Hi everybody, Fran here with your Tango Tip of the Week. During our last Tip, I introduced three inter-related concepts, which (I claimed) might possibly revolutionize your Tango for the New Year and beyond. These are the following:

1.     Slow Down

2.     Stop

3.     The "magic moment"

In our Tango Tip last week, we addressed the general idea of slowing down. This alone will go a very long way toward making your dancing better. Today, we're going to talk about a highly specialized skill, which will serve to add balance and precision to your overall movement. It's called the stop.

Stop

The ability -- and therefore the option --of being able to bring yourself to a complete stop at the end of any individual forward, backward, or sideward step is (in my opinion, at least) an absolutely crucial skill for anyone who wants to dance social Tango at a high level. And yet, stopping is not only overlooked by the majority of students, it is generally rejected as a tool in the arsenal of Tango proficiency. Although it should be quite obvious to anyone observing good dance practice among Argentine social dancers, many of us (people in this country) seem utterly oblivious to its importance.

One of the assertions I hear constantly from highly skilled, professional Argentine dancers is that they have personally spent several years "learning to walk." When such individuals become teachers themselves, they often incorporate this process into their own pedagogical approach. Its purpose is no doubt to clearly focus their own students' efforts on mastering the fundamentals of the dance before undertaking more complex structures and sequences. Thus, it is very common to see students in a class, all in a single line, walking around the dance floor -- attempting to pay careful attention to such elements as posture, precise foot placement, thrust from one step to the next, etc.

With most American dance students -- as virtually all teachers find out rather quickly -- interest in and concentration on such repetitious activity generally has a lifespan of about one minute.  After that, their eyes begin to roll, and they impatiently want to move on to such subjects as -- oh, I don't know, let's see -- how about a few elaborate, multi-part stage sequences. "That's what we want. We'll learn how to walk later, okay?"

Help.

Furthermore, even those enlightened students who recognize the value of such foundational training usually miss out on one of the most important elements of walking -- yes, you guessed it -- stopping. Why? Because even the most well-meaning teachers generally tend to omit this in their teaching. How could this conceivably be the case? I think it's because stopping is so inherently a part of the way dancers from Argentina move themselves that they completely take this "invisible" skill for granted. They already have this in their blood, and they assume everyone else does, too.

Except, of course, that we don't.

To remedy this situation, I urge all instructors of Tango everywhere in the world to make this the year they start bringing the stop front and center in their teaching agenda. To my way of thinking, this might possibly be the single most important concept a student of social Tango can be exposed to. And next week -- as I address part 3 of our essential skill trilogy -- "the magic moment" -- we'll find out exactly why.

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 at www.facebook.com/franchesleighllc

The following folks helped set up, break down and clean up before and after the milonga. Without them, there would be no Firehouse Tango.

• Tsipoyra Sartan
• Jesse Barton
• Rafael and Hilda 
  
• Steve Maisch
• ​​​​​​​Lynn Gross
• Elena Titova