New Beginners September 2019 Welcome to your Tango Journey!

Let’s recap what we did in our first lesson:

We started with some warm up exercises. Useful ones to do at home are pointing and flexing the feet and rotating the ankles both ways. These help to strengthen the ankles. Remember the imaginary beach ball? Holding it front of you, turn your ‘upper system’ i.e above the waist, to one side and then the other, keeping your hips straight.

Posture; Inflate the ‘upper system’ without bringing the shoulders up, shoulders down and back and drop the shoulder blades towards your waist. Weight forward on the balls of your feet and soft not rigid knees.

Weight changes; changing the weight from one leg to another by pushing in to the floor NOT rocking or hopping from one foot to the other. This is called ‘balanceo’

Walking; walking to the dominant beat of the music using our posture, leading with the body not the legs and pushing off from the standing leg. For the followers, extending the leg back from the waist and again pushing off on the standing leg. For leaders, walking in to the followers space and not being too timid!

The Baldosa (square); using the walking technique, walking forwards, sideways, backwards , changing weight on the diagonal corners, and varying the size of the step,

so as to make forward progress.

Pausing

With that we created a simple improvised dance; using balanceo, walking, pausing, stepping sideways and using the baldosa.

Every week we will talk about posture, technique, connection and embrace. We will also introduce you to some of the ‘codigos’, the rules. This week we talked about the ‘ronda’ or line of dance.

We always dance anti clockwise, do not overtake dance into the middle of the room and respect other the dancers on the dancefloor.

Here are links to the music we used......

I know it’s a lot to think about! We’ve all been there. As Sarah said, she and I just happen to be a bit further along on our journey! The main thing is to ENJOY

See you on Monday & Friday

Jenny & Sarah