Eric and I have been talking a lot lately about our cross-training and body conditioning efforts and how they impact our dance. This post is about conditioning your body, in which we explore various posture or movement issues and the exercises that will help correct them.
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There is a real inequality in Argentine tango. There are almost always more women than men. How can we explain that? Despite what a lot of people say, men really have it pretty easy. Many teachers tell beginners, “all you have to do is walk.” Meanwhile, they are showing women how to do crosses, molinettes and ochos. Some men just stand there two footed, faking the lead for ochos while their partner works her bum off, staying on axis and powering through her pivots in spite of him… all in high heels, where one badly timed invasion of her axis could cause her free stilleto to slice across her big toe or impale her standing foot.
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Occasionally, it’s a good idea just to check where we stand, literally, in our bodies– how solid is our “good” posture, and how does our body compensate when we throw in strange elements, like high heels?
We might be diligent about maintaining what we think is good posture, only to later find out we weren’t using our bodies efficiently to support that posture. A good test is to see how our core responds when we shift our center of gravity. If it is strong, our posture will not be phased, but if it is weak, our body will compensate by contorting.
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This is a greatly expanded version of an exercise that we gave as prerequisite homework for our recent classes. Learning how to fine tune your posture is key to creating posture awareness which is very important in tango and in life. This also ties in nicely with a request for an awareness challenge from a friend in Turkey. Our friend had observed that after a shoulder adjustment, his hips and sacrum would sometimes respond in an unhealthy way. While this is far more than an awareness challenge, it does provide more comprehensive posture exercises to help bring awareness to the possible interactions that may occur as we adjust different aspects of our posture.
This is also one of the primary exercises I did many times a day when I felt my job situation deteriorating last summer. A timer on my computer told me to stand once an hour and this exercise is the minimum of what I did then and every other time I stood up from my desk. Doing this exercise many times a day can do wonders to correct the bad posture caused by stress, sitting too long, or time spent hunched over a desk or computer. Even better, do this exercise combined with a few stretches or even some exercise. Maybe a few sun salutations, some Bulgarian squats, or some push ups. Try it– your body will feel better and so will your mind!
Read MoreThis 4-hour class would cover essential technique in Argentine tango to prepare you to attend milongas (social dances) and practicas in a much shorter time than a more traditional series. We will also be inviting experienced dancers in our community to participate, so that you will have the opportunity to work with individuals who can give you personalized and knowledgeable feedback during the class.
We need to have a minimum number of participants to offer this class, so we encourage you to pre-register or contact us soon, if you are interested!
Additional IMPORTANT information:
We structure our classes in unique ways in order to delve into deep studies and explorations of our bodies and the material. Since we want you to get the best experience and assimilate the most from this intense class, we will have some required exercises and material before the lesson. We will provide all of this material to you two weeks in advance.
| Immersive Beginning Tango Class | $40 |
TangoBreath has made us very conscious of how we describe the Argentine tango movements we are guiding. It is crucial to be concise in our presentation – the evolution of which is well understood by our attendees. How we think, and what we think, has a profound affect on the way we move. We are fortunate that discussions and feedback following TangoBreath are revealing new ways of verbally describing tango movements and various visualizations that individuals have used to conceptualize – and physically embed – the core technique of Argentine tango. Likewise, in our own practice, we have come to find our own ways of visualizing and comprehending movement.
Read MoreYesterday, a lovely and inspiring woman, Sasha Cagen, from the San Francisco area wrote us, inquiring about our ways of teaching tango movement after having attended TangoBreath when she visited Asheville this summer. Eric and I were perplexed at first about how to respond. Explaining how to teach is a giant step from actually teaching. There are so many subtle ways in which our teaching, and learning, has evolved in TangoBreath, from a word we might use to a way in which we physically adjust people. And there is so much, still, for us to learn.
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