In these unusual times you might be wondering what you can do to practice tango, especially if you don’t have a partner to dance with right now.  Solo practice can be useful for tango, however there are some cautions.  It is very easy when you practice alone to develop body habits that are not good for dancing with a partner.  Habits in movement, once established can be very hard to get rid of so how can we practice and be productive without making a lot of work later?  All of this depends on how long you have been studying tango.  If you have been dancing for 5 years or less you are particularly susceptible to this problem.

I started learning tango back when tango was just getting started here in Portland, we had no weekly milongas, very few weekly classes, so like it or not we all did a lot of solo practice.  We had very few resources available, so we had to make it up as we went, and getting it wrong more often than not.  That situation was more likely to make bad habits rather than good ones, so I do know what I am saying when I say that for every week or month spent practicing a bad habit it could take anywhere from 3 to 5 weeks or months to get rid of the habit.  Imagine how hard it was to get rid of the pattern of the 8 count basic in my dance when I spent over a year trying to do the perfect 8 count basic (it took years).

You might be working from home (if you are lucky you are still working) and you spend the day sitting in front of a computer and at some point you need to get away from the computer, and work, and the endless news you can’t stop scrolling through.  This is a perfect time to do something that will take your mind off everything and do some practice that will be useful for your tango when we can all get together and put our arms around each other and dance again in a lovely embrace to our favorite tangos.

The first video describes a simple exercise that I find very useful for me.  I will do something like this every day just to connect to my body and feel a simple movement.  The idea in this exercise is not to learn how to do the perfect side to side weight change.  It is more to use a simple movement to get past all of the thinking to learn to listen to how your body wants to move, how your body naturally moves.  The movement should be done very slowly so you can feel things happen in your body that there isn’t time to feel when you dance.  What you are trying to perfect, if anything, is the ability to listen to movement, and to simply feel movement without trying to think about anything.  The point is to use your conscious mind simply to listen, there is no interpretation needed or wanted.  This is why I say in the video that this exercise is almost a movement meditation.

So take your time, move slowly, feel the subtle, beautiful way your body moves, and enjoy the time away from the computer and all of the bad news!

The second exercise will need a little bit of space to move in.  You will be going for a little walk, again the point is not to do the perfect “walk”, just walk (the walk you do on the beach is “perfect” enough).  Just walk, at a slower normal speed at first, and then slow down until you are walking in slow motion.  Start with a relaxed walk and see if you can stay relaxed as you slow down, and see if you can feel your body adjust to the situation as your movement gets slower.  There is a point where you must have your balance as you arrive on your weight bearing foot, or you will fall into the next step.  This is an exercise I do just about every day.  It might be the two steps to the cupboard where my coffee making things are stored, I am thinking of making coffee but I am listening to my body move, feeling that lovely moment when all of my weight is carried by one foot, one leg, and my free leg is truly free to move as slowly as I might want, savoring the feeling of good balance.

If you have a video camera you have a feedback tool that can be very powerful.  Video yourself doing this exercise and make sure you aren’t trying to stylize the movement into “tango walking”.  This is where bad habits are developed and efficiently put into one’s body.

Also don’t practice this exercise for long.  It is best done in short sessions, I do something like this every day but maybe only three or four steps just to remind me how my body feels in this movement.  If you start thinking about how you are walking you have been practicing for too long, and you will begin doing what you think you are thinking about.