Guiding Tango Angels

Yesterday we heralded in the birthday of Jesus with the traditional booze, food, head colds, and drunken dancing. Oliver & Rachel (not me) kindly provided up us with venues, tuck, and fine hospitality.

There was no tango to be had though. Instead an impromptu dance to some reggaeton, which reminded me I really haven´t used my hips for dancing for the last 5 weeks as the only dancing I´ve done has been to tango. And there is no hip wriggling in tango...

Today I had a private class with Aurora Lubiz. She was suggested to me as a teacher by two wonderful German ladies, who were also staying at La Casita De San Telmo when I arrived here and were absolutely wonderful giving me tips on where to go, who to take classes with, and also taking me out with them to milongas. They were completely my Guiding Tango Angels and I´ve missed them ever since they winged their way back to Germany. On their advice, I´ve been to a couple of Aurora´s classes at Escuela Argentina de Tango on womens technique and adornments and really enjoyed her approach. She´s very warm, funny, passionate, but also talks about the muscles to use to make the movements, and where you should feel the movements coming from and ending in. It was her who started me thinking about opening my chest and pulling up through my abdomin, which Mariana then did more work on, to get the correct posture.

It was an enjoyable private lesson, though I felt like I achieved less with her then I did in a private lesson with Mariana. We did some work on walking, ochos, turns, sacada, and a couple of cross steps, as well as some simple adornments which was good and now I look back we did cover a lot. I think one of the reasons it was less enjoyable was that although she moves with you, holding you in a practice hold where you are both holding each others arms rather then in a classic leader follower position, she doesn´t completely dance with you which Mariana does. So I never let go and really got into dancing, it was definitely more practice and less dance. However I think I still got a lot out of the class and am looking forward to a second private lesson on Monday as well as a group class tomorrow.

I asked Aurora how many times I should take classes a week to really improve and work on my dancing, and she said at least two classes. She also suggested doing classic ballet and modern dance to connect with my body and learn how to use it. Finally she did wonders for my current low self-confidence by saying that what I´ve achieved in the last month of learning to dance was really good and I have great potential to be a good dancer if I practice. Hooray again!

So the new plan when I get back to London is:

- Quit gym.
- Join some sort of dance place (Pineapple Studios?) & go to tango, ballet & modern dance...and anything else that looks interesting.
- Visit some more classes & milongas in London to see which suit me and which I can go to regularly and which I can really learn at.
- Take Spanish classes.
- Book flights and accomodation for BA 2009.

I´ll work out how to fit in my job in, and finances around, later.