String Theory

 

Many tango troubles begin with poor posture. Poor posture creates a cascading set of problems that affect both balance and embrace. It throws you off, it throws your partner off, and it creates muscle tension that will cramp your dancing in ways you can't even feel. And if you’re interested in elegance and style, posture is most of it. In fact, good posture combined with a good step is all of it.  (Just before he died, Petroleo once said he thought Miguel Angel Zotto was the best dancer in the world because of his posture.)

Finally, bad posture is tiring. It's an inefficient way to use your body, and when you dance 5 or 10 hours a week, bad posture can wear you out. Play whatever mental games you need to maintain good posture. Be a relaxed puppet, pulled up by a string... or think about being the tallest, most relaxed person on the floor. There are a lot of distractions in a crowded milonga. Other dancers can move in close or even bump you; an inexperienced partner can pull you off center; and sometimes you just get lost in the music and start slumping... so use a little discipline. Use a checklist and tell yourself, "be tall", or "string... relax" or "chest up". Good tango takes concentration and discipline. It takes a long time to develop good habits—and even longer to get rid of bad ones. If you lose your posture, you're screwed. So do whatever it takes.

 

Dancing tall will also center you from the front. Do your string exercise facing a mirror, and check to see if everything is symmetrical. Other than your arms, your left and right side should be a mirror image of each other. Your head , shoulders and hips should be at the same level, and your legs need to be fully extended and relaxed. Heels are comfortably close, with the toes turned slightly out for balance. As the string centers you, your shoulders drop and relax. Then, add just enough muscle tension to raise your arms for the embrace.

 

Our goal is to center ourselves, and move efficiently. We want to eliminate inefficient movement, so that we don’t waste energy using unnecessary muscles. Using unneeded muscles creates tension that works against us. By relaxing the muscles we don’t need, the ones we do need won’t have to overcome them. We also burn less “mental energy”—that is, by eliminating unnecessary movement and muscle tension, our brain has less to think about. We want to keep our neuromuscular-pathways from becoming overloaded. In the picture above, String Man is standing efficiently and using as few muscles as possible, so the communication system that connects them is doing less work.

For me, tango presents a couple of problems. One is the shoulders. It can be difficult at times to keep the shoulders down, back, and relaxed, while dancing in through the minefield of a crowded milonga with your arms held up in the embrace. One of the keys is concentration ("relax... shoulders down"), and the other is good technique. When a man leads well with the chest and torso, and the woman can follow without needing signals from his arms, both can dance with relaxed shoulders. The other problem is the head. We'll talk about that later.

 

Thirty Thousand Tangos

I’ve been keeping a training diary for a long time. At first I used it to monitor my fitness and check my progress in cycling, skiing, and windsurfing. Then when I met Alejandra, I started to keep track of how many tangos we danced. Counting tangos has absolutely no practical value. In fact it's a little crazy, but I do it out of habit. Here are the numbers:

We've average almost 3 milongas per week, and we dance about 9 or 10 tandas per milonga. That means that since we started, we’ve danced more than... 30,000 tangos together! Yikes!  If I’d trained that hard on skis or a bike, I might have made some money at it. I guess that’s why the milongueros say they don’t need eyeglasses to recognize us when we dance—they claim they can spot us by the way we move together.

Every tanda in the milonga begins the same way:  We’re sitting at a table somewhere, and when we hear the first notes, we usually know right away whether to get up or not. We’ve heard the music so much that we don’t even exchange a glance. As we move onto the floor, we may be talking or laughing with other people, but when we step up to embrace, it's always the same. We're already stepping in the compás, so it's like we're already dancing. I pause for half a second and stretch up, as an invisible string attached to the center of my head pulls me toward the ceiling. As I stretch up, I also take a in a deep breath, which causes my chest to fill and rise a little. Then I take half a second to relax and let my shoulders drop, I lean slightly into Alej as if a small magnet on my chest was pulling me in... and we go. We never wait. We go immediately while everyone else is still standing and talking. (There are three or four other milongueros in town who also begin this way, and we know each other well, because we're always dancing the first 30 seconds of the tangos together.) It always begins the same way. But what a strange thought... pulled up by a string attached to my head.  More than 30,000 times.