Based on how most people feel, I am going to cancel group classes for the next two weeks and then re-assess in terms of Omicron levels. I hope to restart class January 6th. My private lessons are continuing, since I have medical-level HEPA filtration in my home studio. Happy holidays! Stay well!
Zoom lessons for snowy days
As we get ready for winter here in Portland, remember that I am still set up for Zoom classes. After almost two years teaching online, I have learned how to teach remotely, and I am ready for the snow!
Private and small group lessons
Some of my students have continued to study on Zoom throughout the lockdown, so all I need is a 5-10- minute head’s up to turn your private lesson back into a Zoom class. What are the advantages of a Zoom class?
It’s easy to record the session so you can review during the week.
If the roads are bad, you don’t need to venture out on them for a lesson.
A Zoom class is the perfect time to work on solo technique: balance, alignment, and strength. That may not feel as fun, but it’s the key to improving your tango quickly.
If you have your partner/friends at home, partner work is just as easy as in person :-) Make your house party a dance party! One student had girl’s night tango technique weekly during lockdown with her bubble of friends.
Group classes
If weather is too bad to make it to Shabu Studio, I will offer an online technique class at 7 PM on Thursday, just as I did for the first year and more of COVID lockdown. The class will only be one hour long, however, as more than that for solo work can be exhausting. Think of it as going to the tango gym: you will have better technique for every hour you focus on your solo tango, unhindered by partner issues.
Hope for mild weather, but…
If we don’t have it, we can still have tango!
Las Naifas is back! December 10th (2nd Fridays) at Norse Hall
Please join Luisa Zini and Elizabeth Wartluft as we host the first Las Naifas since lockdown! We will be hosting our monthly milonga on 2nd Fridays of each month at Norse Hall. Although we miss our old location, which has closed, we are very happy to dance once again at Norse Hall and support this wonderful dance venue that is dear to the hearts of most Portland dancers!
5:30 lesson with Elizabeth
6:30-9:30 dancing with DJ Jerry Wallach
upstairs at Norse Hall, 111 NE 11th Ave., Portland
$15
update: YES! The bar WILL be open!
Proof of vaccination required and you must mask inside Norse Hall, no exceptions. There will be hand sanitizer and we will request contact tracing information, just in case. Please help protect your community! If you are sick, don’t attend.
Invite your friends!
Use video as a self-study tool for learning movement!
I am finishing my yoga teacher training in the next month, and I had to video myself doing yoga and then critique my technique. Although this was NOT fun, I could see a few places where my brain was sure I was doing the technique correctly—but I was not, especially at my weak spot: my shoulders. I was so sure that I had hugged my shoulder blades down my back, but they were headed for my ears in several poses. On the other hand, I was happy to see that parts of my technique look really good and have improved a lot in the past year.
I have scheduled a private lesson for today to work on arm balances and see if I can get my shoulders to do what they are supposed to do. As you build your movement body map, your teacher helps by being the video camera. They can point out where things are not working. They can suggest ways to approach the problem areas. In fact, this is a big part of private lessons: getting to an advanced level as fast as possible via learning how your body moves and using correct technique.
Seeing is believing
Watching yourself dance is also important. Someone can tell you twenty times what you need to correct, but if you can’t FEEL what you need to do, it is difficult to correct. Also, your brain likes to talk back, telling you that it knows what to do and that you are doing that thing the teacher described.
When a student vehemently argues that they ARE doing what I said, I often offer to video their movement so they can see what is really happening. I also video when I want to show someone how lovely their new alignment/technique/adornos look :-)
So, pull out that phone!
We are lucky to have technology in our pocket. Unless you are a Luddite, your mobile phone has a decent camera on it. You can prop your phone somewhere, video, and watch it. You can ask your partner or a friend to video for you.
One more thing: you must watch the video!! This is the painful part of self-study. Approach this as a problem-solving exercise. Try to avoid the “I suck!” reaction that will hit first. This is not about if you are good at bad at tango: it’s about improving.
I have to submit my video with a critique of my technique as part of my certification process. I give you permission to erase yours.
See you in class!
Quick update about classes and Las Naifas milonga
Many of you told me it was too difficult to remember which day would be the milonga, which days class would happen, etc., so……
Las Naifas milonga will be 2nd FRIDAYS, starting December 10th
Please join us at Norse Hall, 111 NE 11th Ave. in Portland, for the beginning a of monthly matinee milonga with great DJs, nice people, and the joy of being back at Norse Hall for tango! You must show proof of vaccination and remain masked while you are in Norse Hall: it is their policy AND our policy to keep you well, as well as the Portland city policy. No exceptions.
Group classes will be EVERY Thursday, 7-9 PM
My group class will be EVERY Thursday from 7-9 at Shabu, 6055 NE Glisan St. in Portland. At some point in the new year, I will return to a separate 7 PM of deep basics technique, with a continuing class at 8 PM. For the moment, the whole deal is $15 for 7-9 PM, with a half hour of warmup and drills, a regular class 7:30-8:30, and practice/time for questions/just dance until 9 PM. Please join me. That is also vaccinated-only, masking at all times in the building. Thank you for following municipal, building and my personal policy. If you have already shown me your vaccination card, you don’t have to show it again; I will keep a list to simplify matters.
I hope this makes it less confusing :-) Have a good Thanksgiving!
Group classes start at Shabu Studio, 6055 NE Glisan, Portland
I am excited to announce my first public group classes since lockdown on December 2nd! Please join me for a fun, challenging evening with a group of friendly dancers on Dec. 2, 16, 23 and 30!
Here’s the plan:
7 PM: Warmup and solo technique work
7:30 PM: Apply the solo technique work to the dance, focus on working with partners
8:30 PM: Mini-practica: dance for fun, work on class content, get help from me
$15 for the whole thing!
Proof of vaccination and masks required
If you are a beginning tango dancer, please feel welcome to attend class. Many of you have dance experience in other dances, and tango takes time to learn. Feel free to take class at 7 PM and stop to watch if it gets past your bandwidth :-) If you are an adventurous beginner, go for it!
If you are a continuing tango dancer, you know that the fundamentals are the building blocks of ALL tango. We all need to practice the basics. I encourage you to attend the solo practice section of class to build your proprioception, balance, and strength before joining the more “traditional” part of class at 7:30.
Advanced dancers: There is always something more to learn about tango. That’s why I have not put a level label on this class. I will be happy to give you additional layers of work to do if what we are doing feels too easy. If you want to do more difficult versions of what we are doing, I encourage you to bring a partner in crime who dances at your level to collaborate with you. Or learn the “other role” in a safe environment. I will not require partner switching or role switching, but I encourage both.
I will switch over to two separate classes sometime in 2022, but for now, I think this serves the community best.
Note: On 2nd Thursdays, Luisa and I will be hosting a milonga upstairs at Norse Hall on a regular basis, so join us there December 9th and subsequent 2nd Thursdays at 5:30 for the lesson, 6:30 for dancing until 9(?) We are still in the planning stages :-)
Upper body alignment cues to protect your back
Dancers often feel that they must remain “connected” with their partner above all other elements of tango. While I agree that staying connected energetically with that person is extremely important, sticking chest-to-chest but off-balance will NOT help your dance and may cause injuries. So, what can you do when the other person grabs you around the neck and hangs on you; locks onto your shoulder blade; or grabs the center of your spine and pulls? Here are some things you can do to protect your body.
Keep your shoulder blades anchored
Take your shoulder blades and squeeze them together on your back. The main muscles that do this are your rhomboids. Now widen your shoulder blades away from each other. The main muscles that do this are your serratus anterior. If you aren’t sure where these muscles are, stand with your hands against a wall, in front of the outside edge of your shoulders and your feet under you (not leaning). Move your shoulder blades together and apart. Think of this as shoulder blade pushups :-)
We are looking for a place where both sets of muscles are working to ANCHOR your shoulder blades, which helps keep your entire shoulder girdle in a healthy position.
Why does this help your tango?
For any move where you need to rotate your hips (ochos, boleos, etc.), you will have more mobility in your pivot because of the stability offered by your own upper body, even if your partner is not helping you remain stable.
If you are leading, you will step on your partners much less if you align your axis all the way from the floor through the crown of your head. Good shoulder position keeps you on balance and gives you more time to react to navigational and partner needs.
Your heart/chest area opens up and makes your partner feel that you are more connected. Try dancing hunched over vs. open at the heart: which feels better?
You breathe better when aligned better, which will help you panic less while leading or following. If you keep your calm and breathe, so will your partner!
This will not be easy to maintain for some time if you are weak in your middle back (I speak from experience). When you are at your lesson, feel free to ask me for exercises to help you.
Stabilize your lumbar spine
I can’t count the times that dancers have complained to me that their lower back hurts after dancing.
There are a couple of ways to approach lower spine stabilization.
Hug your belly button into your spine. Your transverse abdominus muscle hugs your middle like a corset. If you engage it in your deep belly, your lower back takes less of the load. The balance between front and back of the body also helps you with balance while moving and standing.
Kegels, Kegels, Kegels: lift your pelvic floor! Don’t clench your butt! If you can do this and hug your belly in, bonus. Remember, hug/energize/gently lift! this is never a clench/grip kind of movement!
Put your heels down! If you dance on your toes, you will eventually hurt your back.
Why does this help your tango?
It hurts less! Really, that’s the most important reason.
Your partner can feel your core and your legs and your feet better when you stabilize your lower spine, improving communication.
You have more space in your hips for movement, so your technique works better, freeing your legs for more difficult moves as a follower and helping all dancers balance better.
Fix your own dance first
I often hear people criticize other dancers for hurting them. Before I speak to someone about their dance, I try to use my best technique to protect myself. If that fails, I broach the subject to my partner (and not on the milonga floor). Only if that fails do I avoid dancing with that person. 95% of the time, we can make it work.
Walking, stopping and balancing
Some thoughts on walking, stopping and balance
I have started running again (finally!) now that my ankle ligament tear is well-healed, and that gives me time to think about how tango is different from normal walking and running. When you run or walk, you have the expectation that forward motion will continue, so if you are slightly off-balance, you can continue on your way. In a way, running is both a controlled fall and a maintenance of axis and balance.
In tango, the expectation is that you will have to change direction often, and so being all the way on axis ALL THE TIME is part of the walk. Your direction is determined by the movement of other people. Perhaps there will be couples in your way, a missed communication from your partner, or other unexpected obstacles to moving forward. Being slightly off-balance has more consequences, so the emphasis on balance and axis are super-important.
That is not to say it is easy to always be aware of your axis and control your balance. The body is a complex system, so stabilization and balance have many moving parts. However, if you focus on a few key points, you will improve your ability to remain on balance and therefore change direction with grace and elegance!
Start at the base
Your feet and ankles do most of the stabilizing—NOT your partner :-) Luckily, your built-in system of proprioception keeps your brain and your joints connected. Your brain automatically maps your body, so your tango technique merely brings that awareness to your voluntary movement level.
Ideas to keep you dancing with a strong foundation:
ROOT your feet into the ground at each step.
ENERGIZE your big toe mound on both feet.
SPREAD your toes out to use more space, not less, for pivoting.
HUG the outer heels in while lifting your inner arches up to get even ankle support.
BALANCE just behind the heads of your metatarsals, on your arch, not your poor toes.
Knees
Your knees are not a pure hinge joint, but it you treat them as pure hinge joints, you will protect them from injury. That said, your knees are mostly shock absorption in tango. You don’t want to dip up and down like a camel; but locking your knees also looks funny and takes a lot of muscle tension. General guidelines:
If you dip up and down, pretend you don’t have knees and focus that energy on your feet and ankles.
If you hyperextend or lock your knees, microbend them and engage your pelvic floor to lift up without as much work at the knees; keep them soft enough to respond to your feet.
A good knee position is very lightly engaged muscles hugging into the midline—as little work as possible.
Hips
By the time you get up as high as your hips, you are hopefully building on the foundation work of your feet and merely stacking the rest above. However, there are a few points at the pelvis that can make or break the work below:
No slumping! If you tip your pelvis posteriorly (if you were a bowl, is the water falling out to the back?), your body fights to balance your ribs and spine over your feet and your back probably hurts. Think about sending the upper thighs BACK just enough to feel your core lift up and start working.
No arching! If you tip your pelvis anteriorly (if you were a bowl, the water is falling out the front), your back and toes probably hurt when you do tango. Practice moving your pelvis at the hip joint (dipping bird), keeping the back long; rather than adjusting where your spine connects to your pelvis. This should feel MUCH better on your back, and will allow you much more luscious tango movement!
Normal hip movement: it’s normal to allow side-to-side pendulum movements of the hip as you walk because your body needs to balance your head on one foot and then the other. That either means tipping your head/shoulders from side to side like a metronome, or adjusting at the pelvis—and it’s ALWAYS better to adjust closer to the ground! Think of your pelvis pointing towards the inner thigh of the standing leg—your “free” leg has a “free” hip that is LOWER than the standing side of the pelvis! Check your walk to feel what you do: are you keeping a leg “free” by hiking your pelvis higher? Then don’t ;-)
More later
There is obviously more to the body, which I will address in the next post!
Hang in there, grasshopper!
With the Delta variant, all of the opening up of venues, plans, etc., are on hold. I know it’s hard to keep waiting for dances, to keep waiting for favorite partners, but keep the eye on the prize! We WILL be back to dancing, and we have good masking skills, habits of hand washing, etc., so we will be able to avoid the flu as well as the usual festival crud that everyone seems to get after a big event. I need to buy/make masks to match my outfits! Plus, we will have to get good at cabeceo and la mirada, making eye contact to dance from across the (eventually) crowded room. Stay well.
CANCELLED: Fundraising milonga Saturday July 31st at Norse Hall
Jerry Wallach just called me, and the fundraiser milonga is cancelled. It will be rescheduled at some point. In the mean time, please consider giving Norse Hall the donation you were going to give at the dance! Stay well and keep dancing!
Dancing with other people!
There are a few more weeks of Zoom class scheduled, but it’s time to get ready for in-person classes!
Who
My in-person small group lessons will begin in a few weeks. For those of you:
vaccinated
in the Portland, Oregon area
bringing a designated partner
willing to mask until it’s safe/agreed to unmask in the group
…there will be in-person classes. Classes will have up to four couples. When ALL the group is comfortable switching partners, that will happen.
What
Small group classes that focus on getting used to dancing in spaces with other people. For those of you who have been dancing with broomsticks, dogs, and kitchen counters, this may feel strange. For those of you with a built-in partner, it’s time to learn to navigate with moving objects that aren’t cats as obstacles!
Classes will be open to anyone above beginner level (advanced beginners welcome), as each skill and movement will be adjusted per couple. I am hoping to eventually have one advanced and one advanced beginner/intermediate class, but for now, let’s just enjoy seeing other folks!
When and where
To begin, classes will be at 6:30 on Tuesday evenings and 8 PM Wednesday evenings. By the fall, I will be in a different schedule, but for the summer, I am trying to maximize family evening time by limiting the number of evenings that I teach.
Classes will be at my house. I know the rate of filtration for my HEPA system, and I know what surfaces are clean. In a studio, I can’t count on either of those factors. As COVID counts decrease, we will be able to move into studio space and have larger classes.
How do I sign up?
I will need commitments to attend ahead of time. Please contact me and we will start figuring out who is dancing with whom, what night, etc. Because I already have several couples discussing this, I will add people in the order they commit to the classes. There may be a waitlist.
But I don’t have a partner!
I am trying to play matchmaker. If you want a partner, let me know and I will try to help you find one BUT mostly it is up to you!
Also, I will continue with my Zoom noon class for at least a few more weeks, and then I will start up the equivalent of my Beaverton class (which will eventually move back to Beaverton): Tango Toning and Technique. If you have been taking my Zoom classes this year, you already know how this class works: solo work, peers helping, but not partner work generally.
Preparing to dance with other people
For many people, this past year plus a few months (and counting) has been about dancing solo. The dedicated dancers have taken classes, practiced, and dreamed of the day they can dance safely with someone else. As we can see the finish line here in Oregon, we need to wait just a little longer before it’s safe to take off masks and dance in public. However, it IS time to get ready to do so.
Focus on sacadas and contrabody this week
The next few weeks, my Zoom classes will focus on preparing to dance with other humans in person, in couples! For those of you lucky enough to be in lockdown with a partner, this is still helpful practice, but it’s of paramount importance if you have gone a year without a tanda! Join us!
6:30 PM Tuesday: Contrabody, the embrace and balance in the couple
Noon Friday: Sacada technique connecting the leader and follower
In-person group classes will begin in a few weeks for those who are vaccinated. Stay tuned and grab a partner!
Yoga to support your tango
As we continue getting back in shape, I would like to bring a pamphlet to your attention from Harvard Medical School: An Introduction to Yoga. It’s available for order on the internet as an eBook or in print. For those of you who are just starting to look at yoga, it has some history, a description of various yoga styles, medical advice about yoga, the benefits of yoga for the individual; and good, basic poses and explanations, with photos and pictures. While it won’t provide a lot of actual coaching, it will help you decide what style you want to try, etc. What I like best about it: it offers data from scientific studies of yoga, but it cuts out all of the scientific language for fast reading.
I will be offering some free yoga classes this summer for tango dancers. Stay tuned!
Improving your tango balance
As we prepare to dance with other people again, now that we are getting vaccinated—let’s start thinking about how this year of personal tango technique can improve your dance with a partner! It is sooo easy to just go back to the poor technique choices from before, but just a little awareness will make your dance much more enjoyable. Here are some tips to help that process.
Finish each step!
The question I am asked THE MOST recently is about how to move from step to step. “You say finish each step, but when I watch videos, I don’t see what you are teaching….” is the way most of these discussions start. “So, do I put my foot down in between steps, or don’t I??” The methods that I teach are the deep technique details that hold your dance together. You don’t see all of it in the actual dance: it’s the internal gears that run your body. I want you to listen for these moments inside of your own technique, so that you can dance better.
Finish each step 100%. That means that you finish articulating through the now-ex-support-leg’s foot and ankle so that the balance transfer is in control the entire time. As you finish the step, your new “free” leg can fall under your body, completely on balance in the new place. Hopefully, your legs “collect” from correct alignment, not from gripping or pulling them in. At that moment, you are ready to move any direction and/or recover from whatever your partner has done. Focus on finishing, on the process of arriving at a new place in space.
Fix balance on the fly
Most of us who have danced a long time look smooth because we know how to adjust and fix problems as they begin; not because we dance perfectly. Each step I take, I adjust whatever is necessary to finish my step and be 100% ready for the next step. Maybe that means adjusting where I land a little. Maybe that means re-stacking my body over the new spot. Maybe that means reengaging my core muscles. Maybe that means doing an adorno that covers the fact that I need to move three inches to the right :-)
Assume that there are tiny errors in communication all the time in tango, and just fix them. Don’t waste time decided who is wrong; just fix. Regaining optimal balance constantly makes you notice how often mistakes happen, but also notice that most of them are unimportant in the large scale of the dance. Relax and fix, rather than stress out and tighten and fall over.
Find playful ways to maintain balance
I teach adornos from the first day of tango. Why? Because a dancer who is moving slightly will continue to breathe, adjust their balance, and stay relaxed. A dancer who tightens all their muscles to “pause” will not be relaxed enough to enjoy their dance. The leader needs to feel where the follower stands, and if that channel is open because the follower is still moving (adorning) it’s easier to sense what the follower needs next. As a follower, playing at pauses gives the leader time to think AND sometimes provides a suggestion of where to go next, taking some of the burden of decision-making off the leader.
For my ballroom folks who are new to tango, playing with the free foot also facilitates that “changing the chip” to tango. If you adorn when you land, you won’t cheat back to your favorite free foot! This also helps you to remember you don’t need a “frame” and that this is tango.
For those of you who think adornos are wrong or busy, remember that the follower needs their say in the dance as well, and letting them find that as beginners makes stronger advanced dancers faster. Unless you like monologues, this makes tango a dialogue and more enjoyable.
Yoga poses to help with balance
Most of you know by now that I am training to be a yoga instructor as well as a dance teacher. I suggest you Google each one, as there are hundreds of videos out there describing how to do them. I really like Do Yoga With Me’s videos and teachers. Here are some basic yoga poses to try for increased balance that also help your tango:
Eagle pose: This is a great pose to help with any tango move that ends in a cross, as it helps you find your core and inner thigh muscles that you for these moves.
Tree pose: Again, your pelvic floor and deep core kick in here. At the same time, you can feel how your leg and hip can move against each other to stabilize—I find this helpful in any one-legged tango moment.
Chair pose: Most of us sit too much and have not worked our gluteal muscles enough. Chair pose insists your gluts turn on, and it will help everyone’s yoga, despite being on two feet.
Warrior 3: Lifting high on your support leg to create a stable, open hip—that’s a challenge for everyone, and Warrior 3 addresses that. Mine is still wobbly!
Class this week
Tuesday 6:30 PM Zoom class will focus on balance, using adornos and musicality this week. Friday noon class will build on those balance points and work on how to connect better from step to step while still finishing each step. Sign up for class and I’ll see you there!
Mother's Day and the tango community
I would not be here if it were not for the wonderful tango community that I have. This past year, you have continued lessons, supported my learning to teach remotely, and danced your butts off in front of your phones and computers so that we can continue to be a community.
But that’s just this year: I want to tell a story about 2005, the year that my tango community helped me survive in a different way. It’s my Mother’s Day blog because the women (and men) who helped me when I was a new mom changed my life. Since my own mother lives 3000 miles away, my tango community became my mom and grandma, allowing me to keep tango going in Eugene, Oregon.
When my son was three months old. his father decided that being a parent was not fun. I had not planned to be a single mom. How was I going to do this?? Enter the tango tias! Vicky, Lucy, Mary, Marilyn, Annette, Pam, Ashley—you are all still “Tia” to my teenager and when I mention you as “Tia X” he says, “Oh, yeah, her!” because you were all at our house, helping out—bringing food, babysitting, keeping me sane, etc.
You helped me organize classes and the Old Lady Tango Sherry Hour at my house, so I could put my son to bed and other people could keep dancing. You helped me find babysitters. You took classes with a baby strapped between us, making close embrace a whole new experience. I recently went through my photo album (yes, I am old, I have physical photo albums) from that year, and most of the photos are tango people holding my little one, eating, dancing—I am not exaggerating to say that I would not be teaching tango now if you had not helped me make it through that dark time.
So Happy Mother’s Day to all of my moms, my son’s tias, and my very favorite tango people!
Tango and the bandhas
While training to teach yoga, I am finding new ways to look at my tango technique and approach old problems. Today, I will discuss the bandhas (bindings, locks) from yoga and how they help tango technique. For those of you who attend my Zoom group classes, this is our focus for the week.
When you engage a bandha, you are contracting tonic, or stabilizer muscles. Tonic muscles have a high percentage of slow twitch fibers. This makes them fatigue-resistant and ideal for functioning as stabilizers and postural supporters. They provide a stable base for movement. The three main muscles/muscle groups are located at your pelvic floor, deep abdominals, and your neck/throat area.
Mula bandha (pelvic floor)
The group of pelvic floor muscles support your pelvis, holding the contents of your pelvic bowl in place and stabilizing everything above them. Think of the lower opening of your pelvis as a diamond: the pubic bone, two sitbones, and your tailbone form the front, sides and back of your pelvic opening.
Many of us are familiar with the Kegel exercises to strengthen the pelvic floor, but many of us just clench ALL our muscles, including our butt muscles to find the pelvic floor, and that makes for tight tango movement :-) One of my yoga teachers suggests thinking of cradling an egg (not crushing it!) as the right amount of activation.
Here’s one way to find these muscles: Imagine that you can hug your sitbones closer together under you. Then, hug your pubic bone and tailbone just a little closer to each other. Imagine little bungee cords crisscrossing your pelvic floor, helping to create an energized—but not gripped—surface to support your dance!
Why should you work this hard? When you activate mula bandha, you have a little bit more elasticity, a little bit better balance, and a little bit more room to let your hip joints open/release so that your tango motion can have more ease. That ease looks elegant and flowing, so a little more work in one area has big tradeoffs for the entire rest of the body!
It’s not easy to focus this much while dancing, so practice it first just sitting where you can feel your pelvic floor against the chair. Then, try it standing. Then add movement. We will do this in class this week.
Uddiyana bandha (transversus abdominis)
The next bandha to tackle is deep abdominal core. The deepest of the four layers of abdominal muscles, transversus abdominis attaches to your ribs, pelvis, and your spine. Its fibers interdigitate with the fibers of the diaphragm as well, so your breathing affects this level of activation! Think of this bandha as a cumberbund or a corset around your entire midriff, hugging in around your body.
When we are told to “stand up straight” we often abandon the front of the body and squeeze our spine into extension, pushing our ribs forward and out. This is NOT a balanced posture! Instead, think of hugging in just below your belly button (again, cradle an egg, don’t squish!) and around your entire body. Can you feel how that elongates your spine and supports it? That’s the main reason I want you to focus on adding this to your dance.
When you use uddiyana bandha for your tango, the stress of any torque around your spine is diffused so that no one joint is overstressed, and because your spine is well-supported, you can usually twist further and elongate, providing a better understructure for all your moves that pivot and twist.
Jalandara bandha (get your head on straight)
There are different ways to teach this position, so I will focus on the method that balances your head on your spine in a good alignment for tango.
Put your thumbs on the back of your skull, under and slightly behind your ears. Move your head up and down until you feel that area release a little. You may feel that your head is tilted down. Hug your chin to your chest a little bit and feel that back of your next lengthen and attach better to the rest of your spine!
I think it’s obvious why this improves your tango. It balances your head in a position that uses less neck tension. It lengthens the top of your spine, allowing your entire spine to lengthen better. It keeps your collarbones open and lets your shoulder blades float further down your back. All the upper body aligns better, which means your lower body can move your around more easily!
Put them all together!
Sometimes it is difficult to keep more than one bandha in gear at the same time. I feel your frustration: it’s not easy for me! Instead, I try to run through the reminders in my head: pelvic floor, abs, head on straight, etc. Oh, right, breathe! And start over again with the reminders.
See you in class!
Little baby steps
I hiked up a steep climb yesterday for the first time since ripping my ankle ligament in 2020—and overdid it. So…since I can’t teach today, I thought I would write instead (and my deep apologies to the new person who just signed up for today’s class!).
We all want our dance to improve at a steady rate, all the time. Life is just not like that, and neither is tango. One day, we get something new immediately, and then we cannot repeat it for weeks or a month. Then, we can reproduce the move 50% of the time, then 75% of the time. And then, just when we think it is working, we learn a new detail—and it all falls apart again for a while.
My ankle reminds me of this uneven progress every day. I have danced in flat shoes without taping my ankle for a few months, except for days that I would also teach in high heels. I taught in high heels without taping my ankle this week for the first time since last summer, and it worked for four days!! Then, I didn’t tape for hiking, and I am back to taping again.
The body is a complex system. Tango is a complex system. When you tweak part of a system, the rest needs to adjust. The good news is that, when you get the system working better for one move, it usually improves the system for ALL moves.
Each time you learn a new detail for a move, or fix a minor problem, you adjust the entire muscle pathway for that move. Your muscles might have to fire in a new order; you might have to use a new muscle that you were not using before; or you may have learned to pare down the movement and to use fewer muscles. Your brain and body need time to rebuild that motor pathway the way you want it.
If you are learning a new combination or exploring “what do I do next?” as a leader, this same approach creates new nodes for movement. You arrive after a back ocho, and suddenly you have five possible moves instead of just one. That means you need to stay on balance and/or regroup slightly at a spot where you happily charged forward before. You may have to introduce a pause while your body fixes any slight imbalances from before. On the other hand, now you have more fun outcomes, and the follower has time to adorn at the pause, too!
My foot feels much better than yesterday when I sent out class cancellations. It should be fine in a day or two. I have learned tons about the body during this rehab period. It also led me to start training to teach yoga. All “detours” in your tango technique will end up helping your tango progress in the same way.
Little baby steps, millimeter by millimeter—and sometimes going backwards, regrouping, and moving forwards: welcome to tango!
Shoulder girdle alignment and tango
The embrace is an important part of tango, as is good balance. Both can be affected by poor alignment of the shoulder girdle. As many of us have desk jobs and/or spend a lot of hours hunched over our phones and computers, most of us need remedial work to re-align our bodies for best balance, tango, and pain-free daily life.
Understanding how the shoulders should be stacked on the body helps us to monitor our own axis and remedy issues before they affect our partner in the dance—or before they send us to the chiropractor! Also, most of us need to do some stabilization exercises to help our shoulders remain in the right position so that we are not injured while dancing.
Collarbones
Structure
In terms of bony connections, our arms are attached to our torso only at the sternum. Those joints can move up and down; forward and backward; and rotate slightly, reacting to how the shoulder blades and arms move. Have you noticed that someone with a broken collarbone cannot use their arm? That’s because the rest of the attachments to the body are muscle, ligament, tendon, and fascia, not bone.
Tuning into your collarbones
Put your fingers on the connection between your collarbone and your sternum. You should be able to feel little depressions under your fingers where the bones connect.
Now trace your collarbones out to your shoulder joints and feel where they connect to the structure (you might have to do one at a time). If you have ever broken your collarbone, the two sides may feel VASTLY different!
Now, place your thumbs at the front of your shoulder joint and your pinky fingers at the sternum, and experiment with how high/low you can wing your collarbone (I think of it like butterfly wings flapping up and down).
Next, try front and back movement, like opening and closing a book.
Lastly, try to rotate your shoulder joints and feel what happens at your sternum.
Shoulder blades
Structure
The outer end of the collarbone connects to the scapula (shoulder blade). The shoulder blades slide on the back of the ribs, attached to the body by muscles and via the collarbone to the skeleton. They can move up and down your back (elevation and depression). They also move towards the sides of your body (abduction/protraction) and towards your spine (adduction/retraction). On top of that, they can rotate up or down: it helps me to think about holding a door handle and twisting it clockwise or counterclockwise—away from the spine is down. All these motions are possible because of the muscles attaching to the shoulder blades, anchoring them to the rest of the body.
Tuning into your shoulder blades
This is the area I had to work on the most to find the optimal position(s) for my shoulders to take for tango and general alignment (no surprise, it’s the same).
Shoulder blade pushups
I do these from “tabletop” position, on my hands and knees, but if you have bad knees, you can do this with your palms on a chair. If you know cat-cow exercises from yoga, this is a modified version of that.
Put your palms flat on the floor.
Rotate your arms slightly so that your elbows are pointing back along your ribs.
Straighten your arms, but don’t lock your joints.
Feel your inhale and exhale of your breath and keep breathing!
On your inhale, squeeze your shoulder blades in and down your back towards your hips/spine. Send your heart forward, as if the shoulder blades are pushing it forward.
On your exhale, slide your shoulder blades away from your spine, pulling your heart up between them.
Do NOT curve/arch your spine, just focus on your shoulder blades and upper back! This is a small movement and may be hard to do if it’s new to you. It’s ok if almost no motion happens: you are tuning in to a part of you that you may not have tried to move independently before!
Anchor your shoulder blades!
Many of us tend to squeeze our shoulder blades together and push our ribs out in front when told to stand up straight. Um, that’s not aligned! Let’s try something different:
Grab two soup cans (or light weights).
Start with them at your sides, hands rotated to face mostly forward.
Let your shoulder blades drop down your back, slide out and up, so that your arms float out to the sides, up, and over your head. Touch the long sides of the soup cans together and feel where your shoulder blades are. Hopefully, they are still anchored down into your spine and hips!
Notice if your shoulders are bunched around your head. Relax them, and start part 2:
Reach the soup cans up above your head until they separate, and then arc your arms down to your sides, back to the starting position. Repeat.
Keep your arms long (again, don’t lock things) all the way down. I think of this as a heart-shaped movement, from my neck/head, out and down to a point at my legs.
If you are having trouble feeling your shoulder blade movement, have someone put their hands on your shoulder blades to help you focus on them. If you are solo right now, you can lie on the ground with your knees up and soles of the feet on the floor, and basically make snow angels :-)
We want our shoulder blades to be anchored lightly down and in, without squeezing back. However, depending on where you habitually have your shoulders, this might FEEL like a squeeze back, or a pulling down. Most of us have our shoulders too far forward and/or up. If yours are too far back, you may even feel the correct position as a forward fold!
If you are not sure of your positioning, take a photo of yourself from the side and make sure your shoulder joint is right over your hips, and you can draw a line from there through the middle of your arch of your feet!
Arms/Shoulder joint
I will save this for later: that’s more than most people read anyway!
What if none of that works?
If you have worked on your alignment, faithfully done exercises for a while, and are still having trouble keeping your shoulder girdle in the right place, consider consulting a chiropractor, a Rolfer, or someone else who can evaluate if you have adhesions that are keeping your body stuck where you don’t want it. A session or two of myofascial release might do the trick.
Because I have weak shoulders, I have had to spend a LOT of time getting work done to untangle the knots I used to get from leading tango and having people clutch my shoulder for balance. After body work, targeted daily exercises from my trainer, and now daily yoga work, I have much stronger and better aligned shoulders. Be patient: years of poor posture cannot be undone just by thinking about it for a week!
Linda Machtelinckx is offering a mindfulness class on Zoom
Some of you know Linda Machtelinckx. She’s a Portland tango dancer, among many other things. She has started a new business, and has been teaching fitness classes online this year. Here’s the first workshop she is offering on mindfulness. I have included her announcement:
Hello Everyone,
I hope that 2021 is opening the doors to better perspectives and that the longer days and spring will brighten and refresh our minds and bodies. Com join me to celebrate 2021 spring with a fresh start:
Intro to Mindfulness (Zoom class)
A 1 hr-Hakomi-inspired practice and guidedmindfulness meditation taught by our guest teacher, Laura McCorkle, LMT, who will deepen our mindfulness meditation. Make sure you dedicate a quiet space for the special 1-hr class, have a blanket, and a journal if you wish.
Date: April 19th
Time: 6 PM PST
Cost: $15
Registration: Zoom URL link will be sent upon registration with Linda Machtelinckx, Owner of BreezKinetics, LLC. Email Linda @ linda.breezkinetics@gmail.com
If you have specific questions about the workshop, let me know and Laura will reach out to you. Interested in more workshops, yoga and fitness classes? Please visit my new website: https://www.breezkinetics.com for classes I offer and I personally teach.
Jose Garofalo is teaching online
A year ago, Jose Garofalo was our last in-person workshop before the COVID-19 lockdown. He is starting to teach online now, so if you would like a refresher of his classes last year, or to learn more from him, this is a good time to do that! Jose studied with many of the old milongueros and has been a part of a group of tango dancers in Buenos Aires trying to conserve the moves and styles of the older dancers, as well as video footage of their technique; so he has information many tango dancers and teachers would like to learn!
Check out his website (in Spanish, sorry) and contact him for Zoom lessons! Once my tango partner and I are both vaccinated, we will be back to working on our performance pieces based on Juan Bruno, Pupi Castello, Pepito Avellaneda—some of the greats who were still dancing when I started tango in the 1990s.
Proprioception and your tango
Proprioception: perception or awareness of the position and movement of the body
Why is proprioception needed?
Being aware of how the body moves through space helps us improve our balance, and allows us to tune into our bodies and enjoy how we move. It is a sensuous pleasure, if a geeky one in my case. I remember enjoying weeding the garden or going for a walk, or using my spinning wheel as I started to learn about kinesthetic awareness. Everyday movement is the most important, as we want to remain mobile for our entire lives, and moving correctly allows us to stay healthy and uninjured.
In tango, the many parts of the body need to move more precisely than in just walking down the street. There are two more feet in close proximity to yours, and an entire body in your personal space (and on a crowded dance floor, perhaps several couples in your personal space!). To dance tango well, you must tune into your body on a deeper level to achieve mastery of the dance. Join us for group classes this week to work on your own body awareness!
Kinesthetic IQ
There are many ways to be intelligent. Howard Gardner defined multiple intelligences, including body/kinesthetic intelligence. That means that you can be gifted, normal, or struggling with body awareness in the same way you can be good, normal or clueless about mathematics! Not all of us are naturally born with a lot of awareness of how our body moves through space.
Sometimes, deficits in other abilities help to increase kinesthetic awareness. For me, having almost zero ability to see spatially (I have almost no stereo-vision) helped me because I had to FEEL where I was: my eyes could not tell me. I struggled through required sports until college, at which point I took ballroom dance as a required PE class to finish off having to do physical exercise (did I mention I never dreamed of teaching dance?). I found I could remember movement faster than other people, and that I was more aware of my body than most people from paying attention to the FEELING of where I was in space to avoid injury.
IQ is not everything
Years later, I see how thinking I was bad at movement stopped me from trying to dance before that; I assumed I would be bad at it. If we all stopped trying because we were initially bad at something—we would never make it in life. As in career, university, a sport—perseverance is more important than initial talent in most cases.
Only twice in my life have I thought “Oh no! I can’t teach that person to dance!” out of over 5000+ students. In both cases, those people stuck to learning tango for years, working much harder than anyone else, and achieved a solid, intermediate level of dancing. Their dedication and perseverance were head and shoulders above anyone else’s in my entire teaching career.
If you are willing to work hard, you can move from challenged to average—or above—in your body smarts!
Class topics this week:
Tuesday March 8th @ 6:30 PM: Proprioception 1: Tuning into transitions
Friday March 12th @ noon: Proprioception 2: Integrating thinking and feeling in the dance
Please join us!
Balancing stability and elasticity in your tango
Topics for class this week
Tuesday, 2 March 2021, 6:30 PM: Elasticity in movement sequences: finding the ease
Friday, 6 March 2021, Noon: Candombe, milonga and vals: using the music to make your dance elastic
Finding ease in your dance
In anything we do, we want to be strong enough to execute the action we want, but not have it take everything that we have to complete it. There is a balance between effort and ease, not only in tango, but in life. In a culture where more is more, and where looking busy is prized, the idea of less work—is foreign to many of my students. Many Type A people flock to tango, and then injure themselves by trying too hard, and give up, deciding that tango IS too difficult, or bad for the body.
One of my goals in my classes this year is to balance work and ease, stability, and elasticity, so that tango is an activity that benefits the body instead of injuring it. How do we find a balance in our own practice?
Many of you know I am studying to teach yoga as well as tango. In my yoga practice, I have been working on making poses feel easy, light, elastic, and full of breath. I think the same concepts translate well to tango.
Breathe more deeply!
If you have known me for a long time, you have probably heard me coach you to “Breathe!” during a class. I think it is important to tune into your breath for several reasons. First, breathing allows you to engage the “bandhas” (pelvic floor, diaphragm, and vocal cords) that support your core and midline. Focusing on breathing helps to balance the body around its center. It helps to release extraneous muscle tension. It helps you think more clearly. It connects you to your partner and the music better.
Pay attention to your breath as you dance. You do not have to adjust (unless you are holding your breath). Remind yourself to breathe. Feel how the entire body is more elastic and flexible this way!
Relax your connective tissue!
Pushing your muscles to their limits makes the body tire faster, and leads to injuries not only of muscle fiber, but also of connective tissue, which takes a long time to heal!
I tore my ankle ligament playing tennis last summer, and I am finally starting to run again and dream of playing tennis this coming summer. I am still wrapping my ankle to wear heels because of the added stress that pivoting causes, as well as the instability of stilettos vs. the bare foot.
Your connective tissue is wrapped all over your body: fascia, bones, ligaments, tendons—and it is connected together (thus “connective tissue”). I am working being able to feel that layer of my body. It is surprisingly hard! It is much easier to tense the muscles and know where they are but tensing everything is exhausting and can cause injuries.
See if you can relax into your body. How LITTLE muscular work do you need to do to stay balanced and upright? Perhaps a little wiggle in the system may work better than tightness? Hmm? :-)
Your muscles are attached to connective tissue. If you think about lengthening and staying more elastic, it helps connect into this subtle layer. Breathing also helps to find this layer. Do not worry if you cannot pinpoint where you feel the work/relaxing: imagine it relaxing just a little, making your movement more fluid and less stressful. I know, it sounds woo-woo, but I am finding it extremely helpful in my own practice.