[Tango-L] Leading Cross(es)

[ceverett@ceverett.com]

On Fri, 24 Aug 2007 16:24:01 -0400, "Jake Spatz (TangoDC.com)"
<spatz at tangoDC.com> said:
>
> My current view on "the code," for what it's worth, is that the only 
> thing a woman should do automatically is _change weight when she does 
> cross_. I've resisted committing to this, but after several months (6+) 
> of playing around, I've come to conclude that it's much easier on both 
> dancers if she simply changes feet. Preventing that change is much 
> easier and clearer than leading it, in most cases.

In general, two principles best support accelerated learning in tango:
working at the edge of your abilities and using what you already know in
new contexts.  Because I am as lazy as they come, I make very heavy use
of the second principal (which has a corollary: the order in which you
learn things matters very, very much).

The cross is a pretty simple thing and was thought out 50 years ago at
least, and the investigators back then came to the opposite conclusion
as you.

Since the revival of tango in the 80's, the cross usually has been
taught to beginning dancers in both normal and cross foot systems in a
way that forces an automatic weight change.  Followers then get in the
habit of changing weight automatically, and usually they can't help
rushing the cross, at least in the beginning.  Even worse, beginning
followers usually end up puttin the left foot down flat, ball and heel
at the same time, which makes the change of weight pretty much
instantaneous.  This leads to ruinous assumptions on the leaders part
about what must happen during the cross.

As a result, unlearning the automatic change of weight took me months,
being much aggravated by the fact that all of the follows I was working
with at the time had the auto-change-of-weight-on-the-cross habit to
unlearn at the same time.  The crucial piece of knowledge came during a
private lesson with Mimi Santapa last summer, but my intellectual
understanding comes from working with Florencia Taccetti over the last
year.

Consider what IMO should happen during the change of weight when not
crossing: the weight goes onto the ball of the foot first, then the foot
articulates backwards, until the weight split between the heel and the
ball of the foot, then the weight continues past the heel as the next
step begins.  (Side Note: followers who don't use their heels, will lean
forward and reach back with their feet, and usually end up hanging off
the leads right shoulder, Bad Thing.  Leads who don't lead their
followers onto their heels before leading the next step back, force
followers into the invidious position of having to do the wrong thing
just to survive, Even Worse Thing.  Either way, 100% of the time on the
balls of the toes makes followers far heavier and harder to move than
need be.)

In the context of the cross, the follower should maintain the same
habits.  In that case the ball of the followers left foot would touch
ground well in back of the ball of the right foot, with the heel up, the
left knee bent and lined up in front of the right knee, and the left
calf firmly pressed against the right shin.  When the change of weight
is led, the follower's left knee straightens to take the weight, and the
heel will go down to help support the weight.  As the weight goes onto
the left foot, left calf stays pressed against the right shin as the the
right leg softens, so at some point the right foot is freed up and pops
loose.  If the weight shift happens fast enough, the right leg can come
out from the cross fast enough to make the cross in double-time very
easy for followers.  IN other words, we engineer it so there is a bit of
resistance to crossing automatically.

This has 2 advantages.  First, the nice habits followers learn for
walking backwards are reused for the cross, so there's no unlearning
that needs to happen; we're just adding enough to to deal with the new
context. Second, this allows enough of a barrier to crossing
automatically, that the change must be led explicitly, and gives the
leader all the tactile feedback he needs to lead the weight change in a
calibrated way.  Thus all the possibilities after the cross become much
more accessible.

Jeez, I'm getting verbose in my old age.

Christopher