Improvise or play it safe?
Imagine a recent beginner Leader about to start a dance.  I’m going to refer to “Him” because most Leaders are male.  His mind will be bombarded with a large number of ideas, feelings, stimuli and requirements, all shouting for his attention.  No wonder our minds go blank.  So easy to retreat into a set routine to give our brains a break and to get dancing as soon as possible with something that’s at least a bit like Tango.

And herein lies a fatal trap that many dancers and teachers fall into, and from which some never recover.

Go within or go without
The challenge of improving as a Tango dancer requires perseverance and work.  This work is done as much in the mind as in the body. Put simply, we take on new information in the front of the brain, which then decides what to do with it.  This part of the brain is very good at sorting new information, but it has to concentrate.  It’s quite hard work and it can easily get overloaded. We often joke about men and multi-tasking, but the reality is that in Tango we are being asked to focus our attention on several highly complex and demanding tasks at once.

How do you eat an elephant?  – A bite at a time
We need to select small, digestible chunks and practise them repeatedly until we can “digest” them.  This involves forming new pathways in our brains so that we become capable of doing some things on auto-pilot, managed intuitively from the back of the brain, freeing the front to focus on something else.
Most of us already have an intuitive grasp of how we think, so why do we leave it until we are in the hot seat before thinking about and using what we know about our processes?  The secret, especially for Leaders, is to have done a much of this work as possible beforehand.  To avoid overload and meltdown we need to manage the degree of demand we are going to have thrown at us.

Attention please
We need to be able to choose what we are paying attention to.  I am a great fan of encouraging Leaders to have a pre-dance checklist. The order and priority will probably change as we become more experienced.  I have been dancing Tango for about twenty years; nowadays my attention ordeer and priorities usually look something like this.

1. What style of music and hence what sort of dance am I expecting to have?
2. My partner? Do I already know her?  Her level of experience?  How she moves? How much and what sort of lead will be best for her? (If we haven’t danced before this process of discovery will continue well into the dance)
3. La Ronda, the other dancers, floorcraft. How do I enter the dance floor elegantly? Don’t push in. Look at the following couple. Nod your appreciation if the Leader indicates they are leaving us space.
4. My technique, posture and connection. How do I invite my partner into the embrace? Pause and pay atention to our connection.
5. Double check I’m setting myself up for success. What are my options for this dance, given all the above?
6. What will be the first step.
7. A couple of steps in, re-evaluate my choices and assumptions given the feedback I’m receiving from my partner.
8. Improvisation – options, choices and choice points? Can I create a theme and variations? Do I know the music? How does that affect my choices?

In reality the process is much more fluid than the sequential list shown here – this shows my priorities as well as something of the order.

As for Lady Leaders they are often at an advantage.  Usually they already dance Tango as Followers so they are used to the movements.  And as Leaders, they already know what it is they are trying to lead.  With a bit of luck and good guidance they may avoid the sequence trap.

So, the key questions remain:
What should we pay attention to?
What “bits of thinking” are likely to give us the biggest benefits in our dance?

Benchmarking – Using knowledge and experience from other “worlds”
I once had the privilege to work with David Emery, the Olympic hurdler.  He said that as he stood on the podium to receive his Gold Medal, all he could think of was “Why me?” – given that, at least on paper, he was the slowest man in the final.

This question became so dominant in his thinking that he decided to devote his future work to coaching.  At that time the conventional wisdom for hurdlers was to focus on the take off.  But David realised that time in the air is lost time.  He shifted his attention to landing as quickly as possible.  With that subtle shift he gained the extra time that resulted in his world beating achievement.

There are so many examples of how a shift in our thinking can pay the biggest dividends.  High board divers have been trained to slow down time in their minds.  In practice this gives them extra time in the air to make micro-adjustments after leaving the board to achieve a perfect entry into the water.

One of the reasons for the recent success of British cyclists has been to focus on lots of one percent improvements which add up to a significant improvement.  All of these require individual attention to each detail in turn. Meanwhile their competition were convinced they had done something “illegal” to their wheels!

Of course, most of us dance for pleasure, and perhaps we do not want to go to such extreme lengths of dedication and commitment to improve.  But many of us did not even start learning tango until a certain age.  If our available time is limited, and we still want to improve, isn’t it a good idea to find ways to learn and improve as quickly and as efficiently as possible? Work smarter, not harder. Most of our improvement will be achieved by using our minds, not by tiring our bodies.

If you have been to any of our classes, you will know how much I encourage everyone, but especially the leaders, to use visualisation to work on their dance by themselves, away from the dance floor and their partners.  Practise using slow, deliberate movements to strengthen your spacial and proprioception awareness. An adrenalin-free environment is particularly valuable for this work.

We can explore how to develop these ideas and put them into our dance in a future article about Practice