Since I launched into Tango learning years ago, a few transformations devoured previous ways of moving with and / or thinking about Tango.  At Stone Soup one such transformation occured – I transformed my weight shifts, my compact core, torsional rotation skill, my embrace and phrasing choices.

I first made the choice to go after making these changes when I first saw Eric Lindgren dance at the Portland Valentango Festival in February.  I believe he is one of the best social Tango leads in the U.S. for the following reasons:  he is adept at moving with many different quality of movements; he leads his follows in a compact space around him, creating an enormous amount of movement at times in crowded spaces; and his upper & lower body differentiation and torsional energy management is one of the best I have EVER witnessed.

And last but not least, he dances with the melody!  He is not beat driven, but honors the rhythm along with everything else in the music.  NOT common here in the U.S.!  He is able to move his body already in a way that I believe will allow him to become quite a force of inspiration in Tango.

Therefore, I set out to get mentorship on how to shift my level of dancing and direction as a professional Tango teacher.  Murat & Michelle were my first choice – so I followed them to Tucson, AZ then San Diego, CA then Stone Soup.  They gave me the underlying direction, suggestions and private training I needed to work towards what I wanted.

At Stone Soup, during my brief private of 25 min., Eric was able to spot on tell me what I needed to do to achieve a lot of what he is doing on the dance floor.  I knew using my torso was very important.  However, until Eric showed me what he is doing (always using torsion from a compact core), I did not get how much POWER existed in using my upper torso.  I was missing that salient point!

Some extraordinary dancers, Gustavo Navaeira and Horacio Godoy come to mind, use their torso extremely well.  I clearly underestimated the power of this skill.  So I got it!  I got the importance, and more importantly, I got the feel of what I need to do in my body so I can reproduce the feeling and increase the ability.  I call this ability to reproduce the feeling an internal feedback system, which is critical to learning.

How I got to the torsion ability is the story.

M&M (Michelle & Murat) worked with me to get full weight changes that come from fully using my body mechanics to load the hip socket of the weighted leg while moving through the foot fully AND relaxing the free leg.  The pleasure from loading fully into my hip socket and relaxing my free leg (which are both now cyborg – metal ball and socket), is delicious, for all of my muscles, ligaments and tendons feel a relaxation and fuller range of motion without debilitating pain in the socket itself.  Yeah for modern orthopedic technology!

As I move around now I am using much less energy, and enjoying the walk so much more.  I marvel at how so many teachers say just walking is great, yet so many dancers will not get to experience the true pleasures of walking until they get the body skill sets needed to do a Tango walk.  I think it is more accurate to say at SOME  POINT in dancing Tango, just Tango walking becomes a true pleasure, rich with texture and quality of movement with great expression.  The Tango walk IS NOT just walking, and is very different than our normal APE WALK!

A whole other piece of my transformation is to move from a compact core.  I was moving from a looser core, and in working with M&M, I got that in order to move from a more compact core I needed to have full weight changes.   Because I did not have full weight shifts, I had a lot of noise in my Tango with misalignment.  I had to compensate for this misalignment with a lot of movement from outside of my core.  Once I got the alignment that came from full weight shifts, I was able to move just from my core.  And I can use only what is necessary from my core, which is why I call my core use more compact.

However, there is one more aspect needed – that is leading from a compact core WITH the upper torsion.  The upper body torsion works best when everything else is aligned and compact.  Bottom line – full weight shifts are needed for correct alignment.  So in attempting to move as Eric L., I needed to get the full weight shifts, which allowed for a compact core, which allowed for upper body torsion in a useful way.

Furthermore, Michelle had me take the energy of what I was feeling in moving with full weight shifts and compact core and upper torsion and connect that with my embrace.  When I did that, she verbally expressed how I got it – too juicy to put here  To sum this up, I can now include my follow in my upper body torsion much more easily with my embrace.

Lastly, M&M impressed upon me to mark the phrasing with beginning and ending vocabulary and a theme in the body of the phrase.  Then all of my silly improvisational movement makes sense and follows traditional Tango music in a way that makes more sense to my dance partner and people watching how the movement matches the music.

Now my work is to integrate this as a habit (make the new way of moving from a dirt road to a superhighway), and include more of the vocabulary I have with this quality.  Right now I have had to dumb down my vocabulary expressions to maintain this new way of moving.  I am concerned that many follows may find this boring, but I must be true to my own dance. Hmmmmmmmm – another entry.