This video describes a movement that is very important for followers.  Leaders use this movement as well in transitions from forward walking to backward walking sometimes, but followers use it all the time in turns.

This is a bit harder exercise so make sure you are still able to move in the relaxed way these videos have emphasized.  The hardest part of the exercise is the transition from the side step to the back step.  The exercise is set up to help you do this by opening the movement up into a line.  I am most concerned here with the development of the back step and the torsion required to do this movement with a partner.

I have constructed this exercise in a line so that you don’t have to pivot to get around the corner as you go from the side step to the back step.  If you focus on that pivot you may try to use momentum in your leg to throw yourself around the corner.  It is a common enough problem, and it causes a lot of trouble with balance so you can end up using your partner as a prop to get around the corner, something you really don’t want to do.

Please don’t overdo the torsion, do what your body can do, and remember as always, if anything hurts you aren’t doing what I want here.  Nothing should hurt, so stop and go back to the beginning to figure out what you might be doing wrong.

Stay safe, stay healthy, and hopefully we can dance together again soon.

In this video we return to forward walking, this time the focus is on walking in small circles.  This is a very good exercise for both leaders and followers, both move in this way in the dance.

As in all of the exercises try to do this as slowly as you can.  That will teach you much more about the movement, and where you are likely to lose balance.  This movement will require a lot of torsion in your body, make sure you do what is comfortable, don’t push too far until you know what your body can do.  If anything hurts stop right away and figure out why it hurts.  Nothing should hurt when you dance tango.

You can start with larger circles, but ultimately you can circle in nearly the space a couple stands in.  Remember to practice this one in both directions.  As always have fun keeping  in practice.  Eventually we will all be able to dance together again.

With this exercise we return to backward walking, but this time we are trying to refine what we did in exercise 3.  In exercise 3 we focused mostly on the feeling of arriving with all our weight over the weight bearing foot.  We were looking for the feeling of relaxing onto that foot so we didn’t worry much about the free foot, and while the result didn’t look very elegant it did get to the foundation of transferring weight backward.  Now we will refine this movement and make it smooth and continuous, and then we want to be able to do the movement really slowly.  That is always the test, can we do the movement slowly and still have good balance all the way through.

What you will find when you slow this movement down is that you might have a tendency to push with the foot you are leaving.  This will come out again when we focus on the free foot, and picking it up as soon as possible.  As you do this you will probably also end up with tension in your feet.  Review exercise 3 and if you were able to do that weight transfer with relaxed feet, try and keep that feeling.  Here we want to pick the free foot up as soon as there is no weight on it so we finish the step over the weight bearing foot with the free foot free from the floor and passing the standing foot.  When I am leading this is the point I am looking for in my partner’s movement, at this point my partner is ready to start another step.  This exercise is all about finding that place.

Finally at the end of the video I show something I do a lot as a brief practice exercise, combining backward and forward walking.  Go ahead and take a video of yourself doing the exercise and watch to see how you are doing.

Slow movement is hard to do, and yet it doesn’t require a lot of muscle to do.  Be careful of your feet as you do this, you will probably work too hard at first.  If anything hurts, stop whatever you are doing, nothing we are doing here should hurt.  Listen to your body, and figure out why there is pain and change what you are doing.

Have fun and look forward to the time when we can all dance together again.

In this exercise we return to an idea we started in video 2.  In this case we are going to focus on slow forward walking.  As you work with these videos it is a good idea to go back periodically and review the first two exercises.  In this video we are going to work on something much closer to our walking in tango.  It is not all that different from our natural walking but even at tango tempo it is still slower than we usually walk.  The slower tempo explains most of the difference between walking on the street and walking in tango.  In the end with more dance experience it gets stylized and more distinct, but the foundations of our dancing are in simple body movement.

We start as usual with side to side weight change to make sure we are getting weight completely over one foot.  If you can’t reliably get your weight over one foot then you are not going to have an easy time walking really slowly.  You need to be able to take as long as you want to place your foot, and you can only take that much time if you aren’t falling over.  So placing all your weight over one foot is still the game we are playing.  This exercise is good for followers as well as leaders.  It is easier to work on this walking forward because walking forward is so much easier than walking backward, especially when we slow things down this much.  We will eventually work on walking backward.

In this video I focus on the movement of the free leg from the beginning of the step until the free foot is placed on the floor.  Once the foot is placed it isn’t all that hard to transfer your weight and arrive over the foot.  It is harder to just move the leg and place the foot without moving the rest of your body.  Don’t worry about taking a long step here, keep the steps short enough that you can place your foot on the floor without immediately placing weight on it.  You can take longer steps later but at some point you will have to be transferring your weight as you place your foot.  If you internalize the feeling of this walking with normal length steps your body will find a way to keep the feeling of this even when you are taking longer steps, and your movement will still be as smooth, and you don’t have to develop some distinct new thing.

I mention again the use of your own video camera to be able to watch yourself.  Take a video and see what you are actually doing.  This is an important feedback, and better than using a mirror, when you watch the mirror you will not be able to focus on your movement in the same way.  Let the video camera do the watching and you can focus on the feeling of the movement, then you can watch later and just watch.

The control you learn from this kind of slow walking exercise is very nice for your feet.  When you can place your feet quietly, you can dance longer before your feet are tired, and harder surfaces like marble aren’t as punishing to dance on.

Incidentally my roommates used to comment that they could never hear me moving around the house.  I think my tango dancing has changed how I walk normally; I land quite softly in my every day walking.  So I started trying to walk in tango like I walk on the street, and ended up changing how I walk on the street to be more like I dance tango.

The exercise described in this video is a little more complicated, it looks at taking steps backward.  I thought this might be a good exercise to do next because walking backward is harder to do than walking forward.  Followers walk backward when learning tango and this can make learning to follow harder at first.  Since we don’t walk backward down the street we can’t start from something known and work toward tango; the movement we are working on is not familiar so it is easy to make bad habits that are hard to get rid of later.

The focus is going to be on the weight change, but in a different way than the weight transfer exercise in the first video (See Solo Practice).  Here we will start once again from something we all do normally and work from there.

Incidentally I made this video in my new space, it will take a little work to figure out how to best use the space, and how best to set up the camera.  Hopefully it won’t have quite as strong an echo when I am all moved in, and I promise I will memorize where the squeaky floorboards are.  Because of the echo you might have a little harder time hearing what I am saying so there is a description of the exercise below that you can read and compare with the video.

The exercise starts with a side to side weight change but instead of focusing on the subtle details of the weight transfer as we did in the first exercise I want to feel something else.  When you are standing for a long time it is natural to shift weight to one foot to rest the other foot.  When the foot you are standing on gets tired you shift your weight back to the other foot and so on.  Since you are doing this to rest a foot you aren’t trying to do anything pretty, there is no real technique to it, you just do it.  I want to look at this very natural movement and see how it can inform other movements we do dancing tango.  You can pay attention to this movement when you are in the checkout line at the store, since everyone is filling shopping carts these days stocking up for a week or more the lines move slowly and you will get a chance to do this.  I am interested in this feeling of relaxing your weight onto a standing foot.

Next we do a short step backward trying for the same feeling.  With your weight on one foot you can reach back for a short step, reach your foot first, and when your foot is touching the floor place your weight on that foot in the same way as you did side to side.  Don’t push your weight to the back foot just relax your weight there, just like you do side to side.  You should arrive with all your weight on the back foot and no weight on the other foot, which you should be able to easily lift off the floor.

This is the core point of this exercise, the feeling of relaxing weight on the back foot, and the front foot ending up completely free.  There is no feeling of pushing from one foot to the other and done this way it should be fairly easy to arrive on your balance.  When you push from one foot to the other it is easy to overshoot and lose balance, here since the feeling is more relaxing onto a foot you should just arrive over that foot.  If one step works well you might try a couple more.

As I emphasize in the video it is probably not good to do a lot of these backward steps in a row.  I find that it is easy to go from listening to the feeling of a movement to trying to control now my body does the movement, and that is where bad habits are created.  Instead I will do little bits of this through the day.  When I go to the kitchen to fix lunch or dinner I do a little of this exercise as I move around the space.  I do this kind of exercise every day, but I never do it for long.  Long enough to feel my body move, and not long enough that I start thinking about how I do it.  It is more like checking in and re-connecting to a feeling.

Also as I emphasize in the video we are not trying to do the perfect weight transfer.  If we try to do a ‘perfect’ technique when practicing alone there is a risk that it will make it much more difficult to connect with any partner.  Everybody moves differently and we want to be able to keep the feeling of a complete weight transfer even as we adjust how we do it to stay connected with our partner.  It is different with every partner and never ‘perfect’, just perfect enough.

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.