We have been exploring spirals and flow in group class and following up in private lessons recently. I noticed that many people have nice moments of flow in their dance, followed by episodes of almost robotic, tight movement. How can we remove the difficult, awkward parts and foster more ease in our tango?
Spirals
Your body has built-in spirals of connective tissue and muscles. We naturally twist and turn as we move. Contrabody, rotation, spirals—we have a lot of words about this for dancing tango.
Messy front ochos
Part of what brings tango to a grinding halt is an effort to be perfect in the dance. We concentrate, tighten, stop breathing, or try to make a certain move happen, and we lose the ease and flow of natural movement. What if we TRIED to be messy? What would happen?
Try to make flowy, messy front steps like that only turn as far as the body wants to move. Can you tune into your own inner workings? When we tried this in class, most people could feel where they gripped and stopped the movement (knees, hips, back, shoulders—it really varied!). If you can identify the problem area, you can encourage it to relax and not try as hard, finding more ease.
Messy back twists and pivots
Moving backwards is much harder because we do it less in real life. Even contrabody in regular back steps can challenge most dancers. Try letting that motion flow before you attempt to do mess back ochos, pivots, turns: pick a term that doesn’t make you “try” to do a tango move!
Spirals in your embrace
Many dancers were able to find flow and spirals inside their own body but forgot to continue that movement through the arms into the embrace to a partner, so the movement again felt very square and tight. How can we find ways to connect AND flow?
Use your armpits
You have three functional fascia lines that connect from your armpits down around your core and across your pelvis to your upper legs. All three lines start at your armpits, not up at your neck and shoulders. Also, the lines of fascia in your arms connect down through your armpits into your body. It sounds weird but tune into your armpits to keep your embrace spiraling.
Spirals in your partner
You can’t control what your partner does as much as you can control what you bring to the dance. If you use your body and your embrace this way, you will get more flow and ease from your partner, and you will start to find new ways to move, new combinations the grown organically out of how the body likes to move.
It is OK if you don’t know the name of the step you just did if you and your partner arrived at the same place on the dance floor (upright!) afterwards. We learn moves so that we can forget them and move and dance together with those patterns happening FOR us while we just … dance!
Music
For some people, dancing to tango music makes them move in tight ways, unable to release and just dance. If that is you, what if you just dance to music you like? What if you dance to silence? Tune in more to the movement and don’t even worry about music for the moment!
Perhaps knowing the lyrics to a song will make you dance differently to that music. Maybe playing the same five tangos for a week will imprint them in your body so much that you automatically can dance to them better. YOU know you better than anyone else. What works for you?
Keep exploring, making mistakes, being messy. Keep looking for natural movement that dances FOR you! The more ease you find, the more fun you will have, and the more you will dance. :-)
Come join us in group class on Thursdays at Shabu Studios. There are dancers of all levels. Most people can lead and follow, and it’s a friendly place to try new things. We will work on spirals for the next few weeks in diverse ways. Drop in!