At some point during any tango class it is very likely you will hear your teacher talking about dissociation, but what is it and how does it help your tango? In tango terms, dissociation is the ability to isolate the behaviour of one part of your body from all the others. It can refer to how you project your standing leg without affecting your balance, how you lead a height change without bending forwards or backwards, but most usually it refers to the technique of letting your shoulders turn into a pivot before your hips and legs follow. Allowing yourself to turn in this way, with your shoulders and chest beginning to turn before any other part of your body starts to move, is also called a corkscrew effect as your body briefly spirals around your axis. This helps create the flow we look for in tango, but most [read more...]
It is estimated that one in twenty people in the UK do some form of dance on a regular basis, with around twice that number having an interest in watching dance performances either on stage or on the television. A significant percentage of both categories say that Argentine Tango is the dance they most like to watch and want to be able to do themselves, yet a recent survey suggests that only around one in two thousand people in the UK actually regularly dance the tango. What is going on? Whenever tango is performed on stage, it is always the dramatic and acrobatic “Tango Fantasia” version that is featured. With its spectacular lifts, cat-like flexibility, and sizzling hot passion the dance creates a powerful visual impact, and the rapid leg flicks and super-fast footwork give it a unique and instantly recognisable dynamic. The music starts, the dancers connect, and [read more...]
Those of you who are regulars at South Norwood will already have heard the sad and unexpected news about Fred, who passed away suddenly last week after a stroke. All of us at Tangosynthesis extend our deepest sympathy to his family and friends at this difficult time. Fred was a cornerstone of the South Norwood tango group and had been coming to us for several years. His unique and flamboyant dancing style always made everyone smile, and although he never quite seemed to dance the exercises in the way that I had planned he inspired everyone to really enjoy the dance and to express themselves on the dance floor more than they thought possible. Fred was unique and brought a wonderful character to the group that will never be replaced. His stories made us laugh, his dancing inspired us, and his personality brought us together. Thanks for all the [read more...]
This week’s blog post is about a feature on our website that you may not have noticed. Did you know you can subscribe to our calendar and have events or classes appear directly in your phone or computer diary as soon as we publish them? No? Well… Although everything is already published on the Diary of Everything page on our website, people regularly ask us to add all our X/Tango events, workshops, classes, and anything else we do as “Events” on Facebook so it is easy to add these to their calendar. That is certainly one way to broadcast it, but there are problems: It is a lot of work to add everything into Facebook as well as on our own diary as there is no way to cut/paste between the two. Even if we did do that, we would be at the mercy of the [read more...]
The very public meltdown of Gustavo Naveira recently at the Gavito Tango Festival in Los Angeles has got the whole dance world in a buzz. Two weeks ago, had you Googled “Naveira tango” you would have seen page after page of discussion about his contributions to tango and his essay on Nuevo Tango published in 2009. Now that same Google search will return videos of him arguing with his partner Giselle Anne on stage and attempting to humiliate her by walking away during a performance piece in front of a paying festival audience. Thousands of words have already been written about the incident, and no doubt there will be thousands more before the dust settles. But what this has also done is to open the doors to a discussion about respect in dance and how we should behave on the dance floor. On the Dance Floor [read more...]
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