Tango as therapy

Tango will push your buttons. All of your buttons. If you have emotional baggage or trauma (and who doesn't?), tango will ask you to unpack it, evaluate it, and perhaps send some of it to the emotional Goodwill. If you want to get really good at tango, you need to be ready to tackle your issues.

After teaching tango for 20 years, what I have noticed is that people come to tango to tackle their issues, whether on a conscious level or an unconscious level. They want to dance tango badly enough to reach into the scary emotional closet and bring old fears and hurts into plain sight. They are willing to do this hard work because tango has grabbed them and dragged them into a new space. In this new space, they see that, if they work hard, a whole new universe of beauty and music and dance is waiting for them.

Relationship baggage

Tango brings up all of the good and bad experiences you have had with other people in your life. Many dancers bring a lack of trust, or other emotional baggage, with them into tango. Because it is done in couples, it seems to bring up ALL past negative baggage about relationships! I joke that I am the cheapest marriage counseling available in Portland, Oregon.

"He's doing it wrong again!" "Tell her I don't want her to criticize my dancing anymore!" "Why does s/he always blame mistakes on me?" Part of learning to dance tango is learning to give gentle feedback ONLY WHEN ASKED. This applies to dance partners, life partners, and to random people you dance with once and never see again!

For people who are single, or take lessons solo, these messages still come up and need to be dealt with. Can you trust me as your teacher? What about the people in group class? Which milonga feels safe to you?

Trust issues

Tango requires both dancers to entrust themselves to a new experience in which both people are impacted by the actions of the other person. The dance is done close together, touching bodies. For many people, dancing like that requires a level of trust rarely seen in modern life, especially in the North American culture. We are brought to value independence and individuality. Tango seems to invade this space, asking us to depend on the other person and merge into the couple, losing our individuality.

Tango actually requires the dancer to maintain the individual self and care for the self, in order to dance well as a team. Each person has a lot more possibility to embellish and make the dance their own, than is usually available in ballroom or other couple dancing.

However, it takes a deep level of trust to allow another person that close. "I can't do this!!" is the reaction I hear from many new dancers. To try something new, something complex, with another person--let alone in front of other people--brings up all of our fears about making a fool of ourselves. It brings up the middle school dance: will we be chosen or rejected? Will this person respect and value me, or will they treat me badly? Trust is a big issue for many people coming to tango.

Intimacy concerns

Enjoying how you feel dancing is an enjoyment of the senses (sensuality). Tango is all about enjoying how the body feels when it is moving to music, expressing itself, and interacting with other people's bodies. At its best, it is what I call an "in-body" experience, where my brain can turn off and I can just BE.

However, North Americans often conflate sexuality and sensuality. That's why we have jokes like: "Why does the [insert your choice of church/religion] prohibit sex? Because it might lead to dancing!" Our culture is not 100% comfortable with enjoying sensuality. One Buenos Aires dancer told me, "You poor Yankees! So Puritan! Here, we just do what we want, and go to confession." If you have intimacy issues, tango really pushes your buttons.

On the other hand, you learn that you can be intimate and sensual on a non-sexual level that you may not have found before. At its best, tango allows you to connect more closely with your fellow human beings in a deeply profound manner.

Learning to love your body

So many of us don't like our bodies! To dance and become aware of the shape of our body on a deeper level, to find how it works (or struggles) to dance, can push a lot of buttons about not feeling good about body issues.

The body awareness that tango teaches, is invaluable but not easily built. On the way, you have to learn to listen to your body and hear what it is saying. For some people, this is easy and a given in their life. For others, many years pass before the day that they say to me, "Hey, I FELT that!!!!!!" (with about that many exclamation points in the tone of their voice).

After the Princess-and-the-pea phase, where you feel every tiny thing that your body does, you can settle down to a nice medium sensitivity that allows you to care for your body, improves your balance and alignment, and retrains to move in a healthy, pain-free way. That's worth it, isn't it?

When you really feel your body and live in your body, you have to accept how it is shaped and how it works. Popular culture trained me to hate the shape of my body: strong, not slender, with a big butt and calves. Tango has taught me to love the strength and my curves. What can it teach you to love about YOUR body?

Traditional roles (like following) vs. the modern woman

This can be a big button for some people. Luckily, most people who feel this way know that they have an issue. Often, they announce "I have a problem with some guy telling me what to do" (or something like that) at the first lesson. Rarely is this button a surprise for the dancer :-)

Tango is a 50-50 dance. Both people need to do half of the work for it to function. The leader does make some decisions for the couple, but the follower has veto power. The follower can also inspire the leader to change the plan for the next move; the speed of a move; the flavor of the dance. In short, the follower is the motor of the dance. No motor, no dance.

Yes, if a man is leading and a woman is following, buttons about traditional roles will be pushed. However, try to reserve judgment about what it looks like tango is, and see what you can make of tango for yourself. For me, I like to lead and to follow, but not at the same time. I let myself be led when I follow, and I build my dance around my follower's needs when I lead. It's a conversation, a dialogue, not a monologue.

I'd like to hear from you: when you started tango, what buttons did it push for you? Have you found resolution/change/revolution? Tell me!

What's the best way to learn Argentine Tango, Part IV

Below are a few odds and ends from Make It Stick that didn't fit anywhere else, but seemed important to share with you.

Why you need a teacher to master tango

We are all hardwired to make errors in judgment. Good judgment is a skill one must acquire, becoming an astute observer of one’s own thinking and performance . . . when we’re incompetent, we tend to overestimate our competence and see little reason to change… (Brown et al. 104)

One more piece of the learning puzzle remains: calibration. Calibration is: “the act of aligning your judgments of what you know and don’t know with objective feedback so as to avoid being carried off by the illusions of mastery. . ." (Brown et al 210).

It's hard to give yourself objective feedback when learning something. Brown et al. point out that many people have a false sense of mastery of information long before they actually know the new material well. Also, because we base our sense of mastery on our own subjective experience, we can be WAY off base about our level of mastery if no one else gives us a reality check (Brown et al. 111).

Taking private lessons, in addition to group lessons, is the only way to become a master of tango. If you don't care what level you reach, and you just want to dance a little for fun, you can get by with group lessons. Watching YouTube will not teach you the sublety of tango :-)

Deliberate practice usually isn’t enjoyable, and for most learners it requires a coach or trainer who can help identify areas of performance that need to be improved, help focus attention on specific aspects, and provide feedback to keep perception and judgment accurate. (Brown et al. 184)

 

It's OK to fail!

I’ve not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that don’t work. Thomas Edison

Western culture doesn't like failure. Many of us will do just about anything to avoid making mistakes, especially publically (Brown et al 90). Failure has spurred many new discoveries over the eons, and avoiding failure can make us so risk-adverse that we are too afraid to try anything new, to experiment to find new things (Brown et al 92-93). What if we were all too afraid to try learning? There would be no tango moves that had been created in the past 100+ years for us to dance. I think that most moves come from making mistakes while doing moves that already exist. What a boring dance tango would be without mistakes!

…to achieve expertise requires thousands of hours of dedicated practice in which one strives to surpass one’s current level of ability, a process in which failure becomes an essential experience on the path to mastery. . . The qualities of persistence and resiliency, where failure is seen as useful information, underlie successful innovation in every sphere and lie at the core of nearly all successful learning. (Brown et al 93)

 

There is no age limit

There’s virtually no limit to how much learning we can remember as long as we relate it to what we already know.” In fact, because new learning depends on prior learning, the more we learn, the more possible connections we create for further learning. (Brown et al 76)

Humans continue to generate neurons in the hippocampus throughout life. This is the area of the brain where we consolidate learning and memory, so we should be able to learn as long as we make an effort (Brown et al. 172).

Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right

Many people believe that their intellectual ability is hardwired from birth, and that failure to meet a learning challenge is an indictment of their native ability. But every time you learn something new, you change the brain. . . . “We become capable through the learning and development of mental models that enable us to reason, solve, and create . . .  the elements that shape your intellectual abilities lie to a surprising extent within your own control. (Brown et al. 23)

According to Brown et al., “Mastery requires both the possession of ready knowledge and the conceptual understanding of how to use it (35-6)." In studies of mastery, it has been seen that “ten thousand hours or ten years of practice was the average time the people . . .studied had invested to become expert in their fields" (Brown et al. 185).

 

Suggestions for Gaining Mastery

1. Be the one in charge: “Mastery, especially of complex ideas, skills and processes, is a quest.” Don’t leave it up to the teacher!
2. Embrace the notion of successful intelligence: Build on your strengths, but push your envelope. Figure out what you want to learn, what you need to do to get there, make a plan, and keep pushing yourself, testing yourself, and working on the areas that are weak.
3. Adopt active learning strategies: “develop workarounds or compensating skills for impediments or holes in your aptitudes.” Make sure you aren’t just doing what feels easy and safe.
4. Build the structure: look for the deep fundamental structures of what you want to learn, and build on those. That organizes all the learning, creates connections, and makes for successful learning (Brown et al. 159-160).

Where are you on your ten thousand hours? Get out there and dance!

What's the best way to learn Argentine Tango, Part III

Make It Stick: Why spaced, interleaved practice works

In the spirit of Make It Stick, I am adding details and presenting some review of the material from before, but in a different way here, to "make it stick" in your brain :-)

In this post, I am detailing how to think of the process of learning, and how you can use your practice best to retain information.

Effortful Retrieval

In effect, retrieval---interrupts forgetting. (Brown et al. 37).

Finding or remembering old information is hard because our brain has forgotten the cues or connections to the information stored, not because we have lost information permanently (Brown et al. 77). So how do we help ourselves keep information at our fingertips? Struggling to find old information forces the brain to make new connections, linking old information to new information and/or modifying the information we are retrieving with new details.

For tango, the way we self-test/retrieve information, is to try moves or techniques of moving, at practicas or milongas. If it works, you know it! If it doesn't, that is also clear. In one study that Brown et al. cited, students who didn't get tested at all on information forgot 52% of what they had learned after ONE week, while students who had been tested repeatedly, only forgot 10% (Brown et al. 55). What is the takeaway here? GO DANCING!

Repeated retrieval

To be most effective, retrieval must be repeated again and again, in spaced out sessions so that the recall, rather than becoming a mindless recitation, requires some cognitive effort. (Brown et al. 45)

Once you have it right, don't stop practicing/reviewing! It is easy to misremember material. Often, if you dance with someone doing it wrong, you will change your memory of the move to what they are doing. Or, someone may remember it differently, and you start to form a memory based on the other person's version (Brown et al. 116-7).

Often in tango, we say that you have to learn something at least three times to remember it well. I have heard numerous teachers repeat this information. Why does repeating the learning experience help you remember? Relearning/recalling learning makes material clearer, connects it better into cues/memory and “weakens competing routes” of cues/memory (Brown et al. 83).

Elaboration

Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know. (Brown et al. 22)

When you learn something new in tango, figure out how it fits into the information you already know. This creates connections in your brain that help you access the new information more readily. Find how the new move or technique fits into the big picture of your tango dancing, and you will remember the information better.

One way I help my students do this, is to present information that is closely related, but different. Each new step is connected into the material we have already learned.

For example, my advanced class is working on back paradas, leader front sacadas through the follower's back step, and single-axis turns from the follower's back step. For these three moves, there is only a slight change in the lead to produce different results (send the follower, but don't go; intersect the middle of the follower's back step; and intersect the follower's back step as close to the new landing spot as possible). When we work on them in the same class, the followers can feel the difference in the leader's moves more clearly, and the leaders can see when they have misjudged the movement (and have a backup plan in place, using one of the other options).

I often have students work together doing peer-teaching, which requires them to be able to explain what they are going in their own words.

Generation

As you cast about for a solution, retrieving related knowledge from memory, you strengthen the route to a gap in your learning even before the answer is provided to fill it and, when you do fill it, connections are made to the related material that is fresh in your mind from the effort. (Brown et al. 88)

Generation is "the act of trying to answer a question or attempting to solve a problem rather than being presented with the information or the solution is known as generation” (Brown et al. 87). If you have to generate part of the information (fill in the blank for example); you remember the information better because you had to work on retrieval more (Brown et al. 48).

Last week, I taught Tete's "famous ocho" and this week, I taught the reverse volcada that I think developed from Tete's move. I showed the class Tete's ocho, and asked, "What would happen if I moved away from the follower at this point?" Answer: the follower steps forward. "What could I do to prevent the follower from stepping?" Answer: the leader suspends the follower so that s/he can't step. "How do I need to move to get back on balance, moving line-of-dance, to exit?" Answer: [Usually] stepping behind with my left, then sidewises with my right foot, and then walking forward out of the move.

As we worked through each piece of the movement, I tried to ask a question that required thought. I can just show the move over and over, but it won't "stick" the way that requiring students to generate their own answers will. I am still working on this part, as I love to be helpful and provide answers for them :-)

Reflection

Take time to think about what you’ve just learned and tie it into what you already know; figure out what you need to know to make it all fit together, or what skill you are still lacking in order to be able to do this thing (Brown et al 209). What is the big picture? What is the overarching larger context for this new information?

People who learn to extract the key ideas from new material and organize them into a mental model and connect that model to prior knowledge show an advantage in learning complex mastery. (Brown et al. 22)

After a class, you should think about/note/write down the key ideas or moves that you have learned. This helps with reflection (retrieval of recently learned info), elaboration (connecting it to what you already know) and generation (putting it in your own words as you mentally rehearse it) (Brown et al. 88).

I write detailed notes during and after a class when I study with a new teacher, or if I want to remember a pattern to teach it later. For example, if I hadn't kept a notebook during my studies with Tete in 2000 and 2001, I would never be able to teach a class of his movements from memory in 2015!

What's the best way to learn Argentine Tango, Part II

Make It Stick: Why can't I remember moves when I go home after class??

Most people think that repeating information over and over is the best way to learn. In "massed practice," we repeat the same information/moves over and over again, until it feels familiar. Unfortunately, instead of creating long-term memory, when we do this, we are working with our short-term memory. As we loop through our short-term memory, the material begins to feel familiar. We gain confidence and feel good, as if we learned the movement really well. However, when we get home, we can't remember what we did in class (Brown et al. 83).

Just stuffing information into your brain does not help you learn. Think of cramming for an exam: you pass the exam, but is that information really available for later recall? For example, a tango festival, with twenty hours of lessons in a weekend, would be like cramming for an exam. How much of that information is still there a week later?

How to learn movement efficiently

Embrace the fact that significant learning is often, or even usually, somewhat difficult. You will experience setbacks. These are signs of effort, not of failure. Setbacks come with striving, and striving builds expertise. (Brown et al. 201)

Spaced Practice

Massed practice will not help you to learn tango. Instead, you need to space out your practice time. This helps your brain build the connections between the new information and what you already know, which cannot happen immediately. Also, the fact that you have to work hard to retrieve the information each time you practice, helps you learn more thoroughly (Brown et al. 65).

When people ask me how often they need to practice, or take classes, I tell them that it varies by person. If you want to improve, you need to review the information before you forget it; and then keep reviewing it. Personally, if I wait more than 48 hours to review something, I often can't find the information in my memory. So, for me, I need to practice at least every other day when I am trying to learn something new.

Interleaved Practice

The learning from interleaved practice feels slower than learning from massed practice. Teachers and students sense the difference . . . and the compensating long-term advantage is not apparent to them. As a result, interleaving is unpopular and seldom used (Brown et al. 66-7)

Interleaving is studying at least two things, rather than just studying one. In an example from the book, a group of people who already were good at baseball were divided in two. One group was given massed practice of hitting several kinds of pitches, but one at a time. They felt good about how they were learning, and continued practicing for six weeks. The other group interleaved all the different kinds of pitches, never knowing what was coming up. They felt frustrated that they weren’t doing very well. At the end of six weeks of practice, they performed much better than the other group (Brown et al. 80-1).

Although I have used some of these techniques for years, some are new to me, or were things that I did not often do. I had felt pressure to make my lessons feel easier from my students, and had drifted towards too much repetition of one thing at a time. However, the changes I have made to class in the past three months have made a believer out of me: I am seeing results that I have not seen in 30 years of teaching! My students agree that class is more challenging and feels more frustrating, but they are learning faster.

Varied Practice

If you interleave different skills or moves, you learn better than working on one thing, but you can improve on that with varied practice: mix it up! Do things in different orders! Do different exercises and drills!

The evidence favoring variable training has been supported by recent neuroimaging studies that suggest that different kinds of practice engage different parts of the brain. The learning of motor skills from varied practice, which is more cognitively challenging than massed practice, appears to be consolidated in an area of the brain associated with the more difficult process of learning higher-order motor skills. (Brown et al. 67)

My guess is that tango counts as a higher-order motor skill :-) When I teach private lessons, I often write three- to four- moves on the white board, and then have the student dance them in different orders. With the "cheat" of seeing the names of the moves, or pictures of them, the student works through different orders of movement. After that, I ask that they do so without looking at the board.

What's the best way to learn Argentine Tango?

Part One: How the brain learns

Make It Stick

I have been reading Make It Stick, by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III and Mark A. McDaniel. This book covers several decades of learning research, aimed at the educated layperson. One of my students brought it to my attention (thanks, Marcia!) because she knows I am interested in ways to learn and to teach.

Expert performance does not usually rise out of some genetic predisposition or IQ advantage. It rises from thousands of hours of . . .sustained deliberate practice . . . slow acquisition of a larger number of increasingly complex patterns,  patterns that are used to store knowledge about which actions to take in a vast vocabulary of different situations. (Brown et al. 183)

Does this sound like tango to you? It does to me.

What have I found out? The way that most people think is the best way to learn is actually the worst way to learn. However, because it feels easier, learners ignore studies that show them how to boost learning and keep employing methods that don't work well.

I have seen a huge jump in retention of both technique and specific steps since I tweaked my teaching style to implement suggestions from Brown et al. in my teaching.

How does the brain learn?

Neurogenesis

Neurogenesis, or the creation of new neurons, actually happens in the brain BEFORE learning begins (Brown et al. 172). So that means that the intention to learn is a trigger for creating an atmosphere in the body that allows for new memories and motor patterns to stick! As a teacher, I find this exciting, because it means that, just by showing up for class, by intending to learn something new, a person is predisposed to learn.

Encoding

When you learn new information, dance or otherwise, the brain first encodes it:

...the brain converts your perceptions into chemical and electrical changes that form a mental representation of the patterns you’ve observed. . . we call the new representations within the brain memory traces. Think of notes jotted or sketched on a scratchpad, our short-term memory. (Brown et al. 72)

Consolidation

Each time you repeat the new movement or piece of information, the traces in the brain are strengthened. The brain "reorganizes and stabilizes the memory traces," allowing for more connections to be made to other memory traces, so that it can be recalled at a later time (Brown et al. 73). The process of creating long-term memory storage is called consolidation.

Reconsolidation

In the next step of learning, the brain continues to work on the new material, reconsolidating it, pulling it out of storage, modifying it if necessary, and connecting it to more information to strengthen the memory, each time it is used: “Scientists believe that the brain replays or rehearses the learning, giving it meaning, filling in blank spots and making connections to past experiences…” (Brown et al. 73).

Myelination

As you continue practicing, or using, the stored information, those neuronal pathways become coated with myelin. It acts like insulation, allowing the signals to move faster along those pathways. Brown et al. note that:

our learning it thought to be recoded in . . . the same area that controls subconscious actions . . . As a part of this process of recoding, the brain is thought to chunk motor and cognitive action sequences together so that they can be performed as a single unit [and they speed up]. (Brown et al 171)

In tango, this is why you can only do a new movement slowly at first. Gradually, you will be able to dance it correctly at higher and higher speeds: the improvement in performance is due to how fast the electrical signals can travel in your body.

Good news for older learners: our "neural circuitry" continues to grow into our sixties (Brown et al. 170)! Watching my older students, I suspect this actually continues longer, because some of the biggest gains I have seen have come from my students in their seventies.

 

So what does this mean for tango?

The next post will cover how to use this information to learn in a way that "makes it stick" so you can really dance!

A quote from Gavito

As I go into a session of teaching my Thursday nighters what I learned from Tete Rusconi a long time ago in Buenos Aires, I have been thinking about what I learned from Tete. He was an awful teacher, but a great dancer. I put up with direct insults on a weekly basis to learn from him, and learned tons. He didn't like the fact that I was leading in his class, but he respected me for sticking with it. Years later, when he saw me in Portland, he grinned from ear to ear, crossed the floor to say hello, and asked me to dance twice. That made up for a lot!

I wish I had given Gavito's teaching more of a chance and learned from him as well.  As a newbie tango dancer at a California dance festival, I walked out of a group lesson with him because of his treatment of the class. I knew he was famous, but felt frustrated as a teacher, that someone teaching me could be such a jerk. If I had gone to his classes in Buenos Aires, not expected him to be a good teacher, but understood I could learn to dance by watching him (as I did from Tete), perhaps I would have seen beyond the attitude, and would have more of his experience in my dance.

I saw him dance in the milongas in Buenos Aires a bit. Mostly, he sat with his friends and a drink, getting up to dance once in a while. I liked his intensity and the seriousness with which he took his tango, but I didn't get to know him at all.

My relationship with Gavito has been forged by a student who hasn't even been to Buenos Aires, and started dancing long after Gavito passed away. One day, he walked into his lesson and said, "I know who I want to dance like: Gavito!" and proceeded to inundate me with videos. We worked on Gavito's moves and styling in his lessons. One day, he dropped by my house and handed me a book. "Read it," he said, and left. It was Ricardo Plazaola's book, I Wanted To Dance: Carlos Gavito: Life, passion and tango.

It's a quick read. Mostly, it is a biography that wanders around Gavito's life, interspersed with interview quotes. Here is the one that struck me as a great followup to last week's blog posting:

You spend many years learning technique, learning to do everything well, everything perfectly...Many years...But afterwards, when you do everything perfectly, you have to become less perfect, you have to 'mess up' your style. You have to give it your own personal touch. That's when your tango becomes your own, the tango that you feel like a fist in your stomach. something that rips you from the inside that maes you cry...There are tangos that make me cry And for that. how long does it take? A year? Two? Ten? Many years. For some people it takes a lifetime. (p. 122)

What do you think?

Tango: practical vs. ideal (or, Why I teach Naughty Toddler)

One of my students felt frustrated when her dance partner returned after several months off. She practiced diligently during that time, and brought her dancing up to a good, solid level. However, she told me that, after dancing with me for a few months, she felt upset that her technique didn't feel as good with her partner, who is an intermediate leader. Why couldn't she dance as well as with me? Several other students have also commented that, "It's no use working on good technique when, on the dance floor, I never need it!"

So why do we work on having perfect technique? What about focusing on how to deal with dancing with real people, who do not dance perfectly?

Why work on ideal technique?

Yes, it's true that a "perfect" tanda only happens once every few years for me. Most of the time, I dance with beginner and intermediate students, who don't yet have the level of dance that would allow me to dance without effort. HOWEVER, when that unforgettable tanda happens, I want to have the chops to give back what I'm receiving from my partner. I work almost every day at my technique, after 20 years of tango, for those in-body experiences.

As your own technique gets better, you can maintain it under less-than-ideal circumstances. This gives you a better dance with someone than you would have with poor technique. I assume that, when I am dancing with a dancer at a lower level, one of my jobs is to my partner have a better dance experience. How? By dancing my absolute best technique. At Portland Tango Marathon, a long-time friend told me that I made him "look good" on the dance floor. Yes! That should be a given.

Why work on problem-solving, save-your-butt moves?

For me, I think a dancer needs to study both good technique and survival plans in order to dance well and to enjoy social dancing. I try to balance my classes so that we alternate working on ideal technique, flow/energy games, and what I call "Naughty Toddler," a game I made up while teaching at the University of Oregon about ten years ago.

Naughty Toddler is game where the dancers take turns NOT following and NOT leading. The partner needs to adjust in different ways to have a successful dance. This game is about getting out of your head, and into your natural body, letting your dance happen in spite of yourself; finding the flow of the dance.

I originally made up this game so that followers would give more energy to the leaders: how many of us have started tango dancing like robots, scared to do anything "wrong" that the leader didn't ask us to do? I have found that the game also helps leaders: it gives them real-life practice in dealing with unexpected situations. If you can survive Naughty Toddler, you can survive the dance floor!

The rules for naughty follower:

• Don't follow!
• Try to get your leader to run into other people/the wall/get flustered
• Pretend you aren't dancing with someone else! Do your worst imitation of what you see on YouTube if you are out of ideas
• Play!

What does the leader need to do?

• Just like when working with a toddler, it's easier to cut off access to the forbidden space instead of saying no; don't wrestle, find a way to reduce the follower's momentum to zero, and re-take the lead.
• Gentle hands: use your body position to block/redirect the follower. The hands for are preventing accidents if nothing else works.
• Keep breathing and don't freak out: this is how it feels when you are a beginning lead all the time!!

The rules for naughty leader:

• Don't lead!
• Just dance around doing your own thing
• It is still your job to navigate: make sure you don't run into anyone
• Don't worry about whether the follower gets what you are doing

What does the follower need to do?

• Hold onto the leader's shoulders
• Stay in front of them
• Don't worry about what foot to use, just stay upright

Naughty Leader helps followers get practice in how to stay on balance and dance as well as possible, even when there is no clear lead. It also helps leaders understand that they can allow themselves to NOT make a plan, and still have a dance.

Not everyone likes Naughty Toddler

If you are teacher, be aware that not everyone likes Naughty Toddler. Some of my elderly students sit down for the game, unless they have a trusted partner. It scares them because they are afraid of falling down. Another student refuses to play the game (although I hope she will eventually try it) because "it just doesn't do it for me" as a perfectionist: it pushes ALL of her buttons. She was shocked when I correctly guessed her motives for avoiding it. As a perfectionist myself, I know how useful this game has been for me as a dancer. Those who are very structured find the exercise emotionally uncomfortable. As a teacher, I am all about coaxing people out of their comfort zone into a stronger dance.

Bringing the ideal and practical together

The aim of working perfect technique and Naughty Toddler/energy games in tandem, is to create a vibrant, energized, joyous dance with good technique. Without energy, the dance is academic and cold. Without technique, it is lacking elegance and power. Put the two together, and ....you've got what I think tango ought to me.

Now go out there and dance!

A few more thoughts from "The Art of Learning"

I found a few more tidbits of information in The Art of Learning that are very useful for tango dancers, even though Josh Waitzkin is discussing chess and tai chi.

Subtle is good!

...players tend to get attached to fancy techniques and fail to recognize that subtle internalization and refinement is much more important than the quantity of what is learned. (The Art of Learning, 123)

If I could be paid for each time someone complains to me, "But this is subtle," I would be rich! Tango IS subtle, with a deep body awareness needed to achieve mastery. Dancing on Monday night, I found a zone where I was aware of how all of my muscles and my frame fit together, and I could feel the interplay of muscles, of my balance, of my partner's musicality, on a deeper level than usual. I have come to enjoy little, tiny elements of the dance; the subtlety of tango.

Waiting: finding the white space in the poetry that is tango

Not only do we have to be good at waiting, we have to love it. Because waiting is not waiting, it is life. (The Art of Learning, 186-7)

This is what tango is about: finding the pauses, enjoying the waiting, being in the zone in quiet moments. If you try to live for the exciting moments only, for the big, flashy moves, you have missed the heart of tango. In the waiting, you find yourself and your partner.

Create a routine to make dancing less stressful

To have success in crunch time, you need to integrate certain healthy patterns into your day-to-day life so that they are completely natural to you when the pressure is on. (The Art of Learning, 187)

Although there is no one quote about this that works for tango, I really like Waitzkin's creation of a routine that helps focus, calm and prepare a person for something stressful. A LOT of people tell me that they find going out dancing so stressful and anxiety-provoking that they prefer to just come to lessons and dance with me! Now, while that is flattering on one hand, it means that they are working really hard and not getting to play with tango.

If going dancing brings out all of your negative self-talk ("I can't dance; maybe I should just quit!") or your fear of not having a good time ("No good dancers are going to notice me, and I will probably just have a bad evening!") or trigger pet peeves ("I hate it when people keep dancing with bad floorcraft! Why are they getting in my way and ruining my evening?"), then you are setting yourself up to have a negative experience. Dancing should be fun! Socializing should be fun! Dancing should feed your life, not suck it dry.

What calms you down? Build a routine of a few short activities that you enjoy, and help set yourself up to succeed and enjoy the evening. Here's what I like to do:

1. Shower.
2. Pick out a nice outfit.
3. Do 15 minutes of stretching.
4. Spin or knit for 10-15 minutes.
5. Go dancing.

Make a routine out of things you already like to do, and the positive feelings you have about those activities, will transfer to the dancing.

Build a short-cut relaxation routine

After you have developed a good routine that helps you prepare for dancing, you can make a shorter version to work for times when you don't have an hour or more to prepare to dance. What if a friend calls and says, "Hey! I'm going to the milonga in twenty minutes! Let's go!" Do you want to refuse because you need an hour to kick into gear?

Think about gradually shortening your routine so that is still relaxes and prepares you, but only takes a few minutes. This is also helpful for those nights when you start to lose your cool part of the way through the milonga: a difficult partner, a bad collision, or just seeing someone you don't want to see across the floor. Maybe going out of the room, doing a stretch, rinsing your face, and getting a drink of water will clear your mind; but only if you have developed a short-hand version that you know works. Part of the reason it is effective, is that you have practiced it, and wired your body to relax when you go through your ritual.

Once a simple inhalation can trigger a state of tremendous alertness, our moment-to-moment awareness becomes blissful, like that of someone half-blind who puts on glasses for the first time. We see more as we walk down the street. The everyday becomes exquisitely beautiful. The motion of boredom becomes alien and absurd as we naturally soak in the lovely subtleties of the 'banal'. (The Art of Learning, 197)

An aside from me

This is not from the book, but from a therapist who specializes in treating anxiety. If you are stressed out about dancing tango, go dancing. If you are nervous or anxious, avoiding going will simply cause more anxiety. Just go. If you show up, sit down, change your shoes and chat with people at your table, you have succeeded in getting to the milonga! Dance one or two tandas before fleeing. Next week, stay one more tanda. Add a tanda a week. As you meet more people, you will have more folks to dance with you, and you will feel more at home. Pick a table and sit at the same place each week. Become part of the community, and feel how that helps you feel less nervous about the dancing! And listen to the tiny moments that create joy.

Investment in loss

I am still reading The Art of Learning by Josh Waitzkin, in between other books and projects. Today, I was struck by the following paragraph, and then taught a class immediately after reading. My student felt frustrated that she was "losing the tango she had" before, although my impression is that she is improving at a steady pace.  Here's what Waitzkin wrote about learning Tai Chi Pushing Hands:

In order to grow, [the learner] needs to give up his current mind-set. He needs to lose to win. . . . William Chen calls this investment in loss. Investment in loss is giving yourself to the learning process. In Push Hands it is letting yourself be pushed without reverting back to old habits--training yourself to be soft and receptive when your body doesn't have any idea how to do it and wants to tighten up. (p. 107)

This resonates with me as a process that I continually experience each time I go up a level in tango. I have to let go of the familiar motor pathways that make me feel competent, and set off down new motor pathways that feel weird, disorienting and unfamiliar. Gradually, as those new habits fall into place, they begin to feel normal and good; and I reach a new level of dance.

I see dancers all the time who remain at the same intermediate level permanently because it is just too frightening to step off the curb into a new modality. I started from scratch in tango after teaching for twelve years. It was a scary year, as I learned new things and started to teach them. I had to acknowledge that I was also trying to get them into my body. I felt very vulnerable. I have a card in front of my computer that reads: "A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for (John Augustus Shedd)." I read that every day, and try not to let my vulnerability keep me hiding from growth.

What about you?

Thought for the day

I've been reading a few books at the same time, as usual. I am reading Josh Waitzkin's "The Art of Learning: a journey in the pursuit of excellence" during my morning tea. Here's what I found today for all of you who are struggling to attain a higher level in your tango practice:

The key to pursuing excellence is to embrace an organic, long-term learning process, and not to live in a shell of static, safe mediocrity. Usually, growth comes at the expense of previous comfort of safety. The hermit crab is a colorful example of a creature that lives by this aspect of the growth process (albeit without our psychological baggage). As the crab gets bigger, it needs to find a more spacious shell. . . . [Someone afraid to try and fail] is like an anorexic hermit crab, starving itself so it doesn't grow to have to find a new shell. (Waitzkin: 33)

Get out there and GROW!

Las Naifas Matinee Milonga

Luisa Zini and I would like to invite you to our monthly event: Las Naifas Matinee Milonga. We have talked about having a milonga together for a long time. We both love the atmosphere of milongas in Buenos Aires, where you can get a glass of wine, a snack, chat with your friends, AND dance. We wanted to recreate that atmosphere here in Portland.

Las Naifas started last month. About 70 people filled the space. It felt more like a party than anything else: people circulated, chatted, laughed, ate snacks--and danced. Jerry Wallach kept the music coming, and the dance floor never cleared. In fact, we ran almost a half hour late because no one wanted to go home!

I teach the beginner's lesson, and I call it "survival tango" class. In 45 minutes, we work on how to move with good energy, avoid collisions with other dancers in the space, get connected with a partner, and let your body move. I make sure everyone knows the basic rules for a milonga: how to enter the dance space safely, how to ask for dances, how long you dance with one person, etc. It was great to see completely new dancers come for the 5:30 PM lesson and stay and DANCE! Even at 9 PM, they were still there, on the dance floor.

I invite YOU to join us Friday, March 27th at 5:30 PM for the lesson at the Treasury Ballroom, 326 SW Broadway, Portland, OR 97205 (downstairs in the U.S. Bank building). The snacks and drinks are catered by F & B Catering, and were FABULOUS last month. Join us on Facebook for the last minute details or to find out more about this wonderful community of people. Bring your friends and meet new friends!

Body alignment: finding YOUR midline

The more I teach, the more I focus on finding where each person's body can balance best.

For a lot of people, dancing tango means finding the front of the partner's body with the front of their own body. Focusing on the front surface of each body sometimes leads to leaning, heaviness, and loss of balance. What other ways can we think of connection, in order to protect our own body and dance better?

Spine front-to-back

try to picture my spine in 3-D, and build my body around that. Here's a great picture of the spine in the body that might help you with the image I'm talking about. What I like here, is that you can see the ribs and the pelvis, but the feeling of all the bones being IN the body is really well done. I want my torso and spine to be aligned, nice and long, and supple, like in this picture.

Front-to-back, my pelvis is balanced so as to keep my spine as relaxed and long as possible; and to let me use my deep core muscles instead of my back muscles, to hold me up. This gives me a lot more rotational movement possible around my center.

Balancing right and left sides of the body

My body is divided right and left, with my spine as the dividing line. That doesn't mean that there is a straight line down the middle all the time. If I am standing on one foot, that midline has some curves in it! Check out The Birth of Venus! The free leg (the one she does not have weight on), is relaxed, and the pelvis is lower on that side. My pelvis is like a see-saw, with the support side up and the free side down; that tips side to side, each time I change weight from one foot to the other.

My shoulders and shoulder girdle rest in a relaxed way, as if they were draped over my body. Remember that the only bony connection between your arms and your body, is your collarbone: the rest is muscle. This page might be overkill, but it does show how everything is connected.

Both the pelvic girdle and the shoulder girdle have to adjust when we move, in order to created balanced movement through our midline. The more we can be efficient with motion at the periphery (away from the midline), the easier it is to remain balance in the center.

If we adjust right and left at our shoulders (the metronome approach, tick-tocking from side to side with the head and shoulders) instead of the hips (pendulum swing) there is a lot more movement in order to stay balanced. Why work harder??

Contrabody motion for balanced walking, running or dancing

The midline constantly changes, balanced over one foot or the other; with a pendulum movement of the hips; and responding balancing motion in the upper body, spine, shoulder girdle and head. If this is done without motion twisting around the torso, efficient movement is impossible.

Contrabody motion means the opposite side of the torso and hips/leg match up. If you have ever gone cross-country skiing, you had to do this to move :-) Right arm/torso and left hip/leg come forward, and then the other alternates. I looked for good explanations on the web, but have not found a really good one yet.

Think about jogging or running, or even walking quickly as if to catch the bus: The faster we move, the more we tend to use contrabody motion, because we cannot move efficiently without it!

Exercise for finding good contrabody motion

This is a new find-your-own-body exercise I have been teaching recently:

Version 1: Sitting for hip stability

• Put your fingers into your solar plexus region, just under where your ribs stop and your belly starts, to feel your oblique muscles
• Find neutral: straight ahead
• Twist to your right and feel what muscles start to work (if nothing is working, that's a problem!)
• Come back to neutral
• Twist to your left and feel what muscles are working
• Return to neutral

Version 2: Standing

Take a Pilates ball and squeeze it between your thighs (letting your midline help your stability)

• Repeat the above exercise, with either a helper or a mirror to ensure that you are not twisting the hips.
• Make sure that the same muscles are working as in Version I
• Breathe!

Version 3: No Pilates ball

• Use your thighs against each other to help you stabilize so that you don't rotate the hips (for those of you with thinner thighs, imagine that they are touching: energy does almost as much as you can with muscle, maybe more!).
• Continue to use your obliques.
• Now try walking, feeling this motion.
• Repeat

Putting it all together

Putting it all together is both easier and harder than it sounds. After all, you have been walking since you were a baby--but no one taught you how to walk any specific way. Look! The baby is walking! Cool! Done.

As an adult, it can feel disconcerting to realize how little body awareness most of us use day-to-day. When I ask students if they can feel certain motions, I often am told, "No." Only after learning to tune into the body, can some people feel what is going on in their muscles, bones, energy, etc. For some people, even partial awareness can take years, especially if any emotional trauma is being held in the body (read: all of us).

I like to think of the body as being a bunch of stretchy bands, linked together in the center of the body, working as a system to make elegant, fluid motion possible. That's the muscles.

I think of the bones as a building structure, but perhaps one designed by toddlers: the bones don't stack in a straight line, but each one is held up by bones further down. The whole structure rests on the arches of our feet, which are like the earthquake cushions under skyscrapers: they adjust constantly with micro-motions, so that the entire structure might sway, but will stand up.

The nerves move electricity around our bodies and that of our partners. The tango connection for me is more about this electrical field interface, then just touching (although touching is nice!).

Our breath, circulation and lymph constantly pump through, connecting the other systems at many levels. The fluidity of the dance mirrors the actual fluids in our bodies!

It's a complex system to balance, even when not moving, but that constant motion within our bodies is what keeps us balanced. After all, if we tried to NOT move at all, we would not be dancing!

Change your attitude, improve your dance!

"I haven't had a decent tanda in months," said a fellow dancer who is thinking of quitting tango. "I wasn't having fun," said another who is taking a break from dancing at the moment. "There aren't any good dancers out there to dance with me," another person complained to me at a milonga.

I have felt all of these things about every dance form I've done over the past 30 years of dancing. In fact, if I still approached my dancing the way I used to, I would no longer be dancing or teaching dance, because I would have quit every dance form I do.

I rarely go through periods of burn-out about teaching dance, so why is going dancing so much more difficult to sustain?

For me, teaching dance is always different. Even the same person needs different things from me on different days. There are always new combinations to teach and new people to teach. I work on improving my teaching, so I constantly try new exercises and approaches to technique. As I continue learning, I have more information to share; my teaching is continually improving.

I didn't always feel this way about dancing. I would go to the milonga, grump about the quality of partners available, and come home disgruntled. My partner asked me why I even bothered to go out dancing, because I was always in a bad mood when I got home. The three complaints at the top of this post were my mantra.

I realized that I either had to quit dancing (and quit teaching), or find a way to enjoy dancing again. Here is what I changed:

• I go to the milonga to dance with nice people and their energy. When I dance with someone nice, I feel their positive energy move through me for the entire tanda. I feel happier and better after the tanda.
• I dance with my friends and with my students: I focus on creating more community.
• I dance with my sweetie. He is an intermediate tango dancer, but a very advanced human :-) I look for other advanced humans who are not yet advanced dancers, and dance with them.
• I dance with my girlfriends. If I only dance with the guys, I never have enough time to catch up with the women. I enjoy leading, but mainly it is an excuse to have fun with my friends.
• I dance with at least one beginner a night: after all, if no one dances with the beginners because they might look bad (OMG), then the beginners never get better.
• I allow myself to make mistakes. I goof off and have fun. I don't take tango as seriously as I did before. I smile. I talk during tandas sometimes.
• I seek out people who respect their partner's dance and other people's space: if they are sweeping the floor with my body, I am not having fun. If they are leading double boleos in milonga, I won't dance milonga with them. If they want aerial boleos on a crowded floor, I dance with feet on the floor, protecting the dancers around me.
• I go dancing when a good DJ is playing good music. The music really matters to me. I avoid alternative music for tango because it doesn't really speak to me (To the alternative folks: I have no problem with YOU liking it; it's just not my thing).

I accept that I only have a memorable, top 10 tanda about once a year or every few years. Those tandas are magical, and I remember them in detail. What I've noticed, however, is that most of them happen with really nice people with good energy who happen to also be very musical and tuned into me as a dancer. Great technique without great feeling just doesn't do it for me anymore.

I almost always have a good time now when I go out for tango. If I go out solo, when I get home, my husband asks me how the night went, and I can say, "I had fun!" almost all the time.

Your approach may not be my approach, but try out STARTING the night with a different goal, and see if you have more fun.

El escondido: our folk dance finale!

Sole Avila was in charge for this last dance, as I have only danced it a few times. What a fabulous job she did! Thank you, Sole, for sharing your expertise with us and your dances! This whole series of lessons would have never happened if you had not come to my October chacarera class and asked, "When is the next one?"

Dance Chart

As usual, the chart makes more sense after learning the dance :-)

Dance videos

Video one: a nice performance, with the escondido starting at about 3:30.

Video two: a bit fancier footwork for you men.

Video three: a classic escondido tune and nice video, even though you can't see their feet all the time. I like it that they are having so much fun!

Video four: nice and clear, with no one in the way!

Music for dancing

Los Manseros Santiagueños- El Escondido

Escondido del amanecer - Los hermanos Toledo

Peteco Carabajal - Escondido en la alabanza starts at 39:48: If you look below the video part, each song on the album can be reached via the clickable list. VERY useful! Plus, I really love his music.

Escondido - Que siga el baile is accompanied by a very cute video of kids dancing.

El Chamamé

Growing up dancing polka and other Central European folk dances; then moving to Oregon and hanging out with a lot of Mexicans who danced; and then learning Argentine folk dances, you can see how many parts of the Americas received immigrants from the same areas of Europe.

Chamamé is a good example of this. To me, it is quintessential polka-like bar dancing :-)

Dance chart

This is the only dance we've learned that won't bring up a dance chart like the other three: if you can polka or waltz, you can chamame. I'll put up a few videos that show the variants we talked about in class. Really, I think we spent ten minutes teaching this dance (as opposed to more than an hour for zamba). All you tango dancers and folk dancers got in the spirit and went for it!

Dance videos

Do you want ALL the information about this dance? Here it is. Warning, it's about 20 minutes long!

Here's what we looked like, more or less.

This is my favorite, so far!

Did you want to see it with zapateo? Here it is!

Here's a video of a chamame festival, with comments by bystanders and dancers (in Spanish).

Go dance!

Music to dance

Kilometro 11: This is one of the songs we used for class.

Zamba

Zamba is the most complex dance that we tackled. Somehow, its timing is a lot harder than chacarera, chamame and escondido. Also, Sole and I were taught different variants of this dance, so it has been hard for us to teach "one" way to do it :-)

When you add that both of us learned to dance it to the music, changing directions when the music said to do so, you can see how hard it was for both of us to learn to count it for the rest of you! Also, if you go online, you will find SO many different ways to teach it/dance it, that in the end, we are trying to teach all of you to hear the music and dance the way we learned. We know this is driving those of you who like to have a concrete plan, totally crazy. We continue to try to figure out an easier way to count.

Dance chart

http://razafolklorica.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/01/zamba03.jpg

Dance videos

Video one: an older couple with a very dignified, pretty zamba

Video two: my tango teachers dancing a zamba. Oscar was a national malambo champion, so his folk dancing is really something!

Video three: I love this song!! It is Los Manseros Santiagueños playing El Amoroso

Music for dancing zamba

• Al jardín de la república (this video is the magical Mercedes Sosa, but we danced to Los Fronterizos)
•  Paisajes de Catamarca (Los Chalchaleros)
• Viene Clareando (Los Chalchaleros)--OK, OK, I like the Chalchaleros!
• Perfume de Carnaval (Peteco Carabajal and others)
• Pongale por las hileras (Los Travadores de Cuyo)--video
• El Amoroso (Los Manseros Santiagueños)

•  Zamba para no morir (Hernán Figueroa Reyes)

• Cartas de amor que se queman--cute video

• La añera (the legendary Atahualpa Yupanqui)

And, again, I will add Sole's favorites later on.

Chacarera doble

I promised that I would put up review information on each of the folk dances we have learned this month, and I am finally getting around to it! Sorry it took so long.

As we saw in a class taught by two people, learning a folk tradition can be difficult because there are so many variations in a dance. As we joke in Balkan dancing, "What village are YOU from??!!" when someone dances a dance differently from what we learned.

As a long-time folk dancer, I can attest to the fact that many good folk dancers who teach, learned by doing, and don't have a well-defined teaching plan. I cannot count the number of times I've been told to "Do this!" Usually, the teacher has been doing the dancing since childhood, and has a deeply ingrained kinesthetic knowledge of the dance. This kind of teacher offers invaluable insight into the folk tradition, and how dance and music have been taught for hundreds of years, or more.

Sole will be teaching escondido this coming Thursday, which I have never officially learned, so this will be more in the folk tradition of teaching. Should be fun!

Chart of dance step order

Here is a chart of the chacarera doble steps:

http://www.portaldesalta.gov.ar/imagen/chaca2.jpg

Here, you can see that there are variations right away: both Sole and I were taught to do 2 rombos, instead of advance and retreat and then one rombo.

Videos of chacarera doble

If you watch two or three videos, you will already see how varied performance of each dance is. Here, I've chosen videos for a nice connection between the couple and/or flashy zapateo so that you can learn extra moves :-)

Video one: Nice, clear, easy to see how it fits with the music, etc.

Video two: You can dance this with two couples. This one seems to be a mom and her three boys. VERY cute, especially this littlest, who obviously likes to do this!

Video three: 10 ways to do the sarandeo (zarandeo is a variant spelling).

Video four: zapateo by a bunch of kiddos who are way better than we are :-) There are tons with more impressive zapateo, but this gives you an idea the we could learn these.

Music to dance chacarera doble

We danced to two kinds of songs for chacarera doble: ones with 8 counts for the vuelta entera, and ones with 6 counts for the vuelta entera (the one that felt like a race to the finish!).  Here are the ones we did in class so far:

8-count vueltas:

• La Sachapera (Los Manseros Santiagueños)
• El Olvidao (a bunch of different people do this one, but this video is Raly Barrionuevo)
• Entre a mi pago sin golpear (Los Manseros Santiagueños)

6-count vueltas:

• Añoranzas (Los Chalchaleros)--the video is Peteco Carabajal and others
• El embrujo de mi tierra (Peteco Carabajal)
• Flor de Cenizas

Also, I found a list online of good chacarera dobles, although you will need to figure out which are 8- and 6-count vueltas on your own.

CHACARERA DOBLE
Amor en las trincheras - Chacarera doble (Vicky Castiñeira/Carlos Carabajal)
Bajo las sombras de un árbol - Chacarera doble (Peteco Carabajal)
Cuando me abandone mi alma - Chacarera doble (Raul Trullenque/Cuti Carabajal)
Donde ha quedado el cielo - Chacarera doble (Peteco Carabajal)
El embrujo de mi tierra - Chacarera doble (Carlos y Peteco Carabajal)
El nuevo amor que yo tengo - Chacarera doble (J. L. Carabajal/M. Medina)
En pampa de los guanacos - Chacarera doble
La calle alegre - Chacarera doble (Cuti Carabajal/Oscar Valles)
La oriunda - Chacarera doble
La sachapera - Chacarera doble (Oscar Valles/Carlos Carabajal)
Pampa de los guanacos - Chacarera doble (Cristóforo Juarez/Agustín Carabajal)
Para qué me habrás mirado - Chacarera doble
Qué pena chacarera - Chacarera doble (C. Carabajal)
Tiene sentido la vida - Chacarera doble (Mario Alvarez Quiroga)
Tierra madre chacarera - Chacarera doble (Peteco Carabajal)

There are tons of other songs that work, and I will be asking Sole to tell me her favorites to add here.

Argentine folk dance classes in December at the Om

I am very excited to co-teach a series of classes on Argentine folk dance with Sole Avila this December!

This all started when Sole Avila showed up for my Chacarera class that I taught during Portland Tangofest week. Sole was extremely excited to find us, told me that she had studied folk dance and the traditional drum, and asked when my next class would be.

I had not planned on teaching more classes. However, I have missed teaching folk dancing since I moved up to Portland in 2008. I had studied a bunch of folk dances when I was in Argentina, but I hadn't taught them for ten years. Perhaps it was time to change that!

I asked Sole if she would co-teach with me, and she agreed. We are still hashing out all the details, but the plan is to teach Argentine zamba, chamame, chacarera doble, and perhaps the escondido and/or gato.

Come dance with us!

A bit about Sole:

Sole comes from Santiago del Estero, the heartland of Argentine folk dancing. She studied folk dancing and music intensively for six years, and performed with the Cruz del Sur performance group. Sole also attained the title of "Bombo teacher" which is the traditional drum used in folk dance music. She first came to Portland in 2004, and became a U.S. citizen last year. This will be her first time teaching the dances that she loves.

Learning through contrast: interleaving of practice

The more I read of Make It Stick, the more I am changing how I teach. What I find most interesting, is that I will plan a class and then read a chapter of the book, which tells me to do what I just planned to do. After almost 30 years of teaching, I'm starting to do it right!

Peter C. Brown el al. write,

"In interleaving, you don't move from a complete practice set of one topic to go to another. You switch before each practice is complete. . . . It's more effective to distribute practice across these different skills than polish each one in turn. The athlete gets frustrated because the learning's not proceeding quickly, but the next week he will be better at all aspects [of the different parts of the movement] than if he'd dedicated each session to polishing one skill." (p. 81).

How are we working on this in tango this week? We always do this in Body Dynamics class, as we build on skills week after week, doing 5-10 minutes on several different themes each time the class meets.

In advanced class this week, we are looking at several very similar ideas in the dance, that all have slight differences in spacing, the marca (lead), and how the follower moves to complete the pattern.

For example, we've been working on the sentada and a leg drag that comes out of a parada. The sentada and parada are similar moves, but in the parada, the follower's weight is mostly on the back foot, but s/he is stopped with the feet apart. In the sentada, the follower's weight is 100% on the back leg, but in a flexed, springlike way, with the leg crossed in front. This again is only a tiny bit different than getting the follower to do a reverse cross and actually change weight at that moment. When you add the idea of the sacada led through the follower's back step; or a single-axis turn from the same place, then you begin to see that TEENY differences in setting up a step create different responses from the follower.

So why should be work on these at the same time? Isn't this just too confusing?

Here is my question to you: how many times have you led a move, only to have it not go quite perfectly? Perhaps you misjudged the space. Perhaps the follower jumped to conclusions and did a different move. For whatever reason, you are now forced to pull other information out of your memory and immediately apply it.

What if that piece of information was already grouped with the movement that you had tried to do? Wouldn't it be more likely that you could adjust to the reality of the moment successfully? I know this works for me, and that's why I'm teaching this to the advanced dancers.

As a follower, why would this be useful? For me, the more important aspect of working like this is to encourage the follower to be a better follower. Instead of picking a move out of what I call "the index box" from memory, and executing it, the follower MUST wait for the leader to lead the move, precisely because it is not 100% clear which move is being done, until the lead has happened (and if it has not been led, then....that's not the follower's issue). Many followers stay on the intermediate level for years and years, because they are not willing to through the index box of moves away and simply follow. To me, that is the difference between an intermediate and advanced follower, no matter how many years s/he has followed.

So, tomorrow, be prepared for crazy mayhem--for really learning these cool moves!

Festivals: cabeceo or no?

Portland Tangofest starts in a few days, and the the topic of whether or not one should cabeceo  (inviting with a glance/head gesture, from some distance away) has reared its ugly head again.

Traditionally, cabeceo gave women a chance to have some power in the decision-making process of who danced with whom. If she didn't want to dance with someone, she could either avoid eye contact, or look at them, but not agree to dance. Because women traditionally didn't invite men to dance, looking available or not-available provided a measure of control over dancing with certain people.

For those of us who did most of our tango learning in Buenos Aires, cabeceo is what feels comfortable. I prefer cabeceo because, if I am having a conversation with another person, it signals to potential partners that I am busy at the moment. If I want to dance, I am looking around. Putting my cultural anthropologist hat on, I think you should follow the cultural rules that go along with traditional dances; or at least know what those rules are.

Cabeceo doesn't work as well in situations in North America because only some people have been trained how to do it; and others don't like the fact that the person being asked might indicate "no" and so use direct invitation to coerce those of us who tend to be too nice to say "no" when standing a foot away from someone. Also, if two women or two men are doing the inviting, the traditional roles don't necessarily fit. As a woman who leads, I have found it almost impossible to cabeceo women, unless they have spent some time in Buenos Aires. Also, many North American men are not comfortable maintaining eye contact long enough to actually ask someone to dance via cabeceo.

This makes for a very confused muddle at a festival. People from different towns have different conventions (traditional Argentine and very non-Argentine), which is even harder to figure out than usual.

Here is what I do at festivals. I stick to cabeceo with folks who know my preference. For people who walk up and invite me, I usually say yes, but then ask them to cabeceo me in the future. However, if I see a man or woman looking at me hopefully, but then looking away/down/etc. I may approach them and ask if they would like to dance. I will especially do this if they don't look familiar. Folks who are new often have not been taught how to cabeceo.

I'll be hosting the Friday afternoon milonga at Tangofest. In that situation, not only will I ask folks to dance; I will also drag people over and introduce them to new people. I see my role as hostess as a connector, helping cabeceo-impaired dancers to find happiness on the dance floor :-) I will see you there!

And tell me how you navigate Argentine custom and North American practices on the dance floor!