[Tango-L] What Does It Take to Dance Tango?

[astrid]

> I'm curious, are there a lot of people (outside of
> BsAs) whose only real
> dance experience is tango?

I did Russian Ballet for 6 months when I was 7; that
torture put me off any kind of dancing for the
following 40 years.

I think, I got about 6 months of ballet lessons when I was five and then
that school went out of business. I felt no interest to continue elsewhere
and noone made me. Learning the five basic standing positions did not spark
my interest, it alll seemed rather weird and incomprehensible to me at that
age. Recently I have been told by a ballerina friend that some of those
positions should not even be taught to small kids.

 I came to tango with 2 left feet
some thirteen years ago and am still finding out that
I have a hell of a lot to learn, but I feel no
compulsion to learn any other dance.

I did not have two left fet but I had never worn heels higher than 4cm
before. I had tweo weeklend workshops of foxtrot, jive, valse and chachacha
down my belt and that was ages ago. And yes, I did feel a "compulsion" to
learn this dance, the first formal dance I ever studied.
>
I have now been teaching tango for around 9 years and
have found empirically that the most gifted tango
students were those who had no previous dancing
experience, the basic reason being that they bring no
bad habits.

I brought the habit of wanting to move to the music, wanting to interpret it
in my way, as I had always done before with other music, and teachers
complained a lot that I kept trying to "dance on my own". I  complained a
lot that the male beginners kept mishandling my body, and that I had to keep
following people more clueless than myself. .

The most difficult ones have been ballroom
dancers, with their compulsive hyperlordosis, begging
for a slipped disc. Yes, the best background is to
know how to walk....

Well... the walk is not the same.
Now I learn belly dancing, too, and since I started taking tribal bellydance
lessons too which ask for an awful lot of female muscle power and body
control, my tango improves dramatically with every tribal lesson I take. The
men in tango noticed the difference as soon as I started. And the money I
spend on those extra lessons is probably mostly what I save now on back and
foot massages, I don't need those anymore.

Astrid