November 29, 2013
Men's Common Mistakes in Tango
1. Not Listening to the Music
Some men struggle with the music because they don't know how to listen to tango music, others because they are so focused on executing steps that they cannot hear the music. The first is a matter of musicality. The second is that of attention allocation. Dancing tango demands simultaneous focus on multiple elements: embrace, posture, connection, partner, relaxation, coordination, music, feeling, movement, and choreography. Among these, listening to the music must be the first priority—because dancing tango means dancing the music, not just executing steps. Steps are simply an expression of the music. In leading, the man must first pay attention to the music. He must not only focus on the steps and forget about the music.
2. Attempting Difficult Steps
Many students try to lead complex movements, which consume so much of their attention that they become heedless of other aspects of the dance. Beginners often mistake complexity for beauty, when in fact, tango's elegant beauty lies in simplicity. Simple steps allow for greater attention distribution, better movement quality, more musicality, and deeper intimacy. Unlike stage tango that thrives on spectacle, social tango values inner experience. Dancing social tango with difficult steps of performance tango can easily backfire (see The Advantages of Simplicity over Flashy Movements).
3. Leading with Arms and Hands
Beginners often lead with their arms and hands. First, it is a hard habit to break. Second, they don't know how to lead other than using their arms and hands. Third, many women choose to dance in an open embrace, leaving men little choice but using their arms and hands. Fourth, some teachers allow students to practice with an open dance hold, reinforcing this bad habit. However, leading with arms and hands contradicts the essence of tango: connection, intimacy, and physical and emotional interaction. Tango is a torso-led dance from the beginning, which separates it from other partner dances. For a man, learning to lead with the torso—not the arms and hands—is fundamental. Beginners must overcome the habit of using their arms and hands and develop the ability to lead with the torso.
4. Sending Mixed Signals
He who leads with arms and hands usually does not know how to lead with the torso. When his arms and hands put forth strength in one direction but his torso does not move accordingly, that sends mixed signals. While better body-hand coordination may help, the true solution is replacing hand-leading with torso-leading. Arms and hands should serve only to form a comfortable embrace, not to direct movement. Unaware that his body affects the woman's movements, the man may force the woman into the next step with his arms and hands before he has completed his weight change. But since the two dancers are aligned, the incompleteness of his weight change means the same on her part. Asking her to take a step in that situation is demanding the impossible. The woman must finish her weight change before stepping. Such errors can be avoided if the man leads with his torso instead of his arms and hands (see The Functions of Various Body Parts in Tango).
5. Bending Over
Leading involves the entire torso, not just the chest. Chest-leading is a misguided concept. What part of the upper body is used in leading depends on the relative heights of the partners. If they are about the same height, then using the chest to lead is correct. However, if the man is much taller, using the chest to lead will cause him to bend over, stick out his buttocks, and put pressure on the woman, forcing her to bend backward. A tall man should maintain an upright posture and use his lower torso or abdomen to lead a short woman.
6. Bowing the Head
Partners often bring their heads close for intimacy, which works when they're of similar height. However, a tall man bowing his head toward a short woman compromises his posture: curving his torso, collapsing his chest, sticking out his buttocks, and bending his knees. This not only looks awkward but also has a negative impact on the woman's dance. When a tall man dances with a short woman, the woman may rest her head on his chest, but the man should not bow his head over to meet her head. Instead, he should maintain a good posture by keeping his body tall, head lifted, and knees straight.
7. Coercing the Woman with Force
An immature leader may believe the woman must surrender to him and obey him unconditionally. In truth, this surrender in tango is mutual. Tango partners must trust, cooperate, and accommodate each other. Leading is not control—it’s guide, support, and help the follower to express herself. Just as she should follow his lead, he too should be responsive to her needs. There must not be any coercion in leading.
8. Being Self-Centered
A self-centered leader often fails to take into consideration the axis, balance, time, space and support that the woman needs in her dance. Examples include: caring only about his own balance and ignoring hers, rushing her before she finishes a weight change, letting her rotate on a tilted axis, leading her to move but blocking her path, leading her to do things beyond her ability, not giving her enough time to express herself, and so on. Such behavior causes her to feel rushed, coerced, and uncomfortable. A good leader thinks from her perspective, adjusting his embrace, posture, axis, speed, and lead to accommodate and facilitate her dance.
9. Not Providing Enough Support
An inexperienced man often sends a signal and waits for the woman to follow, but fails to provide her with the support that she needs to carry it out. In fact, such support is crucial because she is leaning on you. Failure to provide her with the support may cause her to lose balance and compromise her dance. When she moves around you, you have to move with her to maintain your support for her. When she moves into you, you have to retreat without losing your support for her. Otherwise she may feel like falling away.
10. Overlooking Ancillary Actions
Most tango steps are made up of a series of actions. For example, executing the ocho at the cruzada includes: unwinding the crossed leg, taking a forward step, swiveling the hips and pivoting, taking another forward step, and swiveling the hips and pivoting again. Each of these actions must be led distinctly. Attempting to compress multiple actions into a single lead makes it difficult for the woman to follow. A beginner tends to focus on the featured steps and overlook the ancillary actions. For example, he leads the woman to take a forward step without unwinding her crossed leg first, or leads her to make a forward step when she is yet to complete her hip rotation.
11. Underdeveloped Musicality
A beginner’s musicality is often crude. He may land her steps on the beat but overlook the timing of her ancillary movements. Returning to the ocho example: he focuses on getting the forward step on time; once it's done, he immediately repeats the process in the opposite direction. While these featured steps might align with the beat, the transitions—hip rotation and pivot—are often off-time. Such lead cannot satisfy a mature follower who expects the leader to handle all aspects of the entire sequence in an exquisite way that every action of the sequence meets the rhythm, melody, speed and mood of the music perfectly. Only in such a fashion dancing tango becomes a real treat.
12. Seeking the Spotlight
Some men treat tango as a stage for self-display, using the woman as a mere prop. They invent more and more flashy movements to attract attention. In my opinion this is a bad trend in social tango today. The man's role is to craft the dance, helping the woman resonate with the music, stirring her emotions, bringing out her best, and letting her fully enjoy dancing with him. Instead of drawing eyeballs to his own performance, he should focus on making her the center of attention. The maturity of a leader is measured by how beautifully his partner dances and how fulfilled she feels—not by his own exhibition (see Partner-Centered Leading vs. Self-Centered Leading).
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"Catch us if you can! We were young with all of our hearts!"
ReplyDeleteMost of us did not start doing the tango in order the get the ocho just right. Most of us saw elegant, dramatic and erotic moves in a performance that took our breath away. Then we take tango lessons and dance among older people who look down their noses at beginners for not doing the details as well as they can, who are quite conservative in their tastes, who are uptight about the eroticism, who are offended when attractive young people look better at the erotic movements than they do, and who are too weak, inflexible, heavy, and cowardly to do the more dramatic moves. You try to get along with the teachers and older established dancers, so you take on some of their cautious attitudes. Then you find you're getting more and more fussy at a very different dance than the one you wanted to do in the first place.
It is impossible to do something bolder or more creative without mistakes. In any creative community (dancers, artists, poets, scholars) there is a playful, tolerant attitude toward people trying new stuff. If you try something that doesn't work, instead of saying you're being egotistical and selfish, they laugh, say good for you, you took risks, and added to the creative possibilities of our community. That conservative "no new movements", (or at least not unless you can do them perfectly) attitude is the death of creativity, evolution and life. It maintains tango as an antiquarian cult.
The idea of dividing tango into social dance and "show" dance trivializes efforts to be more creative and to actually do the dance that we were attracted to in the first place. Performance is not just for tourists. It includes ballet, modern dance, jazz and other rich, culturally important forms. It can be brilliant and revolutionary, changing the way we think. It can give tango dance its Isadora Duncans, Sergei Diaghilevs, Merce Cunnihams and Astor Piazzollas. Tango and dance have always included a conversation between performance and social dance. Both should be respected as spaces in which creativity can take place. That's how art and culture evolve in living ways.
Some ladies like cautious dancing. However, most young ladies love it when you want to do something crazy, at least until the older, cautious ones tut-tut them into submission. Doing bold movements is not selfish. The "tango Nazis" who try to exclude the playful dramatic moves that young people can do are the selfish ones.
Should they run before they can walk? Yes! Young dancers can often learn bold lifts quickly and beautifully, long before they perfect going to the cross. There is no reason to delay teaching a lift to a young, strong, light, flexible dancer. We should learn the bold move while we can. We should not have to wait months or years until we are not physically capable of doing them anymore.
The commercial culture is all about catching and impressing, it promotes constant changes, repackaging, exoticism, "creativity" and "boldness". People grown up in such culture and philosophy exhibit a lack of depth and lasting quality. They confuse bizarreness with beauty, focus too much on flashy forms rather than substances, and constantly seek change and novelty. Commercialism is one of the reasons that get this culture into trouble. Unfortunately, some people don't realize it.
DeleteTango is a creation of modernity - of industrialization that formed a sophisticated, cosmopolitan, urban, working class composed of immigrants from all over the world. It's also a creation of modern mass media - the phonograph and radio - that allowed it to project around the world.
DeleteTango, as you say in your history, went through many changes. It grew and evolved. It has always incorporated outside elements. You point out correctly that the Tango shows overseas - first in the early 20th Century and again in the 1990s revived the tango.Those foreign elements in a way are not foreign at all. They are intrinsic to the tango.
I sympathize with your criticism of commercial culture. However, the modern world has exponentially increased the richness of our culture. There are, as you say, critics of commercial culture who hearken back to "Golden Ages" real and imagined - Luddites, catonists, and plain reactionaries. But at this point that is pretty clearly a dead end. Successful criticism of shallow,exploitative commercial culture is going to have to be creative to survive. Progressives, visionaries, and idealists, who get anywhere look to improving the future, not returning to the past.
Part of the reason creative idealists are more successful is that creativity, innovation, and progress have produced some great things. Some experiments don't work, or are uninspired, but enough of them have been truly inspired that most people see progress as a good thing. I would have to agree with them. Deep, rich modern art forms include modern classical music, jazz, blues, modern dance, jazz dance, movies, architecture, poetry, literature, theater, and so on. Tango is completely part of that. All of these art forms, including tango, have continued to evolve.
You say wisely, in your statement on why people quit tango that we need to be open and tolerant. Part of that is being open to experiments and changes that new members bring.
It especially requires being open to young people. Young people like to experiment. All of these new people will bring new cultural influences, as young people and foreigners have always done in Tango history.
One of the main things young people bring is greater physicality. They bring bigger bolder stuff. They can do it better than older people. We need to encourage young people to join us and to bring their changes, cultural inputs, strength, beauty and exuberance. Let them run. Don't make them slow down to our speed. When we were young we ran hard. We need to give them freedom to do so. Teaching young dancers, I learn more from them than they do from me. We try to catch one another if we can. We play. We enjoy dancing and tango brilliantly.
Most people understand the importance of creativity. But not everyone understands its drawbacks. Every time I bought a smart phone, a smarter one is invented next day. In economic terms this is called "creating demands," so people will throw away their perfectly functional old phones and keep buying new ones. How do you think the natural resources are depleted and the environment destroyed? Human creativity may lead us to a promising future, it may also lead us to destruction, if we think that is the only thing important. Whatever new steps you create, someone will outsmart you the next day, I promise. How do you think you can dance socially if everyone brings his new steps that you don't know?
DeleteOne negotiation between traditional, packed-dance-floor Tango and performance, Nuevo and open-space Tangoes is to acknowledge that the environment in which you are dancing, including social mores, varies a lot, and that dancing sustainably in a specific environment puts limits on what is danced and how.
DeleteIf anyone cries out, "No limits", I'll point at spinal cord damage.