May is the month you will dance more! We’ve made it our mission for the month of May to help people dance more in milongas, and with the people they’ve been secretly dying to dance with!
In this series of 4 blog posts, we are sharing two tips a week to help you dance more, and with partners that you love. And at the end we’ll be sharing a video with Pablo and Naomi showing and explaining all of them. We focus on the more hidden aspect of dancing socially, which teachers often don’t have time to teach in classes. We know, as milonga organisers, that they will make your time in milongas more enjoyable!
For our final two tips, we want to discuss about two pillars of tango dancing: floor craft and musicality. They will not only make your milongas more enjoyable, but will also help you to show to the world that you have experience and can be a fun partner to dance with..
Start by checking our first tips:
Tip 1: Check your posture on and off the dancefloor
Tip 2: Use the cabeceo
Tip 3: being active in the pre-cabeceo
Tip 4: Cabeceo your way onto the dance floor
Tip 5: Approaching your tango partner powerfully
Tip 6: Focus your attention on your partner
Tip 7: People are watching your floor craft skills.
We said last week that most of your attention needs to be on our partner. Another part of it should be on what is happening around us. Awareness of the space and people around us is what we call floorcraft. We talk a lot about floor craft here at tango space. It is important for plenty of reasons – one of them is that people at milongas are not only watching our dancing and connection skills, but also the way we move around the dance floor.
There are many articles and videos online about floor craft, including on our website, so we won’t go into details here. Just, bear in mind that it is very important. So we strongly recommend that you take the time to read about floor craft because it is going to change your dancing… and the people you dance with…
Tip 8: Musicality is the sign of a good dancer
Musicality is one of the strongest signs of your experience as a dancer – and as for floorcraft, it is something that tanguero/as look at when they are choosing a partner. For example, an experienced dancer will hear the phrasing of the music and will bring a lot of pausing into their dance while less experienced dancers tend to dance with the same dynamics throughout the song, without any pausing.
Don’t forget that you, as a dancer, you are another instrument of the orchestra. You want to add your movements to the melody and rhythm of the music, always dancing in accordance with what the music is suggesting. For more on musicality check out Pablo and Naomi’s tips on how to architecture your movements.
We hope that with all these tips you enjoy more the milongas and feel empowered – so you can dance with more partners that you love!
Last but not least, we’ve wrapped up all the tips into one video – with Pablo and Naomi adding their own personal explanations. You can use it to review all the tips or go deeper into on. If you like it, don’t forget to spread the joy and share!
Wishing you plenty of awesome tandas,
Anne
