[Tango-L] the fear of close embrace

[Tine Herreman]

I don't know where you guys live that you see only performance teachers.
Basics are plentiful here in NYC. Just this month we have Maria
Olivera & Gustavo Saba, Maxi Gluzman. Melina and Detlef pass through
now and then, how basic can you get hehe. We have Robin Thomas who
travels, and many others who make the basics fun for students.
Teachers of all stripes will be happy to teach fundamentals IF THE
ORGANIZER ASKS THEM TO. Heck, at the Baltimore Tango Element of all
places, I took basics from Sebastian & Mariana (musicality and timing
in a fwd ocho with a corte), Silvina and Oliver (milonga basics), and
Pablo & Noelia (embellishments and an easy cool 2 fwd and 1sidestep
pattern). Chicho, eeh not so basic :).
I am an organizer of a festival. I have over the years seen 2500
participants choose an average of 4 classes each. What goes fastest is
whizzbang moves for intermediate to interm-adv. The basics classes
fill up only when the whizzbang ones are sold out. What to do? The
whole idea is to have fun, not to legislate how other people dance.
Many of you took classes from the sequins types, and with the years
and the miles came the wisdom that less is more. Without the more, you
might not have arrived at less at all. You would have been bored out
of your minds as beginners doing nothing but shuffling along in a
practice embrace to scratchy music with a doubtful beat, lesson after
lesson, wondering whatever on earth you thought was so exciting about
the Argentine Tango. The sandwich-stepover-static gancho combo looked
like a real thrill then!! Now on the other side of same, you sniff and
roll your eyes, and walk to the music, and it's good.
So anyway, my request to the teachers I book for festivals is to sneak
in solid basics, proper turns and musicality, and top it off with the
promised whizzbang move (done better thanks to those basics). So far,
not a single complaint.

T

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 1:53 AM, Jack Dylan <jackdylan007 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> In my experience, it's very difficult to find ... "traveling teachers who
> insistently teach solid, clean basics". That's because most {all?]
> traveling teachers are also performers and they don't dance social
> tango.
>
> And what's more basic than the embrace? I've been to Buenos Aires
> where pretty much all the ladies in the milongas drape their left arm
> around the man's shoulders. But In my community there's now an
> epidemic amongst the ladies to adopt an embrace where her left
> hand is in the middle of the man's back or even lower. They copy
> this from the traveling teachers.
>
> But, surely, it needs 2 to make an embrace and now it feels like
> I'm embracing the lady but she's not embracing me. All the 'feeling'
> is gone.
>
> Jack
>
>