Vaggelis Hatzopoulos & Marianna Koutandou
Helping your partner relax in your embrace
For the women, when you dance with a beginner, try not to do adornos. The capacity of leaders of absorbing, understanding, and then acting upon information in the beginning is limited. Try to give him less information to process, to make it more simple. This lets beginner leaders relax.
For the leaders, you have to be relaxed. If my partner feels I am relaxed, she relaxes, if she feels I am tense, she gets tense.
If you are relaxed and you feel she is a bit nervous, make pauses, stop moving, take a breath in, breath out, and make sure that she feels that also (from the movement of your body, pleeease don’t blow air in her ear). If she realizes that you are doing it for her, she can choose to use that cue to do it as well, and that relaxes her also.
Another thing you can do as a leader is to re-embrace; open your hand and re-embrace during a pause.
If your follower is less advanced, try to not dance with her at her limit, but a bit lower than that. Even if you choose to take her to her limits, then go down again. Give her time to listen to the music, to breathe, to play with her legs, don’t go fast, so she has time to focus.
Also, give compliments. Both men and women need compliments. If you see a guy making a nice enrosque, you need to understand that this guy took a class on enrosques, that he tried to learn it, so when he does it and does it nicely to the music, feel free to say “Eso!, nice!”. The guys almost always give a smile and relax. He feels nice, he did well, he relaxes.
Moreover, feel free, after the dance, or between the songs, if you truly believe it, to simply tell her/him: “Ohh, I love your embrace, it feels nice.”
Try to “give some confidence.” Many men try to impress women sometimes, and maybe something simple like “nice move” or “nice embrace” can make their night. Being honest is important; we are not asking you to express something you are not feeling. But if you do feel it, isn’t it beautiful to let another person for a moment think: “I am not doing badly, (s)he is having a good time.” What a gift!
Sophia Luisa Paul
The third dimension and how it can help followers suggest pauses and time duration
There is always a lot to say when it comes to the magical word “connection” in tango. We can talk about technical connection, musical connection, emotional connection… Here I just want to focus on one small point, but it can give our dance a lot more awareness – the “third dimension.”
While dancing, we usually care more about the two dimensions: “left – right” and “forward – backward”. But there is also the “up – down” dimension. This third dimension is basically formed by how we use our knees and ankles. Coordinating the flexo-extension and its timing together, as a couple, improves our technical connection. We are then able to use it for musical expression as well (Julio Cesar Calderon is explaining that in his chapter).
Special Tip for advanced followers: If you use the knowledge about the third dimension, it will help you to suggest pauses and their time duration. Let me explain that a bit. Usually, we are using an upturned intention to close a movement. To initiate a movement, we are using – besides the direction we want to move – a (slightly) downward intention. So if you want to suggest a pause after a side step, for example, use the same intention the leader would use: upturned intention to generate the pause, downward intention to propose the next step. Some easy situations to try out this concept are side steps (the typical Apertura), backward Ochos to the close side of the embrace, and Paradas.