My Tango Diaries

I'm doing market research on the tango shoes that are most needed in Central Texas/Austin community.  What I have been hearing lately at practica and in my classes/consultations, is that dancers around town would like to see some more choices in: 1. Low-heeled ladies tango shoes 2. Ladies practice shoes 3. Men's shoes 4. Men's practice shoes. 5. Wide and narrow widths 6. Shoes with more padding 7. Ladies shoes with strappy toe box to accommodate various foot issues. In an effort to see how feasible bringing more shoes of the above variety into town, I am collecting data on what dancers wear, and what they like. Please feel free to comment here or send me an email at infinitetango(at)gmail(dot)com. Meanwhile here are the two surveys: Tangueros: https://www.surveymonkey.com/ s/T8M8CKS Tangueras: https://www.surveymonkey.com/ s/R6JSM5C If you're having trouble finding tango shoes in Central Texas - take the survey and let me know what you...

Join the Academy of Tango-Texas in celebrating the third annual “Day of Tango” Festival in Texas! Featuring: Performances, Live Music, Workshops, Dancing & more! The Day of Tango has been celebrated in Argentina every year on December 11 since 1965 to honor the birth dates of two men responsible for the worldwide promotion of the Tango: Carlos Gardel and Julio De Caro. With the approval of La Academia Nacional del Tango de la Republica Argentina, The Academy of Tango-Texas is proud to bring this momentous celebration to Austin! December 6-8, 2013 For more information please visit: www.dayoftango.org Or call: (512) 695-1024 Schedule of Events: Friday, December 6th @ Ben Hur Hall Workshop 6:15 - 7:45 PM Fabian & Roxana Workshop 8:00 - 9:30 PM Patricio & Eva Milonga 9:30 - 12:30 AM Saturday, December 7th @ Ben Hur Hall Workshop 11:00 - 12:30 PM Fabian & Roxana Workshop 12:45 - 2:15 PM Fabian & Roxana Workshop 2:30 - 4:00 PM Patricio ...

“Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt “Isn't it kind of silly to think that tearing someone else down builds you up?” ― Sean Covey, The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Teens   I posted this one Facebook in response to a link share, but I think it needs to go here on the blog as well. The original link on Facebook was to Paul Yang's post on "In Search of Tango", titled, "Why People Quit Tango."   It was shared by several people, but Shellie Hubbard's comment summed it up beautifully: "Very short and to the point. A good read for all, but I want to take a moment to address a very small, yet very destructive, segment of our tango society. So, to you select ladies... Enough with the, "I didn't feel your lead" followed by instruction on the floor garbage. Also, stop leaving the new men to twist on their own while yo...

Another Tango Practica de la Leona - August 11th! When: Sunday, August 11th (NO CLASS THIS WEEK) PRACTICA DE LA LEONA: from 12:00pm-3:00pm Where: 8650 Spicewood Springs Rd #104 Austin, TX 78759 (Austin Bellydance Studio) Cost: by donation. Donation is not required to participate. DJ: Patrick Stallings (On the opposite end of the shopping center from Big Lots - near Cupprimo and Liberty Pharmacy.) A map can be found on Bahaia's "Instruction" page here . ) Description: The next Practica de la Leona will be Sunday, July 28th from 12:00 pm - 3:00 pm at Austin Bellydance Studio. Come practice what our wonderful visiting instructors have been teaching us with wonderful friends on a great floor! Bottled water will be provided along with snacks. Feel free to bring treats to enjoy or share, but please understand that the owner of the studio would prefer that we keep food, and non-water beverages away from the dance floor and enjoy them instead in...

A theory . . . some "woo woo" ramblings on organizing practicas and milongas . . . What makes a milonga successful? Or a practica?  Any individual factor can be bad enough to break it - if the floor is truly awful, many people won't risk injury to dance on it. It will be tough to reach "critical mass" attendance. If there is no parking, again, reaching critical mass will be tough. It can be done, but it will be that much harder. It's easy (for me anyway) to rattle off the qualities I like to see in a milonga/practica space - but there is one factor that's much harder to quantify. With this one factor, I will dance on a bad floor, happily pay a parking fee, go to another city to dance etc.  What's the factor? Is the space loved? Not loved just by the owner of the space (though that is incredibly important) - but does the organizer feel strongly about the space itself?  Not its floor, or parking, or lighting or sound system ind...

Guest post from Jane Prusakova “Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment.” – Buddha  (Epigraph borrowed from Zen Habits - Guide to Achieving Flow and Happiness in Your Work ) Flow is a state of being when a person is fully focused on a task at hand, feels happy and in control, is creative and productive.  The time and space (environment) outside of the task cease to exist, past and future drop off the horizon.  There is only a happy, glorious, challenging NOW.   Tango is ultimate flow-producing activity – the music and interaction within the couple (and with the rest of the floor) require complete concentration, the challenge and creativity are infinite, and dancers are fully in control.  All of which leads to a fairly easy conclusion that tango equals happiness.   Except it does ...

Add to your Google calendar: When: Sunday, June 30th, SPECIAL FREE CLASS 12:00-12:30pm: Foot Technique and Care for a more graceful, grounded, and comfortable lifetime of dancing! (for men and women!) Practica de la Leona: from 12:30pm-3:00pm Where: 8650 Spicewood Springs Rd #104 Austin, TX 78759 (Austin Bellydance Studio) Cost: by donation DJ: Juan Marcos (On the opposite end of the shopping center from Big Lots - near Cupprimo and Liberty Pharmacy.) A map can be found on Bahaia's "Instruction" page . Description: The next Practica de la Leona will be Sunday, June 30th from 12:30 pm - 3:00 pm at Austin Bellydance Studio. Come practice what our wonderful visiting instructors have been teaching us with wonderful friends on a great floor! There will be a FREE CLASS from 12:00-12:30pm: Foot Technique and Care for a more graceful, grounded, and comfortable lifetime of dancing! (For men and women!) Then later, let's see everyone at Tap...

Second class of Javier Rochwarger's Workshops at Esquina Tango, Austin     (Background: I've had classes/lessons with Javier Rochwarger for the last 3 years. He makes his annual visit to Esquina Tango here in Austin every Spring. You can read about two of my previous experiences here: Spring, 2011 and here: Summer, 2012 . ) Group Classes One of the reasons Javier is so popular is that everything he teaches in group classes is taught in the context of the social dance. The movements and the technique are intended for dancing on a populated floor, and respecting the line of dance. He talks about listening to the structure of the music and understanding movement in terms of the music's grammar. His classes have always been filled with beautiful and immediately applicable skills on the milonga floor. Javier's focus is on the quality of the embrace and of the dancer's movement - not so much on sequences, though he does use them. When he uses a sequ...

(I am not using the name of the teacher in this post, even though my follow-up posts will identify him, because it doesn't really matter who the teacher is for this subject - and I don't want to get distracted in defending or attacking his style of dancing/teaching etc.) The continuing adventures of a slow learner . . .   It is deeply disheartening to have my yearly private lesson with a teacher I've studied with the last 3 years, and be corrected for the same mistakes I've been making for the same . three . years. The first year, he was very understanding. I was still pretty new - only dancing a year. The next year he pushed a little harder and I made excuses. I said I would practice - I would work on it. This year was intensely frustrating. These were things I should have resolved by now - fundamental issues with my embrace, control of my axis, how I change weight. The foundation of tango. Instead of becoming defensive in the lesson...

Move along, nothing to see here . . . .     I had a 'talking to' no less than 3 times weekend before last - all by dancers I deeply respect and admire. They were each very helpful, well-reasoned arguments against what I had "taken to doing lately with a particular leader." When it happened, I knew I'd hear about it.  Mouths turned down at the corners, eyebrows knitted and furrowed, a couple of quiet comments were made. On the milonga floor, my leader was breaking the rules, and I was not only letting him, but worse, I was also grinning madly in response. It was a threefold milonga scandal: 1. My leader and I changed the embrace from a traditional abrazo, to what would look like an odd practice embrace - his arms over my shoulders and my arms around his ribcage (he's quite a bit taller than I am). It looked like I'd given him a big hug and we just started moving. I'll get to the reason for this in a moment - for now, just know ...

As you may or may not have noticed, the URL for this blog, and for Leona Training for Dancers, has changed to www.mytangodiaries.com and www.leonatraining.com respectively. It was long overdue, I was just nervous that the transfer would not go well. Mostly it went fine but there have been a couple of hiccups. (And if you happened to be reading this blog while I was going through my experimentation phase of "Let's try this . . . and this . . . and maybe this other thing," with the layout and template - thanks for your patience.) The biggest hiccup is that my extensive, and up-to-date, Tango Blog List got completely blown away. It's not even in the backup, which I don't understand, but there we are.  I need help from you dear readers to try to build it again. If you can, please send me your own tango blog links, and the blogs that you like so that I can compile the blog roll again.  Meanwhile, above there is a tab for my Tango Blogs page, but the page is not as ...

    “Five minutes are enough to dream a whole life, that is how relative time is.” ― Mario Benedetti. Where did you find me? I laugh a little, my glasses are where you found me. The lights are still low as poor-sighted dancers search for their spectacles. Right now I cannot see a thing. When you found me, what was I doing? What was I thinking, so long ago, 5 minutes ago, 1 year ago, 5 years ago, when you found me? I can't remember anymore. I am remembering everything wrong, everything colored by the music and soft sighs. Your arm is gone, your voice is gone, hazy-visioned and disoriented, I try to return to the place I was. When I think I am there, I realize, blinking slowly, hands reaching toward empty space, it is no longer there. It has moved on without me. That place where you found me. And with it, the woman you found there.

This isn't a tango post, but it is a music post - and I think somewhat applicable. It is an almost miraculous thing when a piece of music can speak to us in different ways, in different times in our lives. Sometimes it's a matter of maturity and understanding the depth of a piece over time - but sometimes it's more. The story in the music is so big and yet so personal all at the same. So wherever you are, the song is there, singing to your story. Showing you pieces of your own world you may not have put together yet. Pheobe Snow's "Isn't it a Shame," off of her Second Childhood album, is that kind of song for me, and for my mom. I've written before how my mom and I found much common ground through her music.   When we couldn't find the words to tell each other, Pheobe let us both tell our stories to each other, without having to explain. Everyone reads "Isn't a Shame" differently. To some it is very sad, almost pessimistic. ...

Those shoes aren't made for walkin' . . . While they have ankle straps for support, the platform bottom reduces the ability to flex the feet. The wearer isn't stable (either because the heel is too high or the shoe is poorly balanced) because her toes are "gripping" the shoe. She has no room to spread her toes increasing her instability. I've been overwhelmed with emails so I've gotten behind on responding to this topic. A lot of the questions have the same answers, so I'm going to share them here as well as answer in pm or email, because there seem to be so many common threads. 1. If, when wearing your tango shoes, you cannot put all 5 of your metatarsals (the joints of the ball of your foot) evenly on the ground when you walk, you won't be dancing at your best. This is basic biomechanics - the ball of your foot needs to be completely on the floor to achieve stability.  The same goes with being able to move, and spread, your toes. ...

Dancing is the poetry of the foot.  - John Dryden My feet are stronger than they have ever been in my life. I can not only maintain demi-pointe (balancing over the balls of my feet) on one or both feet for several minutes at a time, but now I can do it almost completely perpendicular to the floor (half pointe). I couldn't raise my heel more than about 3 inches a year ago.  I worked and worked and worked my feet to build strength and flexibility for one purpose - to wear ever higher stilettos and be stable.  Now that I can articulate my foot and maintain my balance in ridiculous-height shoes (5"+), I find I don't want to. Training my feet to tolerate, and dance well in, high heels actually required me to dance, train, and exercise barefoot. A lot . This was a surprise to me but all of the dance-field trainers told me that was really the best way to train. Shoes of almost any kind restrict the movement of your feet. To really develop the intrinsic mus...

The Antidote - it's what keeps us coming back . . . I'd had too many rough experiences in one night. Actually, I'd had too many a night, for months. I was at the end of what I could take and thought, maybe it's a sign. Maybe I need a break for awhile. I'm becoming the person I didn't want to be. Tired. Frustrated. Cynical.  I've talked other people out of this place and back into tango - but I couldn't get the pep-talk to work on myself. What do I want so badly? My eyes wandered from my shoe bag to the door and as I turned my head, you caught my eyes. I smiled before I knew what I was doing. One more tanda. I'll dance one more tanda, I thought, then go home. You were patient, waiting for me to relax and finally, half way through the first song, I did. I settled against your chest and breathed deeply for probably the first time that night. I listened to the music and our breathing and let everything else slip away. As we dance...

(Courtesy www.morguefile.com ) We all have milonga pet peeves and, from the comments I hear at the milongas and read in blogs, tango dancers have a lot of the same pet peeves. (Which makes me wonder why they happen with such regularity?) They range from small annoyances to behavior that can be physically harmful. Left unchecked it can make dancers decide to avoid certain people at the milonga of course, but also to avoid the milongas/venues where inappropriate or uncomfortable behavior is tolerated - or worse, where it is encouraged.  I know the U.S. isn't Buenos Aires and I truly don't have that expectation. However, I would think many of these things would be common sense in most social situations - not just dancing. For some reason, they are not.  (In no particular order - as always, your mileage may vary.) 1.  Intrusive behavior.  One example is when someone (particularly a stranger to that dancer) without any kind of welcome acknowledgment, approac...

A little light reading. "The present letter is a very long one, simply because I had no leisure to make it shorter."   Blaise Pascal Several of you have noticed I'm taking longer to answer emails and I've been posting far less lately. My apologies, I dove into new projects thinking I would have time to keep everything updated and then clearly didn't have time. Bits and pieces as fast as I can . . . In short, I was inspired by several teachers - some I've met and studied with in person, others I've only corresponded with online, to pursue education in dance as physical therapy and dance medicine. This is a fairly well established field in other countries - but not so much here in the US. At least not widely. The field is huge and deciding where to focus has been difficult. So, informed by own experiences regaining strength and health through dance, I decided to focus on injury prevention and rehabilitation for dancers. I am back i...

Guest post by Jane Prusakova Jane's blog, "Software and Other Things" can be found HERE . Always Tango Elegant Milonga in Austin, Texas Buenos Aires Oct/Nov 2011 diary (Niño Bien) There is a subtle difference between pictures from tango events in US and in B.A.  Ok, maybe not so subtle.  The distance within and in-between couples, the use of space, the amount of real estate in and between the lines of dance varies from none to a few feet in many Buenos Aires milongas, and at the US dance events – and creates a very different environments. Tango (like most folk partner dances) originally evolved as a flirty, sexy game between men and women, with the goal of getting close – as close as it could possibly be appropriate in the deeply religious Latin America. The space was, if not exactly the enemy, then the challenger.  The proof is in the original tango pose – with the man holding the woma...