This is the correct way to lead boleos for EVERY embrace and style. Arm lead boleos hurt.
Bad habits?
- Thread starter itwillhappen
- Start date
LadyLeader
Forum Master
I agree but in workshops and some practicas or informal milongas I have to cope with the differences!
Most teachers here train the students in close embrace technique first and the back contact skill is activated much later if ever.
Every person has their own way of moving and preferences. My issue is with self-imposed limitations on learning. The old milongueros didn’t have the opportunities to travel or learn from the internet like we do. They danced what they learned locally.
my grandmother was great at knitting. She could do all kinds of cables and stitches. However she never had opportunities to learn lace or colour work. So her knitting was limited to basic socks and cabled sweaters. If she was alive today she could get all kinds of tutorials for fair-isle and elaborate garments.
No? I’m trying to remember arm led tango moves and all I can come up with right now is a travel turn soltada.
Colgadas also require arm support but they’re led from the torso
This is an issue of teachers neglecting follower technique.
opendoor
Forum Master
How can followers learn when no support is offered?
JournalInTime
Forum Master
That's exactly my point . . .
Followers often interpret, "You own and control your own axis," as, "You must never lean on any part of your partner." Hang off of, drag down, or depend on? No. Lean into and fill out all sides of? Essential to tango!
In speaking with followers, I've learned that many were never told that it's possible to own and control their axis while filling out and accepting support from all sides of the embrace. An exercise that my coach and another of my teachers had us do was: (1) have my partner totally round out and fill my embrace, accepting its support, and (2) on a secret signal, have me simply let go, to confirm that my partner is standing on her own. This teaches how to share weight yet hold yourself up . . . which I grant seems paradoxical, like much in tango.
Anyway, standing on your own without accepting support, you lose much of the information in the abrazo, which is transmitted by multiple points of contact. That's why I have such a dislike for the very upright, semi-distanced salon style. Yes, it's surely possible to use the embrace in that style – see any number of YouTube demos by really awesome dancers! It's just much harder, which is why you mostly see it in YouTube videos by really awesome dancers.
Closing things up and sharing weight simplifies the process, though yes, it also demands confidence in your partner's stability and both people being able to remain upright if that stability goes away for whatever reason.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
Maybe . . .
There are certainly far too many teachers who mostly teach leaders, focusing on cool leader stuff!
At the same time, I've been in almost as many classes where the focus was purely on follower technique, yet the followers were unwilling to trust the leaders enough to learn. Specifically, classes where the theme was how the follower can use the embrace, but where most of the followers were unwilling to trust the leaders not to drop them, not realizing that the point of the lesson was to learn not to let that happen regardless of the leader's skills. Whereupon the class became one on leader technique, to assure the followers present that the leaders would be stable.
So, although there are teachers who don't teach follower technique, there are also too many followers who don't like to hold themselves up because they find it fun to let the leader do that.
That isn't hypothetical. I've had followers outright say that they're so happy that I'm stable and fairly strong, because that way they can float around and do fun things instead of worrying about standing up. I suspect that there's a certain customer-driven (i.e. financial) motivation to teach leaders to be barres and poles so that followers can hang off them. To the untrained eye, that's what all the fancy high legs of professionals seem to demand, though after seeing my coach do things like pirouette on standing splits, I realize that all those pros have done the hard work of stretching and balancing.
Anyway, standing on your own without accepting support, you lose much of the information in the abrazo, which is transmitted by multiple points of contact. That's why I have such a dislike for the very upright, semi-distanced salon style. Yes, it's surely possible to use the embrace in that style – see any number of YouTube demos by really awesome dancers! It's just much harder, which is why you mostly see it in YouTube videos by really awesome dancers.
The point of that style isn't to embrace, it's to show how elegantly you can walk when you don't have a pesky partner getting in your way
JournalInTime
Forum Master
I know you're right.The point of that style isn't to embrace, it's to show how elegantly you can walk when you don't have a pesky partner getting in your way
And to be fair, that game totally works at the milonga.
My partner dances with soft knees, moderately low to the ground rather than super-tall. She rarely lifts her feet high – she interprets boleos as rebotes at floor level unless she's completely certain, after me having turned to show her, that there is nobody in the danger zone. While she embellishes a lot, she does not use flicks and kicks, but small ankle crosses, tiny step triplings, and the like. Her most extravagant pasadas don't go above knee level. This works well for us, because we often dance where a 15-centimetre displacement is a big step.
Many followers here, I would say most, were taught to dance straight-legged and tall. Every boleo grabs air, every step has a flick, every pasada is stork-legged. Lead a small step and they project a medium one; lead a medium one and they project a large one. It's very much the demonstrative, El Mundial style, which is the rage here.
Guess who gets invited more? The women who take huge steps and play "the floor is lava." My girlfriend is regularly frustrated by this, because teachers consistently compliment her on her technique but leaders would just as soon dance with a showboat.
I try to support her (emotionally) with my partner choices: I know right away that if I'm glued practically collarbones to hips to a person, and we're creating an "A" or really an inverted "Y" (⅄) shape, yet I feel their presence most strongly in the back of the embrace, that I can dance with this person like I do with my partner. That dancer goes on my "invite again" list. Whereas I avoid the princesses who prefer to air-walk.
But it does feel as though the goal of a lot of dancers at the milonga isn't to dance agreeably within the abrazo this tanda with this person, but to show off the goods to those outside to attract interest for the next tanda with the next person.
She'd probably be disappointed by the experience of dancing with those leaders anyway.
I'm personally fine dancing with large and open if there's space, but in that case I want to dance plenty of free leg interactions in the parada-barrida-sacada-gancho complex, not walk around while the follower does random adornos that don't have much to do with the music
JournalInTime
Forum Master
It depends on the specific leader. There are certain leaders who used to invite her, a good number of whom are less experienced dancers (she even accompanied a few through their low-level lessons), who have since acquired a taste for dancing with showoffs. She knows they don't have to dance that way, but that's all they want to do. So, I guess it stings a bit that they've stopped inviting her.
Which is interesting, because all of my instruction, ever, has said that that family of movements works better the closer you are. I find that to be the case, too. Ganchos from another time zone, especially, are foreign to me, as I was taught that they're something that happens as one leg literally brushes over another in contact at super-close range.
There we agree. I really dislike the follower habit of an aerial faux-boleo style leg flick in stepping. I like steps to stay below the waist and ideally the knee. One woman I've danced with got her heel up so high on plain old walking steps and turns that I could see it over her shoulder.
Mr. Moustachio
Active Member
If you want to influence future dancers, you should teach.
Tango is not mathematics. There are no answers in the back of the book. Subject matter expertise is necessary. Being an ineffective teacher is only part of the problem. The more significant problem is the material being taught. Don't teach things you don't want to see on the dancefloor (e.g.: the 8-count basic step). Teach lead-follow from day 1. Do teaching from a human resources training & development viewpoint. Your students are both your milonga customers and your unpaid taxi dancers. What do you teach your taxi dancers so that your customers keep coming back?
So, what happens when this guy heads off to someone else who teaches the bad habits you hate? You haven't done yourself or your prospective student a favor.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
You've said in the past that you're pretty sure you know who I am. If so, then you'll know I'm not ready to teach . . . If nothing else, I haven't been around for long enough to go around taking money from actual teachers who've paid their dues. I have strong views of what I like, but those are as a social dancer.
And this is not laziness. I'm itching for a "side hustle" and would really love for it to be related to tango. I'd do the work. I simply don't believe I'm credible after a scant decade.
To be clear: My father taught the kind of math that wasn't about answers in the back of a book. Specifically theory. On that note, I think that an excellent teacher with years of experience being shuttled from topic to topic could research tango theory and then give a decent class on it. One of the problems I see in tango classes is the total absence of theory and obsessive focus on doing. Most dancers could use a much bigger dose of theory, but that's a hard sell to people who sign up for what's often seen as a physical activity.
it's not a zero sum game, people who start up new classes can bring new people into the community and/or fill niches that the existing teachers aren't reaching.