One last dance before Jeebus´s Birthday...

Dec 25 2008

Yesterday I had my last private lesson with Mariana. It was great. It was two hours long, which is about 30min too long for my concentration, but although I dipped during it, by the end I managed to pull it back for the last couple of dances. As a distraction technique Mariana danced some milongas with me.

Milonga, as well as being the name of the dance everyone attends, is also the name of a dance that you can do. Its double speed of tango and the footwork is double speed in threes. Its really fun, and whereas you might see a little slight smile from a woman as she dances with a good man during a tango, during milonga dances there´s lots of smiling from everyone having fun.

I´d had a group class earlier in the day focussing on disassociation - the separation of the upper chest from the rest of the body and through this using the shoulders first to move the body into a turn. Which was great, but hard to do. So when I had my lesson with Mariana we did lots of exercises to make me use my upper back to push the ocho step forward and backwards. I love how she teaches, at the start of the lesson she dances one dance with you to see how you are doing and then decides what you need to work on. After every exercise she then dances another dance with you to see if you´ve started incorporating the movements into your dance - consiously or unconsiously. If you haven´t you do some more, but different, exercises on it, and if you have you move onto doing something else. After dancing some milongas, we went back to a couple of tangos and did some harder moves (ochos that required greater disassociation) that I hadn´t ever done before. I´m starting to get the disassociation thing and also the lightness required in the legs to be pushed into doing boleros and ganchos (the flicks behind your own leg and between the other partners leg).

It was great. We both left the lesson feeling like I´d really moved on in the week she´s been teaching me. And she said she thought I could be a really good dancer if I practice - hooray!

Before she left I asked her who else I should have private lessons with, we talked about a couple of people I´d come across. She was a bit reticent in passing a judgement on others, but eventually said her concern was that if I had classes with someone who wasn´t very good they´d break me and all the good work we´d done together. So I´m going to have more group lessons, a private class with Aurora Lubiz who is expensive but very good on womens technique and Mariana rates her too. And I´ve found a guy who offered cheap private lessons, that she reckons I should use just to practice with rather then getting too caught up on learning new things.

If only I can find a dancer as good as her - very hard to do though! Because already she´s changed me as a dancer, and also what I want in other dancers. When I first arrived there were a couple of men who have been dancing with me regularly at milongas who I really liked because they were clear and direct in what they wanted. But now I hate dancing with them...they don´t flow and move fluidly with subtlety. Which my wonderful teacher does. So I will head back to London soon, dreaming of her, dreaming of when I´m able to learn to lead, and hoping that she does come to london in July like she said she might. In the meantime, there´s no dancing on christmas day and that´s probably a good thing as I´ve a hideous cold that prooves that it doesn´t matter where you are in the world the Christmas Flu catches up with you always!