Dancing with other people!

There are a few more weeks of Zoom class scheduled, but it’s time to get ready for in-person classes!

Who

My in-person small group lessons will begin in a few weeks. For those of you:

• vaccinated

• in the Portland, Oregon area

• bringing a designated partner

• willing to mask until it’s safe/agreed to unmask in the group

…there will be in-person classes. Classes will have up to four couples. When ALL the group is comfortable switching partners, that will happen.

What

Small group classes that focus on getting used to dancing in spaces with other people. For those of you who have been dancing with broomsticks, dogs, and kitchen counters, this may feel strange. For those of you with a built-in partner, it’s time to learn to navigate with moving objects that aren’t cats as obstacles!

Classes will be open to anyone above beginner level (advanced beginners welcome), as each skill and movement will be adjusted per couple. I am hoping to eventually have one advanced and one advanced beginner/intermediate class, but for now, let’s just enjoy seeing other folks!

When and where

To begin, classes will be at 6:30 on Tuesday evenings and 8 PM Wednesday evenings. By the fall, I will be in a different schedule, but for the summer, I am trying to maximize family evening time by limiting the number of evenings that I teach.

Classes will be at my house. I know the rate of filtration for my HEPA system, and I know what surfaces are clean. In a studio, I can’t count on either of those factors. As COVID counts decrease, we will be able to move into studio space and have larger classes.

How do I sign up?

I will need commitments to attend ahead of time. Please contact me and we will start figuring out who is dancing with whom, what night, etc. Because I already have several couples discussing this, I will add people in the order they commit to the classes. There may be a waitlist.

But I don’t have a partner!

I am trying to play matchmaker. If you want a partner, let me know and I will try to help you find one BUT mostly it is up to you!

Also, I will continue with my Zoom noon class for at least a few more weeks, and then I will start up the equivalent of my Beaverton class (which will eventually move back to Beaverton): Tango Toning and Technique. If you have been taking my Zoom classes this year, you already know how this class works: solo work, peers helping, but not partner work generally.

Preparing to dance with other people

For many people, this past year plus a few months (and counting) has been about dancing solo. The dedicated dancers have taken classes, practiced, and dreamed of the day they can dance safely with someone else. As we can see the finish line here in Oregon, we need to wait just a little longer before it’s safe to take off masks and dance in public. However, it IS time to get ready to do so.

Focus on sacadas and contrabody this week

The next few weeks, my Zoom classes will focus on preparing to dance with other humans in person, in couples! For those of you lucky enough to be in lockdown with a partner, this is still helpful practice, but it’s of paramount importance if you have gone a year without a tanda! Join us!

• 6:30 PM Tuesday: Contrabody, the embrace and balance in the couple

• Noon Friday: Sacada technique connecting the leader and follower

In-person group classes will begin in a few weeks for those who are vaccinated. Stay tuned and grab a partner!

Yoga to support your tango

As we continue getting back in shape, I would like to bring a pamphlet to your attention from Harvard Medical School: An Introduction to Yoga. It’s available for order on the internet as an eBook or in print. For those of you who are just starting to look at yoga, it has some history, a description of various yoga styles, medical advice about yoga, the benefits of yoga for the individual; and good, basic poses and explanations, with photos and pictures. While it won’t provide a lot of actual coaching, it will help you decide what style you want to try, etc. What I like best about it: it offers data from scientific studies of yoga, but it cuts out all of the scientific language for fast reading.

I will be offering some free yoga classes this summer for tango dancers. Stay tuned!

Improving your tango balance

As we prepare to dance with other people again, now that we are getting vaccinated—let’s start thinking about how this year of personal tango technique can improve your dance with a partner! It is sooo easy to just go back to the poor technique choices from before, but just a little awareness will make your dance much more enjoyable. Here are some tips to help that process.

Finish each step!

The question I am asked THE MOST recently is about how to move from step to step. “You say finish each step, but when I watch videos, I don’t see what you are teaching….” is the way most of these discussions start. “So, do I put my foot down in between steps, or don’t I??” The methods that I teach are the deep technique details that hold your dance together. You don’t see all of it in the actual dance: it’s the internal gears that run your body. I want you to listen for these moments inside of your own technique, so that you can dance better.

Finish each step 100%. That means that you finish articulating through the now-ex-support-leg’s foot and ankle so that the balance transfer is in control the entire time. As you finish the step, your new “free” leg can fall under your body, completely on balance in the new place. Hopefully, your legs “collect” from correct alignment, not from gripping or pulling them in. At that moment, you are ready to move any direction and/or recover from whatever your partner has done. Focus on finishing, on the process of arriving at a new place in space.

Fix balance on the fly

Most of us who have danced a long time look smooth because we know how to adjust and fix problems as they begin; not because we dance perfectly. Each step I take, I adjust whatever is necessary to finish my step and be 100% ready for the next step. Maybe that means adjusting where I land a little. Maybe that means re-stacking my body over the new spot. Maybe that means reengaging my core muscles. Maybe that means doing an adorno that covers the fact that I need to move three inches to the right :-)

Assume that there are tiny errors in communication all the time in tango, and just fix them. Don’t waste time decided who is wrong; just fix. Regaining optimal balance constantly makes you notice how often mistakes happen, but also notice that most of them are unimportant in the large scale of the dance. Relax and fix, rather than stress out and tighten and fall over.

Find playful ways to maintain balance

I teach adornos from the first day of tango. Why? Because a dancer who is moving slightly will continue to breathe, adjust their balance, and stay relaxed. A dancer who tightens all their muscles to “pause” will not be relaxed enough to enjoy their dance. The leader needs to feel where the follower stands, and if that channel is open because the follower is still moving (adorning) it’s easier to sense what the follower needs next. As a follower, playing at pauses gives the leader time to think AND sometimes provides a suggestion of where to go next, taking some of the burden of decision-making off the leader.

For my ballroom folks who are new to tango, playing with the free foot also facilitates that “changing the chip” to tango. If you adorn when you land, you won’t cheat back to your favorite free foot! This also helps you to remember you don’t need a “frame” and that this is tango.

For those of you who think adornos are wrong or busy, remember that the follower needs their say in the dance as well, and letting them find that as beginners makes stronger advanced dancers faster. Unless you like monologues, this makes tango a dialogue and more enjoyable.

Yoga poses to help with balance

Most of you know by now that I am training to be a yoga instructor as well as a dance teacher. I suggest you Google each one, as there are hundreds of videos out there describing how to do them. I really like Do Yoga With Me’s videos and teachers. Here are some basic yoga poses to try for increased balance that also help your tango:

1. Eagle pose: This is a great pose to help with any tango move that ends in a cross, as it helps you find your core and inner thigh muscles that you for these moves.

2. Tree pose: Again, your pelvic floor and deep core kick in here. At the same time, you can feel how your leg and hip can move against each other to stabilize—I find this helpful in any one-legged tango moment.

3. Chair pose: Most of us sit too much and have not worked our gluteal muscles enough. Chair pose insists your gluts turn on, and it will help everyone’s yoga, despite being on two feet.

4. Warrior 3: Lifting high on your support leg to create a stable, open hip—that’s a challenge for everyone, and Warrior 3 addresses that. Mine is still wobbly!

Class this week

Tuesday 6:30 PM Zoom class will focus on balance, using adornos and musicality this week. Friday noon class will build on those balance points and work on how to connect better from step to step while still finishing each step. Sign up for class and I’ll see you there!

Mother's Day and the tango community

I would not be here if it were not for the wonderful tango community that I have. This past year, you have continued lessons, supported my learning to teach remotely, and danced your butts off in front of your phones and computers so that we can continue to be a community.

But that’s just this year: I want to tell a story about 2005, the year that my tango community helped me survive in a different way. It’s my Mother’s Day blog because the women (and men) who helped me when I was a new mom changed my life. Since my own mother lives 3000 miles away, my tango community became my mom and grandma, allowing me to keep tango going in Eugene, Oregon.

When my son was three months old. his father decided that being a parent was not fun. I had not planned to be a single mom. How was I going to do this?? Enter the tango tias! Vicky, Lucy, Mary, Marilyn, Annette, Pam, Ashley—you are all still “Tia” to my teenager and when I mention you as “Tia X” he says, “Oh, yeah, her!” because you were all at our house, helping out—bringing food, babysitting, keeping me sane, etc.

You helped me organize classes and the Old Lady Tango Sherry Hour at my house, so I could put my son to bed and other people could keep dancing. You helped me find babysitters. You took classes with a baby strapped between us, making close embrace a whole new experience. I recently went through my photo album (yes, I am old, I have physical photo albums) from that year, and most of the photos are tango people holding my little one, eating, dancing—I am not exaggerating to say that I would not be teaching tango now if you had not helped me make it through that dark time.

So Happy Mother’s Day to all of my moms, my son’s tias, and my very favorite tango people!

Tango and the bandhas

While training to teach yoga, I am finding new ways to look at my tango technique and approach old problems. Today, I will discuss the bandhas (bindings, locks) from yoga and how they help tango technique. For those of you who attend my Zoom group classes, this is our focus for the week.

When you engage a bandha, you are contracting tonic, or stabilizer muscles. Tonic muscles have a high percentage of slow twitch fibers. This makes them fatigue-resistant and ideal for functioning as stabilizers and postural supporters. They provide a stable base for movement. The three main muscles/muscle groups are located at your pelvic floor, deep abdominals, and your neck/throat area.

Mula bandha (pelvic floor)

The group of pelvic floor muscles support your pelvis, holding the contents of your pelvic bowl in place and stabilizing everything above them. Think of the lower opening of your pelvis as a diamond: the pubic bone, two sitbones, and your tailbone form the front, sides and back of your pelvic opening.

Many of us are familiar with the Kegel exercises to strengthen the pelvic floor, but many of us just clench ALL our muscles, including our butt muscles to find the pelvic floor, and that makes for tight tango movement :-) One of my yoga teachers suggests thinking of cradling an egg (not crushing it!) as the right amount of activation.

Here’s one way to find these muscles: Imagine that you can hug your sitbones closer together under you. Then, hug your pubic bone and tailbone just a little closer to each other. Imagine little bungee cords crisscrossing your pelvic floor, helping to create an energized—but not gripped—surface to support your dance!

Why should you work this hard? When you activate mula bandha, you have a little bit more elasticity, a little bit better balance, and a little bit more room to let your hip joints open/release so that your tango motion can have more ease. That ease looks elegant and flowing, so a little more work in one area has big tradeoffs for the entire rest of the body!

It’s not easy to focus this much while dancing, so practice it first just sitting where you can feel your pelvic floor against the chair. Then, try it standing. Then add movement. We will do this in class this week.

Uddiyana bandha (transversus abdominis)

The next bandha to tackle is deep abdominal core. The deepest of the four layers of abdominal muscles, transversus abdominis attaches to your ribs, pelvis, and your spine. Its fibers interdigitate with the fibers of the diaphragm as well, so your breathing affects this level of activation! Think of this bandha as a cumberbund or a corset around your entire midriff, hugging in around your body.

When we are told to “stand up straight” we often abandon the front of the body and squeeze our spine into extension, pushing our ribs forward and out. This is NOT a balanced posture! Instead, think of hugging in just below your belly button (again, cradle an egg, don’t squish!) and around your entire body. Can you feel how that elongates your spine and supports it? That’s the main reason I want you to focus on adding this to your dance.

When you use uddiyana bandha for your tango, the stress of any torque around your spine is diffused so that no one joint is overstressed, and because your spine is well-supported, you can usually twist further and elongate, providing a better understructure for all your moves that pivot and twist.

Jalandara bandha (get your head on straight)

There are different ways to teach this position, so I will focus on the method that balances your head on your spine in a good alignment for tango.

Put your thumbs on the back of your skull, under and slightly behind your ears. Move your head up and down until you feel that area release a little. You may feel that your head is tilted down. Hug your chin to your chest a little bit and feel that back of your next lengthen and attach better to the rest of your spine!

I think it’s obvious why this improves your tango. It balances your head in a position that uses less neck tension. It lengthens the top of your spine, allowing your entire spine to lengthen better. It keeps your collarbones open and lets your shoulder blades float further down your back. All the upper body aligns better, which means your lower body can move your around more easily!

Put them all together!

Sometimes it is difficult to keep more than one bandha in gear at the same time. I feel your frustration: it’s not easy for me! Instead, I try to run through the reminders in my head: pelvic floor, abs, head on straight, etc. Oh, right, breathe! And start over again with the reminders.

See you in class!

Little baby steps

I hiked up a steep climb yesterday for the first time since ripping my ankle ligament in 2020—and overdid it. So…since I can’t teach today, I thought I would write instead (and my deep apologies to the new person who just signed up for today’s class!).

We all want our dance to improve at a steady rate, all the time. Life is just not like that, and neither is tango. One day, we get something new immediately, and then we cannot repeat it for weeks or a month. Then, we can reproduce the move 50% of the time, then 75% of the time. And then, just when we think it is working, we learn a new detail—and it all falls apart again for a while.

My ankle reminds me of this uneven progress every day. I have danced in flat shoes without taping my ankle for a few months, except for days that I would also teach in high heels. I taught in high heels without taping my ankle this week for the first time since last summer, and it worked for four days!! Then, I didn’t tape for hiking, and I am back to taping again.

The body is a complex system. Tango is a complex system. When you tweak part of a system, the rest needs to adjust. The good news is that, when you get the system working better for one move, it usually improves the system for ALL moves.

Each time you learn a new detail for a move, or fix a minor problem, you adjust the entire muscle pathway for that move. Your muscles might have to fire in a new order; you might have to use a new muscle that you were not using before; or you may have learned to pare down the movement and to use fewer muscles. Your brain and body need time to rebuild that motor pathway the way you want it.

If you are learning a new combination or exploring “what do I do next?” as a leader, this same approach creates new nodes for movement. You arrive after a back ocho, and suddenly you have five possible moves instead of just one. That means you need to stay on balance and/or regroup slightly at a spot where you happily charged forward before. You may have to introduce a pause while your body fixes any slight imbalances from before. On the other hand, now you have more fun outcomes, and the follower has time to adorn at the pause, too!

My foot feels much better than yesterday when I sent out class cancellations. It should be fine in a day or two. I have learned tons about the body during this rehab period. It also led me to start training to teach yoga. All “detours” in your tango technique will end up helping your tango progress in the same way.

Little baby steps, millimeter by millimeter—and sometimes going backwards, regrouping, and moving forwards: welcome to tango!

Shoulder girdle alignment and tango

The embrace is an important part of tango, as is good balance. Both can be affected by poor alignment of the shoulder girdle. As many of us have desk jobs and/or spend a lot of hours hunched over our phones and computers, most of us need remedial work to re-align our bodies for best balance, tango, and pain-free daily life.

Understanding how the shoulders should be stacked on the body helps us to monitor our own axis and remedy issues before they affect our partner in the dance—or before they send us to the chiropractor! Also, most of us need to do some stabilization exercises to help our shoulders remain in the right position so that we are not injured while dancing.

Collarbones

Structure

In terms of bony connections, our arms are attached to our torso only at the sternum. Those joints can move up and down; forward and backward; and rotate slightly, reacting to how the shoulder blades and arms move. Have you noticed that someone with a broken collarbone cannot use their arm? That’s because the rest of the attachments to the body are muscle, ligament, tendon, and fascia, not bone.

Tuning into your collarbones

Put your fingers on the connection between your collarbone and your sternum. You should be able to feel little depressions under your fingers where the bones connect.

1. Now trace your collarbones out to your shoulder joints and feel where they connect to the structure (you might have to do one at a time). If you have ever broken your collarbone, the two sides may feel VASTLY different!

2. Now, place your thumbs at the front of your shoulder joint and your pinky fingers at the sternum, and experiment with how high/low you can wing your collarbone (I think of it like butterfly wings flapping up and down).

3. Next, try front and back movement, like opening and closing a book.

4. Lastly, try to rotate your shoulder joints and feel what happens at your sternum.

Shoulder blades

Structure

The outer end of the collarbone connects to the scapula (shoulder blade). The shoulder blades slide on the back of the ribs, attached to the body by muscles and via the collarbone to the skeleton. They can move up and down your back (elevation and depression). They also move towards the sides of your body (abduction/protraction) and towards your spine (adduction/retraction). On top of that, they can rotate up or down: it helps me to think about holding a door handle and twisting it clockwise or counterclockwise—away from the spine is down. All these motions are possible because of the muscles attaching to the shoulder blades, anchoring them to the rest of the body.

Tuning into your shoulder blades

This is the area I had to work on the most to find the optimal position(s) for my shoulders to take for tango and general alignment (no surprise, it’s the same).

Shoulder blade pushups

I do these from “tabletop” position, on my hands and knees, but if you have bad knees, you can do this with your palms on a chair. If you know cat-cow exercises from yoga, this is a modified version of that.

1. Put your palms flat on the floor.

2. Rotate your arms slightly so that your elbows are pointing back along your ribs.

3. Straighten your arms, but don’t lock your joints.

4. Feel your inhale and exhale of your breath and keep breathing!

5. On your inhale, squeeze your shoulder blades in and down your back towards your hips/spine. Send your heart forward, as if the shoulder blades are pushing it forward.

6. On your exhale, slide your shoulder blades away from your spine, pulling your heart up between them.

7. Do NOT curve/arch your spine, just focus on your shoulder blades and upper back! This is a small movement and may be hard to do if it’s new to you. It’s ok if almost no motion happens: you are tuning in to a part of you that you may not have tried to move independently before!

Anchor your shoulder blades!

Many of us tend to squeeze our shoulder blades together and push our ribs out in front when told to stand up straight. Um, that’s not aligned! Let’s try something different:

1. Grab two soup cans (or light weights).

2. Start with them at your sides, hands rotated to face mostly forward.

3. Let your shoulder blades drop down your back, slide out and up, so that your arms float out to the sides, up, and over your head. Touch the long sides of the soup cans together and feel where your shoulder blades are. Hopefully, they are still anchored down into your spine and hips!

Notice if your shoulders are bunched around your head. Relax them, and start part 2:

1. Reach the soup cans up above your head until they separate, and then arc your arms down to your sides, back to the starting position. Repeat.

2. Keep your arms long (again, don’t lock things) all the way down. I think of this as a heart-shaped movement, from my neck/head, out and down to a point at my legs.

3. If you are having trouble feeling your shoulder blade movement, have someone put their hands on your shoulder blades to help you focus on them. If you are solo right now, you can lie on the ground with your knees up and soles of the feet on the floor, and basically make snow angels :-)

We want our shoulder blades to be anchored lightly down and in, without squeezing back. However, depending on where you habitually have your shoulders, this might FEEL like a squeeze back, or a pulling down. Most of us have our shoulders too far forward and/or up. If yours are too far back, you may even feel the correct position as a forward fold!

If you are not sure of your positioning, take a photo of yourself from the side and make sure your shoulder joint is right over your hips, and you can draw a line from there through the middle of your arch of your feet!

Arms/Shoulder joint

I will save this for later: that’s more than most people read anyway!

What if none of that works?

If you have worked on your alignment, faithfully done exercises for a while, and are still having trouble keeping your shoulder girdle in the right place, consider consulting a chiropractor, a Rolfer, or someone else who can evaluate if you have adhesions that are keeping your body stuck where you don’t want it. A session or two of myofascial release might do the trick.

Because I have weak shoulders, I have had to spend a LOT of time getting work done to untangle the knots I used to get from leading tango and having people clutch my shoulder for balance. After body work, targeted daily exercises from my trainer, and now daily yoga work, I have much stronger and better aligned shoulders. Be patient: years of poor posture cannot be undone just by thinking about it for a week!

Linda Machtelinckx is offering a mindfulness class on Zoom

Some of you know Linda Machtelinckx. She’s a Portland tango dancer, among many other things. She has started a new business, and has been teaching fitness classes online this year. Here’s the first workshop she is offering on mindfulness. I have included her announcement:

Hello Everyone,

I hope that 2021 is opening the doors to better perspectives and that the longer days and spring will brighten and refresh our minds and bodies. Com join me to celebrate 2021 spring with a fresh start:

Intro to Mindfulness (Zoom class)

A 1 hr-Hakomi-inspired practice and guidedmindfulness meditation taught by our guest teacher, Laura McCorkle, LMT, who will deepen our mindfulness meditation. Make sure you dedicate a quiet space for the special 1-hr class, have a blanket, and a journal if you wish.

Date: April 19th

Time: 6 PM PST

Cost: $15

Registration: Zoom URL link will be sent upon registration with Linda Machtelinckx, Owner of BreezKinetics, LLC. Email Linda @ linda.breezkinetics@gmail.com

If you have specific questions about the workshop, let me know and Laura will reach out to you. Interested in more workshops, yoga and fitness classes? Please visit my new website: https://www.breezkinetics.com for classes I offer and I personally teach.

Jose Garofalo is teaching online

A year ago, Jose Garofalo was our last in-person workshop before the COVID-19 lockdown. He is starting to teach online now, so if you would like a refresher of his classes last year, or to learn more from him, this is a good time to do that! Jose studied with many of the old milongueros and has been a part of a group of tango dancers in Buenos Aires trying to conserve the moves and styles of the older dancers, as well as video footage of their technique; so he has information many tango dancers and teachers would like to learn!

Check out his website (in Spanish, sorry) and contact him for Zoom lessons! Once my tango partner and I are both vaccinated, we will be back to working on our performance pieces based on Juan Bruno, Pupi Castello, Pepito Avellaneda—some of the greats who were still dancing when I started tango in the 1990s.

Proprioception and your tango

Proprioception: perception or awareness of the position and movement of the body

Why is proprioception needed?

Being aware of how the body moves through space helps us improve our balance, and allows us to tune into our bodies and enjoy how we move. It is a sensuous pleasure, if a geeky one in my case. I remember enjoying weeding the garden or going for a walk, or using my spinning wheel as I started to learn about kinesthetic awareness. Everyday movement is the most important, as we want to remain mobile for our entire lives, and moving correctly allows us to stay healthy and uninjured.

In tango, the many parts of the body need to move more precisely than in just walking down the street. There are two more feet in close proximity to yours, and an entire body in your personal space (and on a crowded dance floor, perhaps several couples in your personal space!). To dance tango well, you must tune into your body on a deeper level to achieve mastery of the dance. Join us for group classes this week to work on your own body awareness!

Kinesthetic IQ

There are many ways to be intelligent. Howard Gardner defined multiple intelligences, including body/kinesthetic intelligence. That means that you can be gifted, normal, or struggling with body awareness in the same way you can be good, normal or clueless about mathematics! Not all of us are naturally born with a lot of awareness of how our body moves through space.

Sometimes, deficits in other abilities help to increase kinesthetic awareness. For me, having almost zero ability to see spatially (I have almost no stereo-vision) helped me because I had to FEEL where I was: my eyes could not tell me. I struggled through required sports until college, at which point I took ballroom dance as a required PE class to finish off having to do physical exercise (did I mention I never dreamed of teaching dance?). I found I could remember movement faster than other people, and that I was more aware of my body than most people from paying attention to the FEELING of where I was in space to avoid injury.

IQ is not everything

Years later, I see how thinking I was bad at movement stopped me from trying to dance before that; I assumed I would be bad at it. If we all stopped trying because we were initially bad at something—we would never make it in life. As in career, university, a sport—perseverance is more important than initial talent in most cases.

Only twice in my life have I thought “Oh no! I can’t teach that person to dance!” out of over 5000+ students. In both cases, those people stuck to learning tango for years, working much harder than anyone else, and achieved a solid, intermediate level of dancing. Their dedication and perseverance were head and shoulders above anyone else’s in my entire teaching career.

If you are willing to work hard, you can move from challenged to average—or above—in your body smarts!

Class topics this week:

• Tuesday March 8th @ 6:30 PM: Proprioception 1: Tuning into transitions

• Friday March 12th @ noon: Proprioception 2: Integrating thinking and feeling in the dance

Please join us!

Balancing stability and elasticity in your tango

Topics for class this week

Tuesday, 2 March 2021, 6:30 PM: Elasticity in movement sequences: finding the ease

Friday, 6 March 2021, Noon: Candombe, milonga and vals: using the music to make your dance elastic

Join us!

Finding ease in your dance

In anything we do, we want to be strong enough to execute the action we want, but not have it take everything that we have to complete it. There is a balance between effort and ease, not only in tango, but in life. In a culture where more is more, and where looking busy is prized, the idea of less work—is foreign to many of my students. Many Type A people flock to tango, and then injure themselves by trying too hard, and give up, deciding that tango IS too difficult, or bad for the body.

One of my goals in my classes this year is to balance work and ease, stability, and elasticity, so that tango is an activity that benefits the body instead of injuring it. How do we find a balance in our own practice?

Many of you know I am studying to teach yoga as well as tango. In my yoga practice, I have been working on making poses feel easy, light, elastic, and full of breath. I think the same concepts translate well to tango.

Breathe more deeply!

If you have known me for a long time, you have probably heard me coach you to “Breathe!” during a class. I think it is important to tune into your breath for several reasons. First, breathing allows you to engage the “bandhas” (pelvic floor, diaphragm, and vocal cords) that support your core and midline. Focusing on breathing helps to balance the body around its center. It helps to release extraneous muscle tension. It helps you think more clearly. It connects you to your partner and the music better.

Pay attention to your breath as you dance. You do not have to adjust (unless you are holding your breath). Remind yourself to breathe. Feel how the entire body is more elastic and flexible this way!

Relax your connective tissue!

Pushing your muscles to their limits makes the body tire faster, and leads to injuries not only of muscle fiber, but also of connective tissue, which takes a long time to heal!

I tore my ankle ligament playing tennis last summer, and I am finally starting to run again and dream of playing tennis this coming summer. I am still wrapping my ankle to wear heels because of the added stress that pivoting causes, as well as the instability of stilettos vs. the bare foot.

Your connective tissue is wrapped all over your body: fascia, bones, ligaments, tendons—and it is connected together (thus “connective tissue”). I am working being able to feel that layer of my body. It is surprisingly hard! It is much easier to tense the muscles and know where they are but tensing everything is exhausting and can cause injuries.

See if you can relax into your body. How LITTLE muscular work do you need to do to stay balanced and upright? Perhaps a little wiggle in the system may work better than tightness? Hmm? :-)

Your muscles are attached to connective tissue. If you think about lengthening and staying more elastic, it helps connect into this subtle layer. Breathing also helps to find this layer. Do not worry if you cannot pinpoint where you feel the work/relaxing: imagine it relaxing just a little, making your movement more fluid and less stressful. I know, it sounds woo-woo, but I am finding it extremely helpful in my own practice.

Integrating footwork and core strength into tango

The past few weeks, we have focused on process, the gestalt of a move, to enjoy how our bodies react to tango music and to our partner. This week, we are going to mess around with a few details that will add elegance and give you a good tango workout, too!

1-2-3 speeds of torque on Tuesday

When we learn tango, we work on contrabody for walking, to balance and create elegance in our dance. After that, we learn ochos and twist further to add pivots into tango. Lastly, we learn boleos and other extreme pivoting moves. Usually, we have used all of our twist to do the other moves, and so, as a last resort, we throw our bodies into overdrive—and usually off-balance—to make this third “speed” of torque a part of our dance.

This is true both for leading, where overrotating creates a lot of push-pull of the poor follower and back pain for the leader. The follower, who has been told to rotate past a comfort zone, these adjustments should make for a more elegant and painless pivot. I never teach this because feeling good will lead to looking much better than anything else!

This week, we are going to start with our extreme, find out where it REALLY stops, and then retool all of our smaller pivots and torques to fit inside what our body can do correctly and safely. You will find that walking takes almost no torque, no matter how twisty contrabody felt when you started to pay attention to how you moved. Ochos will also be much smaller in rotation that you thought!

By the end of class, all of your twisting and contrabody moves will feel better and more integrated.

Join us at 6:30 Pacific time, Tuesday February 23rd!

Footwork Friday

At noon on Friday, February 26th, we will focus on footwork. Articulate your arches, balance in your ankles, finishing moves 100%—it’s subtle, but that extra attention to your feet will pay off in your dance!

So many people tell me that their feet or ankles hurt when they dance (or their knees or hips….) and much of this can be alleviated with adjustments to how we use our feet as we balance and travel from step to step. It’s hard to feel what our feet are doing because the adjustments are small but focusing on the feet will yield a lot of tango improvement!

We will work on adornos in walks and ochos; traspies in ALL directions; some speed practice, and more if we have time. Class will finish with a musicality component, putting all of this into action with the music!

Join us at noon on Friday!

Focus on the process in order to progress

We are going to get to dance together at some point, but right now it feels like it has been forever since we got to dance at a milonga. Instead of stressing out about when we get to dance again, this week, let’s enjoy the process of feeling our own balance, dance, musicality—improve and consolidate!

Tuesday 6:30 PM lesson: back everything

This week, the Tuesday class will focus on the process of moving in back steps, back ochos and back boleos; adornos that happen in those steps; and looking at how you can hone your process for different music to work better overall. In real life, we do not move backwards much, so we have few bad habits to unlearn. However, as it is scary to move the direction your eyes cannot see as well, we have a lot of little dance habits to polish out for moving elegantly and with balance! Join us!

Friday noon lesson: front everything

On Friday, we will look at the other direction: walking forward, forward ochos, forward boleos, and adornos that work in forward movement. The process of moving forwards in tango can be tricky because we have habits from normal walking that sometimes cancel out our efforts to be on balance here. Also, anything we don’t get to on Tuesday will be added in on Friday, as we have time. Join us!

Where is side everything?

Yes, since there are only two group classes, I still have one more direction to move. We will probably do that next week, but don’t hold your breath! Teaching in lockdown is also a process, and sometimes we head off in a new direction in class that requires me to move along with you!

Or—you can practice that on your own!

Trust the process!

I personally started life as a very product-oriented being, but tango has taught me a lot about process. We do not know what the product of our tango work—or this lockdown—will be, and we need to let go of worrying about that right now and dance where we are, in front of our Zoom computer screens. I have seen so much progress BECAUSE of what one of my students called “enforced practice” of lockdown solo dancing! I can honestly say that every single one of you I see for group and private lessons has improved immensely this year. Trust that process! You are becoming more musical, more balanced, more elegant, more skilled dancers through your focus this year on process.

See you in class!

Tuning into the music for inspiration

So many of us were taught to “step on the beat” as the main component of tango music, but there is SO much more to play with and explore in your dance! In fact, I don’t teach people to step on the beat. Instead, I have new dancers try out all the ways you can move within tango music, and try to encourage creativity and real connection, right from the start.

How you take a step matters. The quality of your motion is important: do you start slow and then VROOM to a halt? Do you sneak up on the step, whispering your way through to balance? Do you find a quick pause or a slow pause? What flavor is this step/this part of the song/your partner’s musicality? Don’t let anyone tell you there is only one way to hear the music or move; this is YOUR dance!

Milonga and vals have a more insistent beat than tango, and it’s harder to play around. There are moments where your style/version might nooooot be quite so acceptable because it disturbs the groove of the dance. However, there is still a lot of person agency here: you can slide around the beat like a jazz singer, finding cool nooks and crannies in the song to make it your own.

This week in class, we are going to practice adornos and turns, BUT we will be working on finding how YOUR body works best in the technique and then, I am going to turn you loose to try different ways to approach these moves in the music. I hope that, by the end of class on Tuesday and/or Friday, you will feel more connected to your body—and to the music!

Classes this week

6:30 PM Tuesday: Adornos and turns in Tango, milonga and vals

Noon Friday: Musicality of adornos, turns and exploring your creativity

Join us!

Changing directions with balance and speed in tango

Why do tango dancers spend so much time working on their walk? After all, everyone made it into that first dance lesson without thinking hard about how to enter the room. Don’t we already know how to walk?

We try to be super precise in our walking technique in tango because we change direction all the time, and need to be even more on balance to do that in a couple. If someone backs up, or swings into our space, if the music is fast, or if the space is tight, we have to be in control of our axis (and hopefully our partner) so that we can avoid crashes.

A footballer (soccer player to the rest of you) dodges down the field, weaving between other players, while managing the ball—they say a futbolista makes the best tango dancer because of that training in changing direction, adjusting to other people in the way, etc. How do the rest of us get this practice?

Improving your precision

I am training as a yoga instructor, and there is a constant reiteration of “root into the four corners of your feet” that I find I also think about while dancing tango. I want to find the optimal place in my stance, with the three arches of my foot balanced as well as I can balance—so that I always have the ability to land on balance and change direction easily.

I make sure that my axis is stacked over that optimal foot alignment. Is my hip joint stacked over my arch? Are my gluteal muscles in gear, helping to line up my sitbones and my heels? Is my spine stacked on top of my pelvis? Is my core supporting my torso? Is my head on straight? Whatever part of my axis that is giving me the most trouble, I check in there first. Then, if I have time, I check other parts. It is just too hard while dancing/moving to be able to ask ALL of those questions at once :-)

Am I breathing? When I hold my breath, I can’t settle into my balance as well. Just simply breathing will fix a lot of minor balance issues. I let my whole body breathe: when I “stop” I don’t really stop my body. Think super-slow-motion instead, and keep breathing.

Millimeter by millimeter

The progress that you make is hard to feel sometimes, because it is so small. However, think back six months or a year ago: if you have been practicing, or taking class at least weekly, there will be an improvement. Don’t push yourself; remind your body to take it slowly, little by little.

Improving your speed

Focusing on improving your balance will help improve your speed for milonga or fast vals or syncopation in general. However, there are some other elements to practice.

Three Bears

Think of the story of the Three Bears: too big, too small, just right. Adjusting your step size to your newly improved balance, NOW try to adjust the size of your step. You will find an optimal step size for a certain speed. Faster moves are usually done better with smaller steps. Try it out!

Let go of perfection

It’s important to practice moving faster as well. Let go of trying to remember all the new alignment info you have, and just try to go fast. It won’t be as pretty as your regular or slo-mo movement at first. That’s OK! Let is be a mess! It will get better, but only if you practice fast as well as slow.

Get to know the music

Knowing the music will help you with the correct speed/size of step/etc. for a dance. As you get familiar with a tune, your body will respond more easily, and that will remove one more thing you have to remember. Plus, familarity usually allows you to dance better to that song.

Class topics this week

Tuesday 6:30 PM: Vals, musicality and styling

Friday noon: Changing directions with balance and speed

Both classes will work on moves that change direction, balance and speed, but Tuesday will focus on vals and Friday on milonga. Join us for one or both!

Feet and musicality

Yes, I do spend my free time geeking out about tango and the body. In fact, I spend most of my time at the chiropractor discussing feet, ankles, arches, etc. because he’s the only person I know who is just as interested—and has more information for all of us! Shout out to Seth Watterson: the Portland tango community has improved their technique because of you! And no, this is not a paid plug. I just think ALL of you should get Seth to check out your feet and balance, except then I would never get an appoinment!

How do my feet affect my musicality?

The better your technique is, the better you will dance. The better your balance is, the easier it is to dance well. When you are on balance, on axis, your brain has more time to think about what to do and HOW to do it, and your body has more time feel the music and allow the music to inform your dance.

Ways to get your feet to work better:

1. Do calf raises every day to strengthen your ankles. Here’s a video if you need to know what that means. I have been doing these to rehab my torn ankle ligament, and I have noticed that many of us have weak ankles, not just me.

2. Find the four corners of your foot, and root down. The mound of your big toe, the mound of your little toe, the outside of your heel and the inside of your heel all contribute to balance. Here’s a yoga class from one of my favorite online instructors to help you focus on your feet better!

3. Work on your posture of your whole body, too! Heidi Weiss is offering a set of Pilates classes starting in a week, to help!

4. Another person to check out is Portland Tango’s very own Linda Machtelinckx. She is setting up BreezeKinetics as a way to offer Zoom, and then (I think) in-person classes. The first class starts next week. Contact her for more details.

Whether you are into calisthenics, yoga, Pilates, whatever—build your own system of workout that strengthens and protects your body so you are stronger and ready to dance when we get out of lockdown!

And of course, I am here, creating space for you to put your tango, balance, strength, musicality and enjoyment together, twice a week!

This week in my tango group classes

Friday (22Jan21) @ noon: Milonga: going fast with comfort // plus topics requested by students (bk walk and adorno sequence)

Tuesday (19Jan21) @ 6:30 PM: Making little count: milonga, adornos and dancing in small spaces

Optimal tango not ideal tango

I’ve been thinking about optimal tango (not ideal tango) and how each person’s body structure impacts their tango. I think that all people can become good tango dancers if they understand their own body and technique on a deep level, and adjust their dance to their bodies, not to what it “should look like” on the dance floor.

Last week in class, we spent a lot of time with our eyes closed. I wanted people to FEEL what they were doing, rather than evaluate it visually. The most interesting observations so far:

Ochos are straight lines!

As we worked on ochos, many dancers found that they had an idea of an ocho crossing across their midline, rather than a straight step followed by a pivot. I have to say that I had never tried to dissuade people from doing zigzags across the floor because it fits into a room well for a group class. However, when I asked people to go “straight forward” in their space and then pivot—a third of the class improved their ochos immediately! Our visual map of ochos can get in the way of what the body is actually doing.

Becoming aware feels uncomfortable

We hold memories, traumatic and positive, in our muscles and tissues; there’s a whole school of therapy designed to release trauma through movement. What does that mean for finding spots in your body that aren’t helping you dance well? Some of them unlock uncomfortable memories, or our body simply tries to avoid that spot.

Being open to feeling vulnerable means you are open to change, healing, growth—all positive, but scary. When you can look at that in your movement, you can discard what is holding you back and find your new, better-functioning body and technique. I didn’t say it was easy.

You feel the problems before you can fix them

Most dancers need to be able to FEEL what’s not working before it can be fixed. It helps if the teacher points out issues, but you won’t be able to fix them until YOU can feel what’s going wrong. At that point, most people confide, “I think I’m getting worse at this dance!!!!!” to me. From my own experience, I can tell you that I have felt this way each time before a major breakthrough in my dance, and I still go through this process. You will have an understanding of the issue before fixing it: you don’t suck at tango! You are GOOD at tango! Don’t quit now when you are about to go up a level!

Class themes for the week

So, classes this week will focus on YOU finding how your body structure actually functions in key tango fundamentals:

Tuesday (January 12): Balance challenges and adding adornos to walking, pausing and ochos

Friday (January 15): Balance on your feet and ankles, and balance in turns

Sign up!

Back in the saddle again

New Year, new opportunities to . . .

I took ten days off work for the first time in over two years. That gave me an opportunity to look forward and think about what I want to happen in the future, both for me and for my teaching. As I caught up with all of our older family members, I started to focus on WAY in the future, not just 2021. How do I want to live now, and how does that impact ten/twenty/thirty years from now?

Although it’s not a surprise to those of you who have studied with me, I am re-committed to incorporating elements of healthy living into my tango classes each week. I want to come out of this pandemic with more skills, a better life-work balance, and with a body that will allow me to dance! Here’s what to expect:

Tune into our bodies

I have been doing daily yoga since August with my husband (I am personally lazy, but he’s not). Since I tore my ankle ligament, I have not been able to go running, and yoga has given me daily time to tune into my body and be present the way I used to do when running. I recently started yoga teacher training to expand my toolkit of stretching and balance ideas for tango, and have realized that I am more of a movement geek than I thought: I am having SO MUCH fun thinking about which muscle does what as I learn new movements, and then applying that to my tango moves. It’s my third time through anatomy classes, but the first time in ten years; a good review!

So don’t say I have not warned you that tango classes will have enhanced body awareness components!

Relieve stress

Celebrating holidays without our loved ones, has not been easy. For the few who made the huge commitment to quarantine for two weeks in order to be with family (Stephanie!), you know how important those family ties are to you. For those of us too far away to visit, Zoom did help connect us, but it’s not the same.

Holidays are always stressful. On top of that, having COVID around is more stressful. Add to that (in the USA) that we are having a rocky political transition, and many people are stressed out about that, too.

Dancing can relieve stress for many of us. Exercise can relieve stress. Breathing can relieve stress. When we don’t know how long we have to continue this marathon of pandemic alterations, we NEED those stress releases! So don’t say I didn’t warn you that tango classes will focus on taking you out of those moments of stress as much as I can!

Express ourselves

My extroverted students have told me that this isolation is really killing them. It’s not quite as hard for us introverts, but few of us have our normal ways to express ourselves available to us. That’s especially true for tango dancers: going out dancing and moving to music with a multitude of other dancers—that is not going to happen safely for a while. What else can we do to express ourselves?

My solution to this has been to incorporate “just dance” moments into class. Being able to see other humans expressing themselves at the same time, to the same music, allows us little windows into the future, where we will be able to dance in the same room, together. And there may be disco cooldowns :-)

Get stronger

2021 gives us a chance to set goals for ourselves. I am not a New Year’s resolution kind of person, but I want to be strong for as many years as possible, so I am focusing on finding ways to strengthen my body that will be accessible to me as I keep aging. Tango and yoga are both on that list.

I feel that most of us who dance cannot envision a time where we cannot move to music do all the other activities that we love. So . . . You can’t say that I didn’t warn you that dance class will work on building your body and your strength to keep you going this year, and for many years.

Find balance

As we age, balance tends to decline. I don’t want to lose the ability to do the things that I do, so I have really dialed down during the pandemic, working on my balance. Again, I want to live my entire life doing what I love, and not ending up sitting in a chair, unable to move easily. OK, so I love to knit and spin, and I have activities I could do sitting down, BUT I want to be able to dance, walk, garden—all that—until I keel over someday.

There will be balance challenges in class to help all of us work on maintaining and improving our balance.

What are YOU doing?

Share what you have lined up for yourself for 2021! How are you going to keep your tango improving to be ready to dance together? What new cool stuff have you learned to help you do that?

Adjusting your body map focus for classes this week

El Obelisco, December 2019

Many times, we talk about “beginner mistakes” in tango. You know: those moves we learned as a baby tango dancer, where we didn’t really know what we were doing? Somehow, as our dance matures and we learn new steps, the more advanced steps become easier because we learn them as intermediate or advanced dancers. However, for many of us, our basic steps still retain some of our beginner issues.

I think the same thing happens with our tango body map. We pay careful attention to how we do a boleo or a back sacada—anything tricky. However, we schlep through walking to the cross, or doing back ochos, or even just walking backwards. We’ve done it for so long that we don’t even notice that our body mapping is off for certain movements.

As 2020 ends, let’s take some time to reimagine our body maps, fill in the gaps, polish and refine older assumptions, so that we are ready to dance with other folks when we are able. We will bring a more enjoyable dance with us, because we will be able to feel our mapped body, and know where we are in space. Come join us this week for a body-mind meld!

6:30 Tuesday (Zoom): Body mapping hips and down

Noon Friday (Zoom): Body mapping core/contrabody and up

A year ago, I was packing for Buenos Aires

A year tomorrow, I was on my familiar trajectory: PDX, Texas, Buenos Aires, preparing to take my tour group for their first taste of dancing in the heart of tango.

2019 marked 20 years of traveling to dance in Buenos Aires. I had gone first to do my master’s thesis research on tango and gender, but kept going back, even when I claimed I didn’t plan to ever return. What can I say? I love this city and its people.

At first, I didn’t want to be identified as a tourist, so I dressed like an Argentine, did no sightseeing, and just danced 24-7. After a few visits, I realized that there was a lot more to Buenos Aires than tango, and started to relax about looking like a foreigner.

When I started to lead tours, I allowed myself to take time out of tango to get to know more about the area. The more I learned, the more I loved!

A year away from my past visit, what do miss? Of course I miss my friends and the milongas. Of course I miss the excellent food. But I also miss the street fairs, the parks, the summer warmth when it’s winter back home, and being in a real city. I miss taking the train to Tigre and going out on a river taxi to the delta. I miss bike touring in the parks.

I hope that when I go back, people and businesses will have survived COVID. I hope to take more people to dance in my beloved Buenos Aires; to fall in love with this city as I have. Ojala (God willing) in 2021…

The belt maker in Plaza Armenia

Folkloric dance at the street fair in Mataderos

The Tigre delta and a river taxi

Christmas in summer