[Tango-L] Leading with hands... and even legs

[Alexis Cousein]

Chris, UK wrote:
> OK, some dancers report that good social dancers do not lead with their 
> hands, others report that they do.
> 
> But look, the "don't" reports come from people who have felt it. Whereas 
> the "do" reports come from people who have seen it, e.g. 
> 
There's also some semantic confusion. Obviously, when you don't
have chest contact, your arms and hands are engaged in leading
because they're your points of contact. Leading from the chest
through telepathic means isn't a very successful method.

That isn't "leading with the hand or arm", though - that arm
or hand forms part of a frame that has some rigidity, i.e.
doesn't move of its own accord, but merely by the way it
is connected to you (and your chest).

The "leading with the hand" that is frowned upon is trying to
dissociate the hand and arm from the rest of your body and
doing something with them (trying to force the follower to move)
that is *independent* of the movement of the leader himself,
when there is absolutely no need for it.

In some moves, the leader and follower change their relative
position (and doing so is excrutiatingly difficult to get
absolutely right).

And there you could say that the arms
do "lead" something of their own, which is precisely how much
room the follower gets to fill, and the angle she's expected
to have with respect to the follower (you can "close" or "open"
the side connection at the right of the leader/left of the
follower, and the leader does that by changing the way *his*
arms are positioned with respect to his body).

But it still is never the "hand" that moves
independently, but *both* arms that change their position
with respect to the leader's chest in a very precise way -
your arms are still very much connected to the rest of
your body.

In other words, hands and arms only lead by the space they
leave to the follower, as a natural extension of the rest
of the leader's body - they *NEVER* independently try to move
the follower on their own.

-- 
Alexis Cousein                                al at sgi.com
Solutions Architect/Senior Systems Engineer   SGI
--
Bad grammar makes me [sic].