Improvement Archives - Tango Topics

Every tango dancer wants a powerful and elegant walk. Ask a tanguero what they are practicing, and the most common answer is “I am working on my walk”. Whole books have even been devoted to analyzing the walk. For many, a good tango walk is synonymous with a good tango dancer. But how do we actually improve our walk?

Improvement takes two steps. You first make choices about what you want to do, and then you check to see if what you did was what you wanted. You first pick your target and then you check your accuracy. This article discusses choices we can make for the tango walk—the targets we can pick—and a follow-up article will discuss methods to check our accuracy.

The walk is too simple to be the only thing you practice. It does not have pivots, does not change systems, and does not have the pattern of alternating crosses and open steps that is fundamental to understanding many tango movements.[1] At the same time, the walk is too complicated to practice as a whole. An elegant walk is an integration of many specific components, each performed correctly and in the correct sequence. If we try to improve everything at once, then we overload our capacity to focus. Instead, we want to improve our understanding, control, and mastery of each component, and then reintegrate them into an improved whole. Practice the walk, and your walk won’t improve. Practice the components of the walk, and your walk will improve.

So how do we go about breaking down the walk into components and picking our targets? The approach I find helpful is to ask myself a series of questions about what I want to do. I have listed 10 questions below that are a good place to start (see here and here for a discussion of the joint terms used in some of the questions). I recommend you take the time to write down your answers for your own walk. These questions are just a starting point, and there are many more we could ask, especially related to the effect and intent of what we want to convey. The specific questions are less important than the specificity of your answers. Try to be detailed with your response. Clarity of intent leads to clarity of movement.

Feet: How do you line up your feet relative to each other and relative to your partner’s feet?
Ankles: Do you bevel your feet, and when do you point or flex your feet?
Knees: When do you straighten or bend your knees?
Hips: When and how much do your turn out your legs, and when do you flex or extend your hips?
Hip position: Do you keep your hips level to the floor?
Collection: How do you collect? How does your collection synchronize with your partner?
Embrace: Where do you connect with your partner? How do you hold them?
Head: Where is your head positioned? Where are you looking?
Balance: Where is your center of balance throughout the step?
Effect: What do you want to convey with your walk? How do you want it to feel?

There is no “one true tango,” and there is not one correct way to walk, so there is not a right or wrong answer to these questions. What is important is to start making choices. That being said, some choices will better convey our desired effect, and some choices need to be bundled along with other choices we make. Studying the choices we can make, and the choices great dancers make can help with our own clarity. Consider some of the choices made by Jonathan and Clarisa in the images below (images taken from https://youtu.be/ujs4hFT2Kz0 filmed by 030 tango).

Images from Clarisa Aragon and Jonathan Saavedra dancing to “Patético” by Tango Bardo at Rathaus Berlin.

A few notes on some of the choices we can make. There are three main answers to the question of how do you line up your feet? One answer is to have the feet on two tracks, where the inside of the heels line up with each other. Another potential is to have the center of the feet line up with each other, so the back foot fits in the shadow of the front foot (if the light were directly in front of you). A third option is to have the balls of the feet on one line, in which case the center of one foot actually crosses the other. There are amazing dancers who use each of these three possibilities, and each results in a different style of walk.

Turnout determines where your knee is pointing relative to your hip, and beveling determines where your toes are pointing relative to your knee. The turnout and beveling combine to determine the size of “the pizza slice” your feet make on the floor. Your choice of beveling and turnout depend on your aesthetic preferences, foot strength, the music, and what you want to express. You can see Vanessa expressing turnout and some impressive beveling in the first image, and a more neutral ankle and turnout position in the second image (images from https://youtu.be/_7wySfMSuvA). Beveling the standing foot requires a lot of balance and ankle strength to perform safely, so I recommend most dancers to have a neutral ankle for the standing foot and play with different shapes with the free foot. One (more or less) universal rule is to position your feet such that when walking backwards the big toe is the first to arrive, and when walking forward the big toe is the last to leave. This rule is clearly shown by Roxana and Sebastián in the third and fourth images (from https://youtu.be/NFXs20kygAY).

Various levels of turnout and beveling by Vanessa Villalba (dancing with Facundo Pinero). Sebastián Achaval and Roxana Suarez displaying the big toe being the first to land when walking backwards and the last to leave when walking forward.

How you collect depends on some of the other choices you make. One important choice is whether your free foot is flexed or pointed when passing through collection. If your foot is flexed when passing through collection, then your knee, and ankle will pass through collection at the same time. If your foot is pointed, then your knee and ankle will pass through collection at different times, and you will have a continuum of collection (Credit to Jackie Pham for coming up with the term continuum of collection). In the panel above with Jonathan and Clarisa, you can see how they keep a pointed foot through collection. When Clarisa collects at the ankle, Jonathan collects his knees. And when Clarissa collects at the knees Jonathan collects at the ankles. This creates space for the step and makes the movement look connected. Your type of collection also depends on the amount of turnout of the standing leg. When you pass through collection, you want the knees to pass close to each other to not leave a gap between them. The more turnout you have, the more potential gap. This can be solved by turning in the free leg when passing through collection, which leads to a snakelike walk. If you want the snaky effect, then more turnout of the standing leg is helpful, and if you want a more linear direct effect then less turnout of the standing leg is helpful. The choice of turnout impacts your choice of collection, which in turn impacts the effect you display.

So, you want a better tango walk? Then do this: ask questions and come up with specific answers. These answers give you specific components to work on. Work on the specific components and it will lead to improvement and clarity in these components. Better components sum up to a better walk.

[1] Practicing a range of movements exposes our body to new concepts, improves our balance and coordination, and highlights technical flaws which can then be corrected. Improving a variety of movements makes us a better dancer, when in turn gives us a better walk.

To get strong, you start with light weights slowly increase to heavier weight. To become a better runner, you progressively increase the speed or distance. To learn a musical instrument, you start with simple scales and songs and progress to more challenging pieces and concepts. In all cases, we learn by progressively increasing difficulty such that the task stays challenging but not too challenging. We build a staircase where each new step is a little bit higher than the next. The same principle applies to learning Tango.

Beginner dancers often feel overwhelmed and lost, and most dancers struggle to integrate moves they learn in class into their dance in the milonga—both symptoms of the difficulty being set too high. At the same time, dancers who have been at it for a few years tend to plateau, reaching what psychology professor Anders Ericsson calls “that level of ‘acceptable’ performance and automaticity [where] the additional years of ‘practice’ don’t lead to improvement.”[1] This stagnation is a symptom of the difficulty being set too low.

The gym has nicely labeled weights that we can add, and we can change variables such as reps, sets, exercises, and recovery time to increase difficulty as we get stronger. But how do we vary the challenge of Tango? What are the variables that we can use to dial up or down the difficulty of the dance?

There are six variables that determine the difficulty of a move, sequence, concept, or really any part of the dance. I’ll call them familiarity, complexity, accuracy, timing, partnering, and navigating. A new movement is more difficult than a familiar movement. A complex pattern is more difficult than a simple pattern. Execution with precision and accuracy is more difficult than ‘just doing the step’. Specific timing and musicality is more difficult than doing a step to the beat or without music. Leading or following a step with a new partner is more difficult than with your regular partner. And finally, navigating a crowded milonga is more difficult than when no one else is around.

Familiarity, complexity, and accuracy are internal variables while timing, partnering, and navigating are external variables.[2] Internal variables are based on our own knowledge and actions—our familiarity with a concept, our choice of movement complexity, and our accuracy as a dancer. External variables depend on the external environment—who asks us to dance, what music is playing, and the amount of space.

Learning depends on being able to progressively vary the difficulty, so learning Tango depends on our ability to vary the difficulty of these six variables. Few if any dancers can accurately execute a new, complex move musically with a new partner in a crowded milonga. Something must give. The challenge is that in the milonga the external variables are not set by us.[3] The milonga dials up the external variables, increasing total difficulty, which often leads to sacrificing the development of internal variables to meet these difficulties. We all know dancers who pull out every complicated move, but without accuracy or grace. We also know dancers who may be musical and have a yummy embrace but just repeat the same few simple steps over and over at every marathon they attend. So many late-night Tango conversations revolve around the merits of fancy moves versus elegant posture versus connections versus musicality. But the truth is we can have it all. We can learn new concepts and dance complicated sequences musically and with connection in a crowded space. We just need to turn down the external dials for a bit.

For many of us, we go straight from learning a new step in a class to trying it out at the milonga. It ends up not working so we go back to our tried and true dance. But of course it doesn’t work. at the milonga all the difficulty dials are all turned up to 11. It’s a recipe for disaster. Instead of trying our new step at the milonga, first go to a quiet space. No music, no navigation, no need to perform, no distractions. Turn all the dials way down and then build back up. Start with getting familiar with the concept. Then break the movement into small components to reduce complexity. Drill each component and film ourselves to work on accuracy. Then start combining and adding back in the external variables. Play with different variations to work the lead and follow. Practice to different music to work on musicality. Start controlling the spacing, see how big and how small you can make the same movement. Ask for help and feedback along the way. Finally, test it out at a milonga. Soon enough you will have a new move to play with, dance and enjoy. By controlling your dials instead of being controlled by them, you build your staircase to become a more expressive and enjoyable dancer.

[1] Anders Ericsson spent much of his career studying what makes experts experts. I highly recommend checking out his research and writings. Quote comes from the book Peak: Secrets from the new Science of Expertise

[2] With a little word smithing, I was able to get the internal variables to end with ‘y’ and the external variables to end with ‘ing’, which can be helpful for identifying each.

[3] Granted, we can choose who we dance with and the songs we dance to. But the fact remains that it is generally frowned upon in the milonga to do things like trying the same move several times in a row paying no attention to the music or space.

Improvement

Want a better tango walk? Then do this: Part I

Dial up your Tango Dance: How to Progressively Grow Your Dancing Skills