.
At the end of my first year of learning to dance tango I heard about close
embrace tango and that it had a smaller selection of steps. I decided if I
had any chance at all this might be it. I had been introduced to sacadas
in open embrace and shown how they could be done to the left and right in
cross and parallel feet. But I could barely do one to the right in
parallel feet. I knew it would take a long time to learn just the one, and
each of the others would take as long also. I despaired.

I was told by a dancer that "milonguero" style was simple but had to be
very musical. I thought just maybe I might have a chance. I realized that
I was setting a metronome in my head at the start of the song and using my
percussionist background to stay on the beat. I resolved to dance
listening to the music the entire tango. This turned out to be very
difficult. I gave up all but the simplest steps and strove to maintain a
continuous awareness of the music and my partner. But no sooner than I
started to dance but I had to dodge another leader and then I realized I
had stopped "hearing the music", and brought my attention back to it. Or
my lead was iffy and my partner did something strange and I began to sweat
and feel bad and stopped listening to the music as my nervous self talk
took over my consciousness.

It was perhaps after year to a year and a half of this discipline that I
began to find I was hearing the music and aware of my partner the entire
time I danced and could still deal with navigation and other challenges.

I can't imagine how one could dance musically without listening to the
music the entire dance. And though I am among the slowest of learners I do
believe that learning to listen to the music the entire dance is a
necessary skill, a fundamental skill for a dancer to develop. This was
something that seemed obvious to me but I don't recall it being taught and
have very rarely encountered it being included in discussions on learning
to dance. My personal experience is that it is not until this functioning
of listening to the music and the partner becomes "second nature" that
musically expressiveness opens up in the dance. Then the
expressiveness of movement develops as one hears the different
expressions and phrasings in the music.

peace, Jonathan Thornton