Finally, after the chaos of the holidays, Eleanore and I are practicing again. it means that tango is more on my mind these days and as a result I have some new abstractions to fuss with. As I've said often enough, I think too much.

I'm thinking about listening. It's not like the concept hasn't been important before this point, but right now it occupies the center of my thoughts. Improving my tango listening skills has become my main focus.

We have to listen to our own body, so that we know where our weight is, where our momentum is, and where various parts of our body are, in relation to each other. We have to listen to the floor itself and stay connected with it. We have to listen to the music, of course, on many levels. We have to listen to the environment of the dance floor, because we're dancing with everyone there, not just with ourselves. And we have to listen to our partner.

It's listening to my partner that has occupied most of my attention recently. Follows are used to thinking in those terms, of course. Leads will naturally give a nod to the concept, but this focus of mine feels like much more than that.

I have often said to friends of mine who were beginning follows that I worried that I wasn't good enough to dance with them. We've all seen experienced leads take an absolute beginner and make them either look good or at least have a very nice time dancing. Personally, I have a hard enough time just dancing with a new, but experienced, follow. Therein lies my interest in listening.

It's almost as if every follow has their own language. (Im sure this is true of leads too.) One person takes big steps in response to a given lead and another person takes several small steps and another does something else entirely. Experienced leads seem to be able to pick up a new follow's language really quickly. This is a skill set distinct from tango vocabulary, combinatorial ability, musicality, or floorcraft. I want to learn it.

I suspect that, just as there are things that make one lead's language easier to understand than another's, there are things that make each follow easier or harder to understand. For example, the other night, when Eleanore made a point of keeping her legs as straight as she could, I was suddenly much more aware of her leg position and momentum. In terms of physics, that just makes sense. I wonder what else there is that makes one follow clearer than another, in this regard.

So, this will be my focus this year. I think that means I should be trying more exercises such as the one that Jaimes once taught in his Five Steps to Tango Enlightenment workshop, in which he had follows arbitrarily change weight whenever they felt like it, challenging leads to pay attention and keep dancing. I think it also means dancing with lots of new people, something I'm still terribly shy about (very much for this reason). And I think it means asking the folks that I do dance with regularly to experiment with me. If you have any advice about it, I would be delighted to hear it.

Posted by Michael on 3/17/07; 5:29:20 PM