Tango pauses vs. micropauses
I think of the pauses in tango as the white space around a haiku on a printed page. To have a lovely dance, you choose when to move and when to pause so that your dance has music and spatial flow. This is NOT what I am talking about today.
What I want to discuss today is the question that three people have asked me in the last week: “Why are you making me stop at the end of each step???” The argument is that they don’t SEE anyone doing what I ask them to do when we are working on the deep technique of tango.
I call these tiny moments “micro pauses” within the dance. You don’t see these mini stops when watching someone dance, but they form the basis for a fluid dance that SEEMS to not stop between steps. The human eye likes to track movement, and once you have mastered these micro pauses, even your partner may not be aware of them. When you watch people dance on video, especially performers, remember that a. no one is in their way and b. this is a choreography. Therefore, the partner already knows what is coming next and they aren’t going to hit anyone if they can’t change direction.
Micro pauses improve your balance
When you are learning to finish/start each move on balance, you must stop as long as you need to get completely on axis. At first, this will feel like you are doing the graduation walk REALLY SLOWLY (hum Pomp and Circumstance as you practice to make it more fun!). It’s hard to get your brain to slow down this far, so check out the exercises below to see how I cheat my brain into slowing down enough to finish each step.
It’s ok to put both feet on the floor! On a good day, 1% of your weight might land on that other foot, enough to move a sheet of paper under your foot but not get stuck on the floor. On a day when balance is a challenge, you may have to use that moment to land on both feet, get on balance, and then try again. Which do you prefer: a partner who falls over, or a partner who catches their balance? Yeah, I thought so.
I try to use the end/beginning of each step to adjust my balance and the balance of my partner if I am leading. That way, I never fall too far off balance. I am not perfect by any means, but I have practiced enough that most of the time, my off-balance moments are private, and I fix them before other people must deal with them. This subtle level of awareness adds to your quality of movement and provides your partner with a much nicer, fluid dance overall.
Micro pauses improve your musicality
Micro pauses provide what I think of as the heartbeat of tango: the Bum, Bum, Bum of each step having power, energy, balance, the sensuality of a big cat ready to pounce. Without them, the dance is set in motion and moves down the floor like a robot set in motion: no heartbeat. A dance like that is like a flat line on the heart monitor: it’s dead. Get your tango off life support and use those micro pauses!
Again, if you are completely on balance at the beginning of a move, you have more choices of how to play with the music. If you are off-balance, you usually have only one speed and direction you can go. I like to have choices to play with in the music. This moment gives you time to choose whether to move, to pause, to switch feet, to catch your partner’s balance—way more fun than just walking on the beat for ten minutes.
Exercises towards a balanced, fluid dance
I had to make up exercises to slow my brain down when I learned to finish each step. My brain was SURE that my body had completed a step long before I arrived on axis. I am certain that I am not the only human with this problem :-)
Walking with adornos
The point of the adornos is not to scribble all over the dance: it’s to encourage pauses and to help keep a dynamic balance during pauses. For each step, FINISH the step and then explore the world of your free leg. If you arrive on balance, there is a lot here to mine for quality of movement and musical expression. For me, I started to do this because otherwise I would try to slide through the end of move into the next step, missing that crucial moment where I was between the steps. Mantra: the last step is past; the next step has not yet happened. There is only this moment.
Change direction every step (the grid game)
Pretend you are on a piece of graph paper. For each step, you must step direction forward, side or back, as if on a grid and you CANNOT go two steps in the same direction. Find out which of your steps are easy to finish, which make you fall over, and focus on the difficult ones. Put on music and play with different speeds (or add adornos) to make this feel more like a dance.
Mirror game
Facing a partner but not touching, try to complete steps in slow motion, again changing directions often. Don’t begin a new step until your partner looks like they are totally on balance. For more challenge, pause longer at the pauses sometimes, and other times try to shorten the “micro pause” timing, moving when it feels like your partner has arrived on axis, but before they start to adorn and play.
It gets easier and faster
Remember that when your brain gets this idea fully wired into place, you will suddenly be able to speed up the process to where other people can’t see the micro pause, but they can feel the improvement in your balance, energy, and musicality! It does take patience to slow down enough to really practice this, so good for you for doing the extra work to make your dance truly fluid by pausing!