[Tango-L] Leading with the heart and the core

[Myk Dowling]

David Thorn wrote:
  > A "non-arm" pickup can be executed by my matching her turn rate and
> stepping directly in with an on-body pickup.  Yes, my arms encircle her 
> at the same time, but the required arm pressure is no more than is found 
> in many an orco cortado executed with energy  (Susanna Miller refers to 
> this as "the lady gets to fly" and considers it a good and a fun thing.)

Thank you for proving my point. "The _required_ arm pressure".

> Rock'n'roll dances (which I never do!), yes.   Lindy, sometimes.  Good 
> balboa, no.  Even though in Lindy, and to a lesser extent in Balboa, the 
> connection may be carried through the arms, the lead nearly always comes 
> from the core and NOT the arms.  Even most close embrace tango dancers 
> hold each other with their arms when they are actually dancing (as 
> opposed to practicing) and thus a part of the connection is through the 
> hands and arms.

Which is what I'm saying! The chest is the root of all leads. The arms 
assist in communicating the intention. Personally I quite dislike the 
term "the lead comes from the core". It has no intrinsic meaning in 
everyday language. Everyone interprets it differently. Some people take 
it to the extreme and think it means that the arms are completely 
irrelevant. Others seem to take a metaphysical meaning and use their 
arms a lot while claiming that their lead is "from the heart".

>  > So you use your arms for _maintaining the connection_!
> 
> No.  Maintaining contact.  The "connection" in the sense of any pressure 
> is gone.  It is to let the follow know where I am at so that she can 
> manage her own turn, but NOT so that I can control, guide or direct her 
> turn in the least.

And so we fail again in communicating while using what we think are the 
same terms. I don't consider "connection" to imply control. I think 
connection is what makes it dancing together rather than dancing near 
someone. Although if you are doing it so that she can "manage" her turn, 
isn't that guiding her turn?

> Country-western, salsa, rock and roll, etc - arm leads.  The true swing 
> dances, body leads.

I don't believe there's a simple cut-off. It's not a binary position. 
There's a range of varying amounts of both arm and body usage. Some 
dances use a lot of one and very little of the other, while others use a 
closer mix of the two.

Nuevo seems to use more arms than "traditional" tango (where 
"traditional" means the common forms of social tango which are 
definitely "not nuevo"). That doesn't mean that nuevo is like salsa or 
rock and roll. It's still definitely tango.

Myk,
in Canberra