Creativity and Expression

A friend of mine shared this lovely Milonga with me:

It is a very showy piece of dancing, not to everyone's taste, I am sure. I find it a wonderful milonga, and wish I had the creativity and control on display.

1. As a show piece, I really like the lighting: in the background, you see their whole bodies; in the foreground, you see only knees down, making for an interesting contrast in focus. I don't know how much of that was intentional vs. a happy mistake of the available lighting, but I loved it.
2. I am amazed at their creativity. Practically every 8 measures they change up what they are doing, displaying something new.
3. The showy-ness does not hide underlying musicality and control. Clearly, these dancers know what they are doing (I have never met them personally, so I can't say directly). They are well connected with each other and the music.
4. When the light shows their face -- they are smiling.  They enjoy dancing with each other, they enjoy the response of the crowd, and they enjoy the music. And that makes for a good show.

Hopefully I will someday dance a Milonga with even a small portion of that awesomeness!

Focus, Clarity, and Landing a Partner

My friend Ampster has talked about waiting for the follow to land, and how he uses that to dance. It sparked a chain of thoughts about my own process. My process is not very different really, but:

I always want to know where the follower has their weight. Why? Because a step taken when they are off-balance (or worse, have the wrong leg free) will break connection with the follower, and likely with the music. Maintaining those two things are my main focus (and the source of most of my enjoyment and satisfaction) when I dance. At least so far, the people I dance with seem to appreciate that focus!

This isn't to say that I test each and every step before I take it ... I don't. When I am doing a turn, I might do the whole thing in one smooth motion. I will make sure that my follow *is* ready for that first step, but for the next couple steps, I leave it to some mutual sense of when, how far, and how fast to take additional steps.  I still influence this, of course, by using my chest to direct the movement, the strength of the initial pulse, and keeping my own weight moving through the step. However, the fine control of each step has become, to some extent, muscle memory.

The creation of this muscle memory has lead to nicer dancing. I no longer have to plot out the exact physical instructions for my body to create certain motions, I can think at a high level: 'A step in cross system out of this turn will feel good here', and can enjoy the sensation more easily than when I needed to focus on thinking 'okay, step 18 inches to the left. Twist upper body to signal to follow. Shift my own weight while follow is engaged pivoting ...'. I am exaggerating the thought process some, but I think the sense of it is clear?

This clarity in my own motion also frees me to focus on the follower. By improving my own technique, balance, and 'mind of no mind', I can pay better attention to my partner's weight and balance, and the music.

Hurray!

Confidence and Interpretation

I had a funny exchange Monday night.

Monday night, at the China Harbor milonga, I never felt on. It was a mix of losing my balance, not quite connecting with music, and losing connection with my partner. This part was not funny, but it happens from time to time.

Later in the evening, I was standing at the bar, chatting with some friends (followers, in this case) who made the exact same observation. One of them I had danced with earlier, but added that she really enjoyed my dancing for our dance, it was just her dancing that felt off. And I thought the same: that her dancing was quite nice, even if mine was off.

I guess if we could stop criticizing ourselves, we could just take pleasure from the fact that our partner enjoyed the dance. Not a new realization, but it keeps happening.  I should try actually learning the lesson.

Walking (or Falling)

One area I have trouble with is my walk.

I often lose balance after stepping onto my left foot, requiring a quick step onto the right to keep up. This is made much worse when I have a partner who has any tendency to lean/step that direction. Interestingly, I do not have any problem when stepping backward.

Last Friday morning, I was attending a meditation practice, and as it happened, the practice for the day was walking meditation. With 30 minutes of slowly walking back and forth, focusing on the physical sensations of walking, I discovered two things.

First, that pushing through the step is comfortable, and if I push my center of gravity all the way up over the ball of my foot, I have no balance problems with that step.  I have tried to apply this while dancing, and am making some progress. Focusing on getting my balance all the way there is hard when I'm trying to listen to the music, navigate, and connect!

Second, I during that walking meditation, I also tried letting my hips go to lesser and greater degree, and I learned that that is another way of getting your center of gravity aligned: by letting the left hip out, you shift your center enough to be balanced!

How do the rest of you reach your balance?

(Third: focus on meditation is tough when it's an act I have spent a lot of time attaching other efforts to.  Whew!)

Frustration and Focus

Lately I have been a little unhappy with my dancing. It is rooted in a few things:

•  A normal learning cycle -- learning comes with plateaus. They are valuable, because the plateau allows incorporation of previous. Although it may not feel like you are improving, you are actually moving from conscious to unconscious competence. Being in the plateau is always painful, though ... And the incorporation that happens often (for me) feels like regression, because you are slightly knocked out of comfortable old habits. I have been gradually improving my posture, for instance ... but my back actually complains more, since previously unused muscles are being asked to work.
• Knowing too much -- 'best dancing' is a moving target. As I improve my knowledge of technique, the music, my ability to connect with a follow, I am rewarded with ever more intricate details. Pursuing these more intricate targets requires much harder work for a finer-grained reward. Not only do I have to dance well, but I want my own style. I may be able to lead a step clearly, but is my balance absolutely perfect through every piece of it?
• Lack of time/dedication to practice -- Life is ever changing, of course, and I no longer have as many hours to spend at Milongas and Practicas. Without the near daily dancing I once did, I no longer have sufficient incidental practice time. I am also not making dedicated practice time or space. As a result, I am not improving as quickly as before. Lack of progress, and the knowledge that I lack enough dedication to practice, both frustrate me.

This unhappiness leads me to focus more (too much, probably) on my own dancing while leading. This is a dangerous thing to do, as putting too much focus on myself limits my ability to connect, and at an extreme, would make my follows feel like they were dancing by themselves.

I don't think things have gotten quite that bad, luckily.

Finding the Embrace

I enjoyed reading Ampster's thoughts on developing his embrace, and it reminded me of my own process.

Entrega
Everyone travels their own path, and mine started with this.  I have always been known as a good hugger*, and to apply my terrible spanish, it is due to Entrega: A good hug involves surrendering to your partner.  Opening your heart, listening to their body, and embracing. I have understood this part of Tango, and people have always responded positively to me. Improving my connection to the music, to the love of the dance itself, has taken time, but understanding the connection with the other person has been there.

What made this difficult? Two things:

1. Surrendering to strangers is harder than surrendering to friends -- I still have to work on opening up with new partners.
2. Confidence in my ability. I have been confident about hugging for a long time. Less so with Tango. It is very difficult for me to surrender when I don't feel confident in my self. I did not go social dancing for about a year after starting regular tango classes (maybe 2-3 times in that year), and this lack of confidence was reflected in a stiffer embrace, too much thought about my own motion, and not enough listening to my partner.

As my confidence improved, my ability to listen farther than my own feet grew. As I started dancing more, more dancers became my friends, and I grew better at opening myself up to strangers ... at least for 15 minutes at a time.

Beginning the Song

With the above in mind, I was doing my best at really communicating with my partner. Interpreting the music, suggesting it, listening for a response, and moving together. Then, I happened to take a workshop on starting and finishing songs, and it added a very important piece for me: the embrace (not only the physical part, but the connection between dancers) is the most important part of an enjoyable dance, at least for me. If this is so, I should spend as much time as necessary to establish a good connection!

Therefore, I now almost always begin my dances in the same way. I offer my left hand, shoulder height, for the follow to take, and then move together for the embrace.  I like to hold all the way across the back, just below the shoulders; this changes depending on the height of the follower, of course. I usually connect at the sternum or just below it; I have been losing a lot of weight recently, which has caused my point of connection to move upward!

This is the 'starting embrace', and I pause here, waiting for the music, or the right moment in it, to begin.

While paused, any adjustments necessary get made, and I like to close my eyes, to focus only on the follow. We are not moving, and may not have entered the pista yet, so I don't fear running into anything. I try to still my thoughts, until I can feel my heartbeat, and that of my follow. I try, for lack of a better description, to feel how warm the follow is, and wrap a little closer, or give more space, depending on it.

Having finished this, waited for the music, I now enter the dance. Usually with a side step. And now the real embrace is ready: somehow, despite all the above work, it is only after we take our first step in the dance that everything shakes out. We pause again, to adjust and re-affirm. Even though only one step, it lets us read whether the other person is in time with the music, and how responsive they are to a suggestion.

And then we go!

** Here is my advice for hugging:

1. Connect with your whole front ('stomach', I often say, but it shouldn't be pushed out). Don't bend forward at the waist.
2. Movement is not necessary -- no patting, shuffling, etc. A little rocking/rotation can be nice, but don't overdo it.
3. You shouldn't squeeze them, but you should be able to feel the embrace. (Some people do like squeezing, but it imparts a different feel)
4. Close your eyes.
5. Hold the person until one of you has had enough.

Held Closely

It's still early, and the floor is empty. Lights are low, the space is warm, and we are dancing. With this song, and this partner, holding you close, carefully, listening to your every response is the dance. We are surrounded with a lush, melodic sound, lifting us around the floor on its crest.

What a great night! Ended perhaps early, but on a high note.

Nuevo and Traditional Dancing

In many areas, I am fairly evenly split between encouraging innovation, and respecting tradition. To frame my thoughts, let me define the arguments for each:

• Tradition is valuable because it is already the distilled result of much innovation. Collective wisdom has already emphasized the most useful and valuable aspects, and to ignore tradition is to throw away years of innovation.
• Innovation is valuable because there may exist a better way to do something. Although many things may have been tried before, circumstances change. Given my personal preferences, something which has traditionally not been enjoyable/possible, may be a huge improvement.

And more particularly with tango, we have some social aspects to consider:

1. As a group activity, doing unexpected or possibly dangerous things will forcibly effect those around me. Sudden ganchos, long corridas, or changes of direction can be confusing to dancers trying to navigate with or around me. Tradition plays an important role in creating the shared framework we use to dance with each other.
2. On a smaller level, tradition improves connection with a (new) dance partner: we can focus on a communally chosen set of signals to use in our dance, and not have to interpret sudden new movements on the fly. Some might choose this as a challenge, but not everyone will.
3. There is social pressure to 'fit in'.  This goes both ways, of course: if the majority of a group favors a traditional style, those showing new movements will be frowned on, but the reverse is also true.
4. Some change is necessary to keep a community alive.

There is a nice discussion of Nuevo Tango here, also, talking about some of the same area: innovation is not a new phenomenon, and established tango already includes much of what is being re-discovered, evaluated, and perhaps discarded again.

I personally have a lot of fun in trying out new ideas.  I do this usually while dancing (at a practica, and with a partner whom I know enjoys it). I don't usually take the further step of braking down the possible motion into it's components, or really understanding the body mechanics behind it, but if a motion seems particularly enjoyable (or, at least, possibly enjoyable after some more practice!) I will do so.

My actually dancing evolves only very slowly, though; I rarely incorporate things that I 'tinker' with into my dancing at a milonga. That is not to say there is no effect: my understanding of my body, how my lead is recieved, and in some cases my skill at conveying those signals are all improved by focusing on an unused aspect.

Plus, it is fun.

Dancing Style and Geography

I'm in Portland this weekend. Although I did not make it out dancing, I have in the past, and it always fascinates me that the dancing is so different between Portland and Seattle.

I should probably not be surprised, as most instructors I have learned from seem to work very hard to establish a unique style. It seems to follow from this that the 'local' dancing in a city would depend a lot on the local instructors. However ... there is a fair variety of approach, even in a relatively small place like Portland, and there is also a fair amount of exchange and travel between here and Seattle. And yet, it took me quite a while (if I have yet figured it out) how to give dancer's in Portland as nice a dance as I might in Seattle.

What is the difference? I probably don't do it justice, but mainly: Portland prefers a lighter approach to leading, with a very light embrace, and the follow free to turn inside it. Seattle seems to like a little more grounded-ness, with a firmer embrace. Not everyone is the same, and each city has follows who like either style, but that is broadly what I have encountered. My dancing has probably gradually shifted somewhere in the middle of those.  I now try to feel out where my follow likes to be in that spectrum, and adjust my embrace and lead as appropriate.

I haven't danced much outside of these two cities, and I look forward to encountering new styles and habits!

Practicing at Practicas

Last night, I participated in a discussion about the Seattle tango community: where it is at; where it might be headed; where it should be headed.

Among many interesting topics and points of view, we talked about the problem of allowing for practice time. Of course, solo time is available, but generally, you may not have a floor that is good for it, or a partner to dance with, or a music system sufficient to bring across all the intricacy in the music.

Thus, a practica.

However, at least in seattle, practica's are treated as social dances instead of practice time. There is some shading of practice: people will stop and work on steps together, there may be no cortinas between tandas, and people are a little dressed down. Mostly, though, people will dance with a person, in the round, for 4 or 5 songs, thank each other, and then go look for the next social dance.

So how to run a practica that allows for and encourages a teaching atmosphere?

1. Set it up with that expectation (the goal of this practica is for experienced dancers to work with newer dancers)
2. Adjust incentives to encourage this: free for experienced dancers, not-free for new ones (or any other incentive scheme one could dream up. Perhaps sign-ups for the 'experienced dancers' list? With some sort of reward/ranking scheme to determine if/when they get to sign up again?)
3. Make dancing the room impossible -- break it up into 2 or more small spaces, with plenty of room for dancing in place, working out a movement, thinking about the music, but not to be swept into a dance around the room when you hear your favorite Canaro song. (2 spaces will turn into one dance, and one practice, possibly)
4. The music can't be too good. The songs chosen can all be good, of course, but the flow of music can not encourage runs of dancing

The focus on the music really stuck with me, and has me thinking about what songs I would pick to encourage practice, but not dancing. Depending on the particular practice goals, of course, some music will be more suitable than others. Or perhaps there could be some work on orchestra's, so all music for the first hour will be D'Arienzo, then we switch to Pugliese. Or what have you.