This is a very common movement in tango. You see it everywhere in vals, milonga and everything from the 90 year olds to the most ‘nuevo’. Its often hidden in turns, angles wide and narrow and speed, but its there.
If there is a spanish name for this movement I’d love to know!
Next time we’ll look at the movment with a partner, add more details and play with variations.
and we create a stopped and rebounded energy for very clear and powerful check-steps. These can be done in parallel or cross system and in any direction.
Here are Monday’s + Wednesday’s editions rolled into one.
Today I begin a few simple and somewhat challenging exercises to build up strength in the standing leg and open up freedom in the free leg, by using a spicy balancing posture while articulating the free leg. Practice these like everything else, one song per side per day and you will feel a tremendous increase in your stability and control.
Exploring my headspace, and the way each of us think, has always fascinated me and shaped the way I teach. What do I bring to this moment? To this dance? To this conversation?
Here are some of my thoughts on how to distinguish where your attention is during dancing. Are you aware of the little voices chattering away in your head? What are they saying? How do they affect your experience, your performance, your enjoyment? In other words: what’s in your head?
This is part 2 of a 3 part molinete series looking at training around a chair to cultivate precision, balance and elegance in molinete. Today is we finish the movement with the pivots in the front and back step, how they are generated and a few tips on making them better.
Molinete on the dance floor around your partner is rounded (obviously!) so there is another way of moving that has to be integrated ultimately, yet, if you can do molinete around the chair with balance and grace, it becomes effortless to translate that into rounded movements, but the reverse is not quite as true.
In addition to my written blog postings I’m introducing a regular video blog. Focuses will include dance technique for a variety of styles and levels, classes, practicing, how to get the most out of practicas and milongas, interviews y mas.
Today’s topic is the first of a three part series on molinete. I love to look at molinete around a chair to create an environment that requires:
larger steps, which cultivates more power in your movement and exposes inelegance,
linear movement, which is often lost in the ‘falling-this-way-or-that’ tendencies when we have every angle available us,
specific direction and size of steps, which focuses our precision even more to do a step exactly this big, exactly there, into exactly a 180 degree pivot,
balance on each step.
I find that working for one song a day on each side around a chair can be an excellent practice. Of course, the way in which you practice is equally important to what you practice, but that’s another video.