Fran and Pat here: Last Thursday, the Firehouse was eerily overrun with ghosts and goblins, witches and wizards, not to mention all sorts of colorful characters from storybooks and movies – as we celebrated our annual Halloween Extravaganza. With Sue Dallon away in Buenos Aires for the week, Terri Lopez and Steve Turi served as can-do co-hosts for the fest, which included can’t-sit-down-gotta-dance, fabulous Tango music from the redoubtable DJ Richard Ariza. We wrapped up our annual Milonga month sessions, and plan to get back to Tango next week.

The main event of the evening, of course, was our annual Halloween parade, which showed off the creative costume choices of our favorite Tangueros and Tangueras. We’ll now turn the microphone over to co-host Steve Turi, who’ll provide us with full details on who took top honors in our costume contest. Take it away Steve!

Greetings, Tanghosts and Tangoblins, Steve here. After parading before the judges,  prizes were awarded to the following costume winners:

Best Couple -- Francis and Marie (Gauchos/Cowboys)

Sexiest – A tie between Diane Huber and Marisoto

Most creative – Elizabeth (A fall tree or “Miss Autumn”)

Door prizes went to Hector, Hilda, Camille and Francis.

Finally, clean-up was very efficiently handled with much aid from:

Steve M.

Bob Brillo

Rafael and Hilda

Tsypoira

Hi everybody, Fran here with your Tango Tip of the Week. Take a lesson at a ballroom dance school pretty much anywhere in America, and the first thing you'll almost certainly be taught is a dance step. This will consist of a prescribed series of movements you and a partner memorize individually, and then more or less replicate together in something called the "dance frame."

Sound familiar? Dance school -- dance step, right?

At the end of your first lesson, you'll probably have added three -- maybe even four -- brand new steps to your repertoire, ready to showcase on the nearest dance floor. See that? You've just experienced for yourself what I call Ballroom Commandment #3: The process of learning how to dance consists of accumulating (memorizing) a progressive series of geometric structures, which are generally referred to as figures or steps.

Wow! Learning to dance is easy. Three or four steps in only one short hour. You can't wait to come back for your next lesson. Except, of course, that when you actually try these great new figures with someone other than your partner from the dance school, they don't seem to work the way they're supposed to, do they. In fact, maybe they don't work at all.

The problem here is that at the dance school, they somehow left out one tiny, little element in the process: They didn't teach you how to actually dance.

Oops.

Instead, they steadfastly adhered to what I call Ballroom Commandment #2: There is no need to waste time, learning precise lead/follow mechanisms in order to attain acceptable proficiency in ballroom dancing.

And, in fact, they probably did this without even thinking about it --- because the overwhelming majority of teachers at ballroom dance schools today don't recognize lead/follow as a subject worth paying any attention to. Lead/follow isn't sexy. Lead/follow is b-o-r-i-n-g. Oh yeah, and lead/follow is really hard.

I myself learned lead/follow the really hard way. Before I ever took a formal ballroom dance lesson, I spent quite a few years in clubs and dance halls all over New York, trying to figure out how to make social dance movement work -- with often very mixed results. This is how most people learned how to dance, when there was a robust, easy-to-access Ballroom-Latin-Swing dance community everywhere you looked. Like most other "street dancers," I was very proud of the fact that "I never took a dance lesson in my life." We looked down on dance schools as cookie-cutter step factories, where people who largely had no real aptitude for dancing were spoon-fed a bunch of pre-digested, "fake" nonsense in return for shelling out their money. All of us could spot a dance school student a mile away. We rolled our eyes, and hoped they'd at least avoid crashing into us, as they attempted to reproduce their robot-like interpretation of the real thing.

It wasn't until many years later that I had a personal epiphany about why dance-school dancing doesn't work. It's not the steps, I realized -- although just between us I consider a great many dance-school derived repertoire to be nothing short of ridiculous. It's the fact that dance-school students don't ever, ever, ever get the opportunity to learn how to lead and follow. I myself picked the skill up from years of trial and (lots of) error -- just the way they do in Argentina. There, the traditional way is to spend a lot of time in the milongas, watching, trying, making mistakes, trying some more, and ultimately getting better in very small increments over many years.

This is the missing link. Without learning how to lead and follow, you can certainly reproduce dance figures on cue, if you practice them over and over with a specific partner. This is what we call choreography (more about this subject at another time). But, folks, you just can't dance!

How do you learn lead/follow for Tango? Basically, there are two ways that I can recommend:

1.     Get yourself born in Buenos Aires, and spend 35 or 40 years in the milongas, picking it up moment by moment.

2.     Run -- don't walk -- to your teacher's venue, and beg her/him/them to teach you everything there is to know about lead/follow. Do it now before YouTube makes you forget.

Learning lead/follow is hard, but you must, have to, gotta get it into your system. Remember (and keep telling yourself): When it comes to improvised social Tango, without well-honed lead/follow skills I just can't dance!!!!!!

Please join us for our Saturday Practica at Dardo Galletto Studios, 151 West 46^th Street (between 6^th and 7^th Avenues), 11^th floor; 2-4pm, $10 per person. (Bringing a partner isn't necessary.) Pat and I will both be on hand to answer any questions you may have about your dancing, and to help you with material you're working on. Plus you get a new “must-have” tango move each week! If you’d like a private lesson, you can visit our website at www.franchesleigh.com, call Fran directly at 212-662-7692, or email him at franchesleigh@mac.com Join us on Facebook atwww.facebook.com/franchesleighllc

The parade was adorable.  The forecast scared away some people, but overall it was a night full of high energy.  The music by Richard was as always great and he danced with many of the tanqueras.

The Judges, Marie Pagano, Edna Negron and Barbara were fair in their choices.

lst Best Couple, Francis and Marie, Gauchos/Cowboys

Sexiest:  Diane Huber and Marisoto

Most creative, Elizabeth, A fall tree 

Door prizes, Hector, Hilda,,Camille and Francis.

Smooth as glass!

Everything went perfectly and a good time was had by all.

I even persuaded Lynn to dance half a song.

Con mucho amor,

Esteban