Hi All,

It's time to plan our annual Firehouse Tango Jewish New Year’s feast for our fellow Firehouse tangueros. 

This year, Rosh Hashanah starts on Sunday night, September 9 and Yom Kippur is on Tuesday the 18th. That makes Thursday, September 13th the perfect day to schedule our dinner. 

 

As I do every year, I will make my mother's brisket (the best in the Bronx) with potatoes and carrots and maybe a turkey. Please let me know if you'd like to contribute something. You don't have to be Jewish to contribute. 

 

Sue

 

 Here are some items from previous years:

 

• Sue - brisket with potatoes, carrots, and string beans, gefilte fish, dried fruits and nuts, desserts and honey from Joe's bees. 
• ​Mike and Debbie - Salad
• Marion Levine - Kugel
• Tsipoyra - cake

• Georgina Blitzer - Kugel

• Judy Assisi - Chile

Hi everybody, Fran here with your Tango Tip of the Week. Last week, we took up our discussion of pivots, or what I refer to as the “sixth” fundamental element of social Tango. As I mentioned at that time, the pivot is the basis for much of the more complex repertoire in Tango — including the crossed system along with ocho, molinete, calicita, and boleo — not to mention movements, which are found in the Tango Nuevo repertoire such as colgada and volcada. Today, we’re going to define the role, which the pivot plays in one of the two basic circular elements of Tango; i.e., ocho.

In general, an ocho is a movement in which the leader invites his follower to move back and forth in front of him, using what we might call a “figure-eight” pattern with her feet (hence the term ocho or “eight”). Depending on the lead, she will move forward or backward as she travels through space.

From the follower’s standpoint, her movement for one half of the complete ocho pattern involves three distinct elements:

1.     Pivot

2.     Walk

3.     Alignment

Let’s look at a forward ocho as an example of these three individual elements at work. One of the more typical places in the dance where a forward ocho might occur is at la cruzada in the context of la salida. The leader walks his follower to the cross, and decides to invite one or two forward ochos before proceeding to other elements:

The pivot

 After an appropriate pause at la cruzada to insure that both he and his partner are comfortably in balance, the leader invites the follower to rotate counterclockwise, uncrossing her feet and bringing them together as she unwinds. The leader accomplishes this by rotating his own upper body counterclockwise, taking care to help keep his follower’s balance on her pivoting foot. As the follower executes her pivot, she rotates the lower half of her body so that it faces a direction in which she will be able to walk forward on a travel line around the leader. At the same time, her upper body remains more or less facing the leader. (In other words, she now finds herself in a twist.) The follower makes absolutely certain that at the end of her pivot she does NOT automatically walk forward. Rather, she completes her movement, and waits for the next invitation from her leader

The walk

Now, the leader invites the follower to walk forward to his right. He does this by rotating his upper body to the right, gently directing her by this action to move on a travel line, which might be described as an invisible circumference around his position as the center of a circle. As she moves forward, the follower’s body remains in the twisted position, which she adopted as she unwound from la cruzada. (Her head faces her partner, her lower half faces the direction of travel.) In terms of the length of her step, the follower targets her leader’s right shoulder as she goes. This will ensure that at the conclusion of her walk, she will end up directly in front of him.

The alignment

In finishing her walking action, the follower now pivots again in order to bring herself out of the twist and to face her partner with her shoulders and hips squared off. This action is something the follower initiates by herself — rather than needing to be led. Her motivation for this is that as a good dancer she doesn’t want to complete any movement without finishing in a front-to-front relationship with her partner. (A beginning follower may have to be led to pivot in order to achieve this facing position — until she is eventually trained to do it by herself. Furthermore, a follower who has been told that every single action she takes absolutely must be led may balk at the idea of initiating this small aligning pivot on her own. However, a teacher who understands good dance practice and who recognizes that, in fact, even in Tango there are conventions of movement, which do not involve lead/follow will be able to help his/her student to overcome this rigid misconception.)

As the follower initiates the pivoting action described above, which brings her into alignment with the leader, he may choose to simply allow her to come to a stop — or her may decide to initiate a continuing pivot by rotating his body clockwise in order to invite his follower to complete the second half of her forward ocho.

Of course, there are many other possibilities here as well. Next week, we’ll talk about what occurs between the two partners as they work their way through a typical molinete.