This waving arms/upper body training is entirely for developing musicality in me, to create an intense bond between my inner and the music and to HEAR more. To use whole body is too rough. With arms, hands and fingers I can express much more detailed the sounds I hear, variation in length, dynamics, emotional load and so on...
Somewhere in life I lost my childhood ability to memorize/recognize music but when I SEE my hands doing same kind of movements as for a while ago I understand that here I have the part A again! It seems to stimulate my totally rusty musical memory and give me back fragments of that ability. It helps me also to hear more - even my musically well educated friends start to use their body when they want to sort out a difficult part of music.
I feel that as a leader I need a strong own musicality so it can get my body to move as well as my follower's.
Thanks for an interesting insight. I can't help thinking though that what you
are seeking is a conscious and thinking ability to hear the music whereas
in (social) dance what you need is a sub-conscious, almost intuitive ability.
I never lost the musical interest, it never has been on a technical
level, but I'd lost the ability to move and discovered it again through
the medium of other dances before tango. My experience is that there is
little reason to separate the moving from the musical and both can be
acquired together. That doesn't teach you to dance in partnership but
by bringing your best of musical movement to the partnership you can
concentrate on finding out what can and cannot be done together.
Ameanabar doesn't teach dance but exclusively musicality in his book. Though some steps are needed to test/show the phenomenons :smile:
So it's a non-dancing professor of music teaching musical appreciation
to dancers?
I understand his idea here is that a couple doesn't need to take all the steps simultaneusly but some of the musical elements can be expresed by follower and the next notes by the leader but the whole song is still a shared experience.
It's an academic tango of the performing visual arts and of choreography.
What I've seen in the example is an unhelpful distraction.
They are dancing open, there is no (physical) connection, they move, then
she dances alone, they move and she dances alone again. he is little more
than a support mechanism. She grasps his upper right arm. they have toned
left (man) and right arms as another support frame. He doesn't seem to be
leading though it is a choreographed demonstration.
The tango of my preference is the shared dancing of the senses and the
music together in the moment. As is often the case here, your idea of tango
and mine are not the same.
It's perverse that tango, once criticised by ballroom onlookers in lands afar
from Buenos Aires as being too close, too sensual, even too sexy, has been
physically desensualised by Argentines themselves in order to sell a
diluted visual expression of tango overseas and to bring in tourist revenue.
