Cadencia

Beginners often assume that dancing to music simply means stepping on the beat, but there’s much more to it. Cadencia—the swaying of the body to the music—is also an important part. Cadencia is one of the foundational skills essential to tango, yet it is frequently overlooked.

To learn to do cadencia, you must first learn to swing your leg. Begin by lifting the hip on the side of your free leg until the leg hangs loose, able to dangle like a pendulum. Keep both the knee and ankle straight so the leg appears long and can swing gracefully. Now, imagine that your leg does not start at the hip but at the chest, that is, visualize everything below your chest as part of your leg. Since the chest is the point of connection with your partner, it can serve as a fixed point to swing everything below as a whole. This not only makes your leg look longer but also gives your entire body a taller, more elegant appearance.

Swinging the body resembles swinging a three-sectioned cudgel. Movement begins with the torso, which propels the hip, and finally drives the leg. In other words, cadencia is a chain reaction. Novices often move their legs from the thigh alone, focusing narrowly on stepping. As a result, there is no cadencia. To produce cadencia, you must initiate the movement with your torso, which in turn swings the hip and leg. Keep your body upright and resilient to achieve a controlled, pendulum-like swing, rather than a fluttering motion like a loose ribbon.

Importantly, the swing is lateral. Many students mistakenly focus on vertical stepping and neglect the crucial side-to-side movement. To create cadencia, concentrate on the body's lateral motion, producing a pulsating rhythm with each step, much like the surging of ocean swells. Each surge propels the body into a swing, and the momentum then reverses, sending the body into the opposite swing. This rhythmic, wave-like motion—like riding a swing—is what cadencia feels like.

Cadencia is a collaborative effort, initiated by the man. Whether the follower’s body swings in time with the music depends partly on the lead. Often, the woman fails to step on the beat because her body is led into swinging too little or too much, too slowly or too quickly, preventing her foot from landing naturally on the beat. An experienced man generates just the right amount of swing to ensure the woman’s foot lands exactly on the beat. Likewise, a skilled woman times the swing of her body to the music as well. She does her part to complement the lead.

While cadencia is used in both social tango and performance tango, it is primarily a social tango technique, designed to enhance the sensual pleasure of the dance rather than creating a visual impression. Both partners must possess matching musicality and balance control to swing together—a skill that requires adequate training. Yet once mastered, the sensation of two connected bodies swinging in perfect harmony with the music transforms the dance into something infinitely more pleasurable. (See Cadencia and the Flow of Tango.)

The following video illustrates this technique:

Related videos:

Cadencia - the pendulum effect

Tango close embrace, connection, cadencia