Hi Everyone, Fran here with your Tango Tip of the Week. One of the important skills leaders have to learn in dancing Tango is the ability to move with the rhythm of the music. In Argentina, moving rhythmically is considered a far more necessary skill than the most extensive vocabulary of complex figuras. In fact, without the ability to move in rhythm, anything a leader might do on the dance floor would be thought of as nothing short of laughable.

There is, however, at least one skill which is considered significantly more important than keeping good time. It is the skill of ensuring that one's follower is comfortable during every individual movement within the dance. For the majority of beginner- and intermediate-level leaders, this is an area which calls for meticulous skill development over an extended period of time.

It takes many leaders a great deal of time and concentration before they're able to move with any degree of consistency to the music at all. There are so many other things to think about - technique, figuras , lead/folllow - that musicality can take a back seat for a long while. Once a leader is finally able to connect his feet to the music, he generally feels a great sense of accomplishment - as well he should! - and often believes that his followers will automatically be able to join him in his newly-found skill.

Here is where the problem occurs.

To be able to move by oneself in rhythm is not at all the same as being able to lead a follower in that rhythm. This is the part that can take literally years to develop. And for a leader to assume that his follower should be able to keep up with him more or less automatically is at best naïve and at worst utterly destructive to the integrity of the dance partnership.

Even under the best of circumstances -- i.e., a situation in which both leader and follower are highly skilled and used to dancing with one another, dancing in rhythm is always secondary to maintaining a consistent level of comfort for the follower. Any time a leader feels that his follower might not be absolutely ready for his next movement, he must of necessity slow things down - sacrificing his plan to squeeze a given sequence into, let's say, a tight group of beats - in order to give her the room she needs to actually execute the individual movements he is leading without discomfort.

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