When I teach, I make sure that everyone swaps partners and make also sure that people that came with their partner get to pair up every two or three exercises. I am very often asked why do we have to swap partners.
Unlike most ballroom dances, which are aimed for competitions and choregraphies, tango is improvisational. As such, it is important that one man can dance with any woman. It's important that he can make her understand his energy but, even more important, that HE understands how HER energy will receive his marks. If I dance with 100 women I will find that to do a single step I have to do it 100 times differently. All of this because in tango we're all different (sorry for those of you who copycat your idols! The true must hurt!) and we all have different energies that we have to understand.
Furthermore, dancing always with the same person will allow for accommodation and loss of that capacity to adapt to your partner.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Changing partners
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5 comments:
Ah KR. That is the ideal world. Some folks have no aspiration other than to dance ONLY with their partner. For them, the "so you can dance with ANYONE" argument is irrelevant.
When I still took group classes, I would only take them with a partner, because otherwise, I'd always just end up being an assistant teacher.
Yes Johanna, I know that kind of folks and they soon disappear from my classes... But what can I do? I'm not going to work against my principles to get more people in the classes, I don't do it for the money!
Perhaps you don't wan't money, KR, but maybe you hope to help your community grow? I find a "take it or leave it" approach with our own ideals can do more harm than good. Letting potential tangueros disappear because of rigid principles is a loss to the community. A more constructive approach is to continue to ecourage experimentation with others by giving positive and valid reasons for doing so. That would achieve both goals :-)
Yep, I'm not THAT bad! :o) I do have people that come and want to dance with each other only but what I do is talk to them and explain it and they end up by changing partners, at some point. I had students that were very resolute in the beginning not to change partners and that now do.
What will happen if they keep dancing with each other is that they will not only be unable to dance with anyone else as they will also accommodate to each other and start to develop little technical mistakes that will soon become bigger.
One of the incentives to change partners is to have people from the same level in a class and I make a lot of effort to make sure that people attend the appropriate level!
LOL!
Ok, you can come out of the corner.
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