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CHAPTER 4 The Walk

Excerpt.........."I find it helpful to consider that each dancer’s body as being divided into two parts: upper (above the waist), and lower. For the leader it is the upper body that dominates the airspace and gives the lead to the follower. For the follower the upper body tries to stay directly in front of the leader’s upper body at all times. The lower bodies simply exist to cart the upper body about to allow these tasks to happen. You may ask why I should bother to suggest this model at all. The answer is that, for competent leading and following in tango, we have to learn a new skill: how to ‘dissociate’ upper from lower body at will. By this I am not referring to some mystical concept of the paranormal, or to a stage conjuring trick! What I am referring to is the ability to walk in one direction while facing one’s upper body in another. There are limits to this but most of us can manage 20 degrees without practice and a great deal more after a while. What is the point? When walking in an embrace, the follower will need to be to one side of the leader’s feet or another, and not just directly in front of us, for us to achieve anything interesting at all. This ability to dissociate at the waist is absolutely vital for the follower when she moves round the leader in the ‘grapevine’ manoeuvre, and for all dancers who wish to be able to pivot well. I have come to realise that the ability to dissociate well has been the central core of my personal growth in tango, and I strongly recommend all my readers to devote as much time to perfecting this as to any other element of controlling your own body.

It is fascinating to watch a group of people who have been asked to walk to a tango tune, all in the line of dance, around the room. For some reason, instead of walking naturally and – as they have been doing all their lives – without thought, they begin to concentrate on the process of walking. I know I do. We appear to concern ourselves with issues we gave up worrying about when toddlers, and sometimes appear to walk in a very odd way and even lose our balance. It feels awful.

One powerful image works for me every time and helps me bypass some of those theoretical barriers of self-consciousness. Just imagine that tango is like walking on a lovely summer’s day, in the park, arm in arm with someone you love. You wouldn’t be thinking of the technique of walking; you would be focused on your companion. Hey! That’s tango! You would generally stay in step, without having to think about it at all, even if you had much longer legs than your companion. You might not be stepping with the same leg as each other at the same time. Bearing this in mind, an extremely helpful exercise for those just beginning to learn tango is to walk around the room, in step to the music, in the line of dance, hand in hand to begin with. It is good to come to a halt and restart from time to time, and both partners should take responsibility for initiating stopping and starting, changing from one partner to the other by agreement once in a while. Fairly soon it will become apparent that whoever is chosen to be the leader needs to give some sort of indication that the couple are to start walking.

Similarly, if the couple are to stay together when a halt is required, even if the music makes it very obvious, the chosen leader will be obliged to show in advance of the actual cessation of movement that a stop is about to happen. Of course, you could say: “Parade will come to a halt; three, two, one, HALT!” like a drill sergeant, but it is also possible to use subtle body language to suggest a deceleration sensation to the follower at the start of the step or even during the beat before last. It is remarkable how well most people who have walked arm in arm with someone else for a few circuits of a dance floor will pick up the signals............"

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