Every week, you’ll find on our blog class notes and a summary video from our Wednesday and Sunday tango group classes.

These video and notes are meant to help our students remember what they’ve done in class.

Dimension: Directions - Theme: Managing corners

In the beginners class, we looked at two simple ways to turn 90 degrees to stay in the line of dance. With the intermediates, we explored creative ways to manage corners, using variants of arrastres and crosses.

Summary video



 

Beginners/Improvers: Three point turn

Top tips

  • Leaders: For the rebound, make sure your hand firmly on your partner’s back so that she doens’t move away from you.
  • Followers: Make sure you step around your partner.

 

Beginners/Improvers: Cross turn

Top tips

  • Leaders: Lead the cross when your partner has her weight in the middle of her two feet.
  • Followers: This is the lead for quite a wide cross, quite different from the normal cross you might be more familiar with.

 

Beginners/Improvers: Ocho variant turn

Top tips

  • Leaders: You can control how much your partner pivots by how much you dissociate.
  • Followers: Make sure you dissociate your torso first so that you can understand how much to pivot before committing too much.

 

Intermediates & up: Barrida and sandwich combination

Top tips

  • Leaders: You’ll need to ground your partner to make sure you have enough time to do the barrida.
  • Followers: Engage your core as this step can be a bit fiddly and you might find that you are losing your balance.

 

Intermediates & up: Repeat crosses

Top tips

  • Leaders: Maintain your dissociation to lead the repeat crosses.
  • Followers: There is a little pivot in between each cross.

 

Intermediates & up: Entry to ocho and Americana

Top tips

  • Leaders: For the entry to the ocho, lead your partner to pivot first, than to change her weight.
  • Followers: For the change of weight, make sure you keep your feet nicely together.

 

Homework

There are so many ways to turn at corners, hard to find suitable homework! Maybe the best tip is for you to try and come up with ways you like to turn exactly 90 degrees at corners. Did you know: being able to correctly manage the line of dance, including corners is one of the criteria in the World Championships.