This thread started by Sharon asking: > How do you help your beginners to walk reasonably and musically? I think that is one of the most important questions to ask.
Walking alone in a ring I like to have people walking alone in a large ring. There are problems that are individual and there are problems that belong to the couple. Walking alone allows the student to concentrate on their own technique. Tango walk is a little different from regular walking styles; there are differences in posture that require some changes in how muscles are used. Walking alone gives people a chance to concentrate on these small changes. The walk needs to be automatic. Because we have a life long practice in walking, our habits are strong. In order to create new habits hours and hours of walking is needed. Nevertheless, if you keep students walking alone for 10 hours, they have learned postural chages worth one year of tango lessons. Spend a 20 minutes of walking alone in the beginning of every class to improve individual technique and dance. It is like practicing scales with an instrument. I try to get beginners walking with purpose and pride, without talking too much about the details and different stages during the steps. It is better to get them really moving, use their walking competence and adjust that a little. Trying to teach walking theoretically step by step, works for with people who have a high level of body control (dancers, actors, some athletes and movement instructors). Regular beginners will loose all confidence and ability to move. Posture You can ask them to change posture while walking - just try out things: what happens in your back, neck and the hips when you lift your arms to an abrazo compared to having them down? What happens if you in addition let your shoulders come down? What happens, if there is life and movement in your upper torso while you walk, compared with a stiff upper body? What happens if you move your chest a little forward? What happens with your head and neck, if you look look forward. What happens if you let your neck relax? What happens if you create a column inside your body that start from the perineum and lifts upwards through your chest to the top of your head? All directions Walk forward, backwards, sideways, and sometimes men forward and women backwards. Walking backwards requires that everyone keep on equal distance to the person they can see closest to them. This will help to keep the ring. If the person closest to you is about to step on you, reach out with your hand to stop them = helps to create the trust needed to walk backwards. Learn the good from the bad You can ask students to do some bad and weird things (lift your feet high, stick your head forward or backward, stick your pelvis forward, Walk with unsymmetrical shoulders, walk up and one down, walk low with short steps= knees bent all the time) The list of errors is endless, after each error guide them back to a good posture. Feeling what the bad things do to your walk, helps to recognize them later in ones own dance. Finding the beat Some men have hard time converting the music to weight shift. They hear the rhythm (they can clap it) but they are not able to figure out where their body should be during the beat. Walking in the ring gives them time to watch what others are doing and it gives the teacher an opportunity to walk next to them and guide with their body. Put the students hand on your lower back, which allows them feel your weight shifts in relation to their own walk. Allow them time to synchronize their walk with yours - sometimes it takes a whole dance. Use slow, regular, pause or double tempo steps. You know the drill... Short steps vs. long steps Find the relation between height and step length. I like to call a normal step length, the step you can take without moving your hip or changing the point where your weight is placed under your standing leg. A normal step can be stopped without leaving your previous placement of weight. Prolonged steps Some beginners have seen tango dancers do long steps on stage, and they are trying to do prolonged steps as their normal step, which is not a good way to start. Knowing that prolonged steps exist, can help the beginners to avoid them. Prolonged steps are too difficult for for beginners to use in dance. But if you have mixed level class, it can be a nice excercise. Prolonged steps (or perhaps extended steps is better English) add an inch or two to the step length. The leader will ask for a prolonged step by moving a little further during the step = the weight is not comfortably in the ball of the standing foot any more, but in the very extreme front of the standing foot at the moment, when the moving foot is placed on the floor. Be careful to not increase the length by moving only the hip forward. The same applies in steps to any direction. A good exercise is a slow milonga. I don't remember the name of the step (double step-walk?): you reach out with one foot, stop with a small weight on the forward foot, and step again one inch longer with the same foot (this is resembles the prolongement used in tango). Repeat on every step. When students know how to do the prolongement with a stop, drop the stop, and do just reach out and prolong = make one extra long step that has a gliding type of continuity. The prolongement requires a commitment to the movement and the step. The prolongement cannot be stopped without leaving your previous placement of weight. (You can of course go to your new weight and change direction and come back, but your have take your previous foot off the floor. If you do not need, it is not the kind of prolongement I am talking about.) Crosses Practice all crosses as a regular walk, where the arriving foot, instead of passing the stading foot, crosses. Pay attention to the small changes in directions between each step. We seldom do crosses while we walk on the street, therefore we have a habit of trying to avoid them. Doing 1000 crosses helps to open up the brain for the possiblity of making a cross. A cross should be just like a regular step, without any alarms going off in the brain. * Walk forward cross with right: Step forward with left- step into cross with right. Repeat. * Walk forward cross with left. * Walk backwards cross with right. * Walk backwards cross with left. * Cross with right - step - step - cross with right. Repeat. Pivots Add small pivots to the walk for each step. Practice both forward and backward until the next step can be controlled. In the ring only small pivots (5-90 degrees) and the molinete will work. Combinations When they know how to do one thing, give them combinations to practice the changes. Lots of repetitions is nice for creating automation, but combinations helps to move a single item to the dance. These combinations work also as repetition. Make sure that every new piece of of information is repeated several times. * Give very short combinations of steps, lenghts and rythms that can be chained together. Do them all together, to check that every one got it. Expression Until you are able to walk with expression alone, you are not able to lead or follow with expression. *Ask students to walk with passion, fear, resentment, happiness, eagerly, in pain, with expectation, lazy, stressed, in love, sad. * Ask them to move like a movie character or an animal. Help them to exaggerate. It helps to push their uppor limit of expression. In their dance, they are perhaps able to use 10% of the expression they do in an exercise. So if they are able to double the range of expression during the exercise, they will probably feel more comfortable to use a little more expression during their dance. Sometimes expression can ruin the technique, so you need to find a right balance, without killing the joy of expression. People tend to do things that they never could do as a couple, but that is OK. Combine expressions and elements: - Humphery Bogart style double tempos - Marilyn Monroe style pivots (they are very different from Lady Gagas) - Do 121 crosses like an happy accountant - Do long steps like you had a stone in your left shoe - make every sidestep left like it is a step away from you hateful ex-partner and every sidestep right like it is a step to your new love whom you do not really know that well yet The freedom to improvise Some men are fear struck while leading. Walking and dancing alone, helps them to find the music in their dance. For women it is a great opportunity learn to listen to and use the music. * Improvise with full freedom and express the music! But before you get good in improvising you need to practice. Give them only one to two elements to improvise with. The limitation forces people to make up and use new combiantions. If they are totally free, they just tend to repeat old ideas. For example: * No pivots. no crosses. Use as many corners as possible. Try to use all different corners you can come up with (with or without a change of foot in a corner). * All steps in normal tempo, with the exepction of a pivots than have different tempos. In otherwords, only tool of expression are the pivots. Therefore, one must use the differences in pivot, in order to dance to the music. Walking together. It is also possible to walk in the ring in couples with abrazo ;-) It allows for a whole new sets of comments and focus on the interplay between dancers. All of the above exercises can and should be done also in couples. Happy walking, Eero -- ----------------------------------------------------- http://eero.no _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list Tango-L@mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l