The Booty Misconception
- Thread starter TomTango
- Start date
Of course it all depends on how you want to dance;
that is your choice, she would not be mine nor their style.
However this post was about butts and posture. In my view,
and that of many others, there is nothing "proper" about
Noelia's and Maja's posture and they are in fact an indication
of other problems. Accordingly I don't think they are good
examples to follow and promote.
There doesn't seem to be even any dissension amongst posture "experts"
on the net and certainly not amongst practitioners of Pilates, Alexander
and Feldenkrais, physiotherapists in general and their writers.
Angel HI
Well-Known Member
This raises all kinds of question that probably should be left it alone.
Technique should be mapped to other areas not copied.
e.g. if you play tennis at the squash field you might seriously injure someone.
What is dangerous with Noelia's posture is that people try to copy the posture,
but they are not aware how to use it properly and get injured.
And then Noelia (Maja) ... is guilty for that.
There is a saying in Croatian (literally)
A frog saw horse getting a horse shoe so it raised its foot.
TomTango
Active Member
People don't realize the prominent booty is a side effect of other postural things she's doing, not the main point. So they stick their butt out without all of the other necessary adjustments, turn their back into an "S", and get lower back pain.
Same for leads. I tried to hinge forward at the waist for a while not realizing what it looked like leads I saw were doing wasn't what they actually were doing.
Why ever not? Isn't a discussion like this, and maybe the provocative
(in the sense of provoking comment and/or thought) comments like mine,
the point of a forum? Funny isn't it, I found this forum, years ago now,
while looking for clues as to what the dance could be. Based on other
research, much experimentation and practice I eventually ended up
disagreeing with most of what was being written at the time.
I can certainly agree that pelvic positioning is a complex area
to discuss partly because we all have different experiences
and partly because we are all in different states of bodily fitness.
I would recommend that anyone interested reads Eric Franklin's
writings on the pelvic floor, pelvic positioning (and tilt), the supporting
deep core muscles and all their contributions to centering.
His dance orientated contributions need interpretation because
much of it is really aimed at other professional dance forms.
Tango is a complex subject with its wide open interpretations and
its variations makes certainties difficult. May that long continue.
The ballroom industry resolved the same problem decades ago
which resulted in the standardised pattern dances of today.
Moving on . . . .
Well of course I would argue that this posture is unnatural
and rather dangerous in the long term to copy. In fact if
someone in normal life has this posture it would be regarded
by some as at best less than ideal and worst as indicative
of other muscular or even structural problems. Or maybe
simply the result of poor musculature support as a result
of a sedentary lifestyle and at least that can be rectified.
I think we disagree there. Whatever postural thing she might be doing
is probably counter to being centered and seems very artificial. To tilt forward
the pelvis to find space for the feet results in a prominent butt (that may be
merely a consequential sideshow) and a break in the internal communication
of the body. That's besides the resultant possibly long term route to back
pain as it becomes ingrained in their bodies. Perhaps we should ask why such
dancers feel the need to hold themselves like that when Argentine social
dancers who dance of hours per day have no need to do so.
Although dance trainers may talk about isolations and tango practitioners
talk about dissociation the real world body is a complex structure of bones
and interdependent muscular structures. Change one thing which affects
something else, improve one thing and find that you can do something new
with another or you expose another different weakness to yourself.
As above, but why attempt it?
Static posture is unnatural but used in dynamic way it can be really natural.
You are bashing Noelia of your background.
And don't even think of dancing of someone with that way.
I was dancing with a professional dancer many times and she doesn't have any problems.
We're talking about Noelia because the original poster
has used Noelia in support of his argument. I have
refrained from bashing her restricting my comments
to those about posture. If you want me to move off-topic
on to connection and her dance, I could but not here.
Come on, you cannot know who or how I have danced.
In fact I came to tango via other dances and first learnt
from an overtly show dancer. Rejecting that style, and his 8 count
basic teaching, I learned from two Salon dancers who claimed
to teach an authentic tango.
It wasn't really although it had elements.
Then I went on a voyage of discovery for some time
and made up my own mind. Tango allows that.
I certainly have danced with people like Noelia,
it's a personal choice to prefer not to repeat it.
Not to labour the point, I covered this in the video section.
It isn't a natural nor healthy posture and from briefly watching
her walk and her dance with you and with Osky Casas (whose
father does not dance like this) it looks pretty ingrained to me.
It's a fashion of today, possibly because many have less core
than they actually need to stand and walk erect supporting
their internal organs in the way nature/evolution intended.
I wonder what we are evolving into?
I am not in this video, I appologize for misleading the forum to think that and I cannot edit my post.
Loisa Donnay
Active Member
In my 20 years of dancing tango, I have seen many different types of postures. Back in about 2008, it became very popular in BA for followers to really stick their butts out. Remember this is a business for performers and teachers, and they need to attract attention. (My guy once dubbed BBA "The city of nice butts"). After about 4 years of everybody imitating this, it went out of favor. This is a confluence of art, style, talent and ability, as are so may things in tango - dance YOUR dance, that makes you and your partners happy, and spend less time trying to copy some "ideal" that doesn't really exist.
newbie
Well-Known Member
Nice performance of social tango Mladenac, smooth and fluid.
That are my teachers dancing, I didn't formulate my sentence correctly and cannot edit
That is what you wrote.
It does not say that you danced with Noelia, and it doesn't say that it is you dancing in that video.
No worries, mate.
It's actually pretty hard for the untrained eye to determine whether someone's bad posture is the result of skeletal formation or bad habits. Anatomy books love to give a picture of how the femur is set in the hip socket, but dig a little deeper and you find that not only can it be sitting quite differently from person to another, but that the angle of the femoral neck can be quite drastically different as well.
Speaking from my own experience... as a child I always sat in the W position (link with picture below) I actually sat like this with my knees much further apart, but I could bring them together this way too. I can still sit this way with no discomfort
http://www.today.com/parents/why-w-sitting-really-not-so-bad-kids-after-all-t69806
Adults kept trying to get me to stop because it was "bad for my knees", but it was perfectly natural for me. I never really grew completely out of femoral anteversion. (There is also a condition called femoral retroversion). I attain more range of motion in my hips when I work at flexibility, but there is a limit to how much I can change it. Sitting cross legged is difficult. In my late teens and early 20's I was taking 15 hours of ballet a week and I could never do a split. Even to get close, my back leg had to go off to the side at an angle. Nor did I have much extension for arabesque without opening my hip, because my leg had so little range of motion going to the back because of the BONE structure, not soft tissue flexibility. See pictures of bone variations in this link:
http://themovementfix.com/the-best-kept-secret-why-people-have-to-squat-differently/
That's just the hips... people also have differences in how their knees are formed making them knock-kneed or bowlegged. There are differences in the joints in the feet. There are differences in the natural curvature of the spine and in the natural amount of pelvic tilt.
And of course, there are differences in how much booty women have based on where they gain weight/fat. Even if I tip my pelvis substantially UNDER (ie: trying to elongate rather than arch my lower back) I look like my butt is sticking out because, well, I've got booty. (and a significant curve in the lumbar region)
There are also people with what is erroneously called an extra vertebra in the lumbar region (L6) and these people sometimes have more significant pelvic tilt. It's not always an extra...it can be an anomaly of how the bones fused to form the sacrum. Or it might be an extra. Some articles say less than 4% of people have this and I've read others that say it may be as much as 10%. If you think about how the lumbar vertebra angle, you can imagine how an additional vertebra might impact pelvic tipping.
Anyway, my point is that it's easy to judge other people's bodies and use of them because we aren't IN them. We don't know about their skeletons, their injuries, their ligaments and tendons. We barely know about our own. Do we as a culture spend too much time sitting and not enough time strengthening? Oh yeah! Is a weak core always the answer to what you might perceive as "bad posture"? No.
Now the way my shoulders creeped up and rounded forward because I was nervous and tense in my recent demo... yeah, THAT was just bad posture.
Speaking from my own experience... as a child I always sat in the W position (link with picture below) I actually sat like this with my knees much further apart, but I could bring them together this way too. I can still sit this way with no discomfort
http://www.today.com/parents/why-w-sitting-really-not-so-bad-kids-after-all-t69806
Adults kept trying to get me to stop because it was "bad for my knees", but it was perfectly natural for me. I never really grew completely out of femoral anteversion. (There is also a condition called femoral retroversion). I attain more range of motion in my hips when I work at flexibility, but there is a limit to how much I can change it. Sitting cross legged is difficult. In my late teens and early 20's I was taking 15 hours of ballet a week and I could never do a split. Even to get close, my back leg had to go off to the side at an angle. Nor did I have much extension for arabesque without opening my hip, because my leg had so little range of motion going to the back because of the BONE structure, not soft tissue flexibility. See pictures of bone variations in this link:
http://themovementfix.com/the-best-kept-secret-why-people-have-to-squat-differently/
That's just the hips... people also have differences in how their knees are formed making them knock-kneed or bowlegged. There are differences in the joints in the feet. There are differences in the natural curvature of the spine and in the natural amount of pelvic tilt.
And of course, there are differences in how much booty women have based on where they gain weight/fat. Even if I tip my pelvis substantially UNDER (ie: trying to elongate rather than arch my lower back) I look like my butt is sticking out because, well, I've got booty. (and a significant curve in the lumbar region)
There are also people with what is erroneously called an extra vertebra in the lumbar region (L6) and these people sometimes have more significant pelvic tilt. It's not always an extra...it can be an anomaly of how the bones fused to form the sacrum. Or it might be an extra. Some articles say less than 4% of people have this and I've read others that say it may be as much as 10%. If you think about how the lumbar vertebra angle, you can imagine how an additional vertebra might impact pelvic tipping.
Anyway, my point is that it's easy to judge other people's bodies and use of them because we aren't IN them. We don't know about their skeletons, their injuries, their ligaments and tendons. We barely know about our own. Do we as a culture spend too much time sitting and not enough time strengthening? Oh yeah! Is a weak core always the answer to what you might perceive as "bad posture"? No.
Now the way my shoulders creeped up and rounded forward because I was nervous and tense in my recent demo... yeah, THAT was just bad posture.
katerina
New Member
You know there is a thing called lordosis, which affects most women that are or were engaged in ballet or gymnastics that many tango followers come from. I know cause I have it and my tango teacher always corrects my butt sticking out but it is only my natural pose because of this particular thing with my spine.