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 - Theme: Sandwiches and back sandwiches

The sandwich step (sanguchito) is a great tango classic and it's easy to see why: it's cute, musical and can be used in a multitude of combinations. In this class, we started with the most classic sandwhich and then worked on a couple of combinations, including the very creative back sandwiches.

Summary video



 

Beginners & improvers: Sandwich

Top tips

  • Leaders: Make sure that after sandwiching your partner’s foot, you first place your foot on the floor with the heel completely up. When you drop the heel to the floor, this will make your partner come forward and sandwich your foot, in a very gentle manner (e.g. without pulling her with your arms!)
  • Followers: Always bring your feet together at the sandwich, and squeeze your feet and knees together.

For more details about the sandwich for beginners, you can have a look at this class note & video.

 

Beginners & improvers: Repeat sandwich on both legs

Top tips

  • Leaders: When you feel you partner is starting to transfer her weight to her right foot after the sandwich, ground her by gently squeezing down with your embrace to make her stay with her weight in the middle of her two feet. You need to catch her at the right time or it’ll be too late and she’ll have collected!
  • Followers: Remember that the proper technique for every step is to have your weight in the middle of your two feet on every beat and not immediately transfer your weight fully to the front leg. If you keep this technique, it will be easy for your partner to stop you halfway through the step (and to lead other steps like arrastres and sacadas).

 

Intermediates: Back cross sandwich

Top tips

  • Leaders: Make sure you leave your partner enough time to untangle herself after the back cross!
  • Followers: When stepping out of the back sandwich, first cross over with your foot, and then your knee. Don’t move your knee first across or you might hit your partner.

 

Homework

Top tips

  • Leaders: For us, the key element of any sandwich is to make your partner come forward and sandwich your foot in a gentle manner. We like to use a “mechanical” lead, meaning that the lead is not only coming from your torso, it comes from your whole body. Because you go backwards, your partner comes forward. To achieve this, practising the corte position and making sure you can control precisely your transfer of axis by dropping your ankle is very important.
  • Followers: A lot of followers of any level don’t close their heels at the sandwich. I can’t emphasise enough how important it is, otherwise sandwiches really don’t look that good. Practise sandwiches with your partner or if you don’t have a partner, just a shoe will do! (I do that too!)

 

See you soon on the dancefloor,

Nati y Bruno