RealityPivots

Big, big breakthrough with Susan, tango student, today. She showed up and demanded that I change my approach because it wasn’t working for her. I’ve been using the exaggerated forward lean as a way to force the woman to react with ‘body as one unit’ so that her legs move intrinsically as I move her shoulders. Lately I had been talking about the shoulders reaching out to accept the signals my shoulders were sending. It wasn’t working for her and she was getting frustrated.
So we started dancing and I let my mind reach out for metaphors, and for directions. I ended up more or less free associating and in the process started dealing with boleos and the penultimate step of the ocho cortado — the brief bounce onto the left leg before twisting into the cross. That move is one of my favorites and yet I’ve never been able to teach it well. As we went through it over and over I urged her not to put all her weight on that left foot and make a complete shift off the right. Then I got talking about ‘posture’ and having the groundedness of the pivot foot flow through the heel into the floor and the pressure of the body on the ball of the foot flow upward through the front of the body through the head.
That seems to have started a new process. We started dancing again and I started pivoting her on each step so that she had to be on her axis. I told her that she had to reach that state, of being ready to pivot, at each step. When we tried the ocho cortado movement I asked her to keep the pivot/strength/axis continual in her right leg as she bounced for a second onto the left.
AHA! She said, “Oh, you keep lifting!” And we were off to the races. Everything fell into place.
Her concentration and focus have always been exemplary and now she knew where she was going. She didn’t achieve that new plateau on each step but she worked toward it. We tried ochos and then she wanted to see how it felt with molinetes.
Everything was transformed. Her leg moved easily and settled into the cross lightly. I could direct her leg, back, side, and cross from any position in time with the music.
Bravo!