Mingmar, I think it would be very useful to have a discussion about the fundamental skills that are needed in order to allow you to listen and express the music. Both men and women need this fundamental skill in order to dance well. Not listening to the music, or not moving with the music can lead to a fundamental sense of disconnection and strife or struggle within the partnership.
I agree that a discussion of fundamentals may be rendered graphically as a pyramid. In fact, the training scale of dressage is often referred to as a training pyramid and it is often pictured as a pyramid. The bottom level is the most fundamental skill and the next fundamental skills builds upon that base skill and so on until you reach the highest possible expression. Dressage has been around many hundreds (or thousands if you go back to the likes of Marcus Aurelius) of years and the study has been deep, intense and world wide. The study of tango is far newer and our conceptualization of the dance is very weak (IMO). People often speak in absurd vagaries and I have never seen a clear conceptualization of the fundamental skills need to dance tango well. If only . . . The partnership between horse and rider is very similar to the partnership we seek in tango. As Huck pointed out, the expression of a perfectly listening horse and the connection with that horse is just like what he would seeks in a tango partner. Much discussion is made in dressage about tempo, cadence and rhythm. A flaw in any of those elements can lead to disconnection and a failure to build the higher skills or higher expression. Tempo and cadence or rhythm are different concepts in riding and I believe they are different concepts in tango. I often hear Argentines speak a lot about cadencia, but little is made of that fundamental aspect in teaching tango to Americans. I don't understand why. Sincerely, Lisa Battan www.battanlaw.com _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
