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: Interactions - Term review

In this class, we reviewed a couple of the steps we saw in the last month and a half, all around the Tango Dimension Interaction: arrastre, sandwiches...

Summary video



 

Beginners & improvers: Arrastre from side step

Top tips

  • Leaders: When you lead the pivot, make sure you also rotate your foot out of the follower’s way otherwise your foot is preventing her from pivoting (whilst your torso is asking her to pivot!).
  • Followers: Bring your heels together nicely and squeeze your knees together at the sandwich. No straddling! 🙂

 

Intermediates: Arrastre followed by repeat sandwiches

Top tips

  • Leaders: You need to stop your partner halfway through each of her steps to make sure you can sandwich her foot.
  • Followers: Step not too far from your partner after each sandwich otherwise you might pull him off axis.

 

Intermediates: Arrastre to the cross

Top tips

  • Leaders: Same technique as for the previous step: you need to stop your partner halfway in the step leading to the cross so that you have time for the arrastre.
  • Followers: After the arrastre, you need to sandwich your partner’s foot when you feel he is transfering his weight to your right.

 

Intermediates: Arrastre to the cross followed by repeat pasadas

Top tips

  • Leaders: For the pasada, slightly lift your partner to indicate your want her foot to go above yours.
  • Followers: To untangle yourself from these pasadas, you need to first bring your knee to the other side of his leg and then your foot. Don’t go with your foot first as you might kick him along the way.

 

Homework

Top tips

  • Leaders: This is a review of various steps and concepts we’ve seen in the past term so they should feel more natural. Try and place them on different musics and make them match to the musical phrases.
  • Followers: For the arrastres, is is really important that on the beat you have your weight in the middle and that you have not collected already. Practice walking forward and backwards on 4 beats: 1-Extend, 2-Push, 3-Transfer with your weight in the middle, 4- Collect. Do it slowly with pauses in between each stage to better feel the sequencing.

 

See you soon on the dancefloor,

Nati y Bruno