We hold classes every week in Sevenoaks and South Norwood, aimed at tango beginners... and when we say 'beginners', we really do mean people who have never danced tango (even those who have never danced anything at all) before. Some of you have told us how much you love the look of tango and really want to give it a go, but your previous experiences with classes where everyone else is months ahead of you, or where you have to commit to extended courses to get you going have put you off trying. This is completely understandable; it's hard enough starting something completely new without having the added pressure of trying to keep up with everyone else, or having to attend a block of six, eight, or ten classes without missing a beat. Our classes are different. Every beginners' class we teach starts with the absolute fundamentals [read more...]
When preparing for a tango class or an event, the music the DJ chooses to play throughout the evening is probably the most important thing there is to decide. It doesn't matter if you provide a bar, free food, a fabulously ornate building with a perfect dance floor, or even a view across the Serengeti for the dancers to enjoy between tracks, if the music isn't danceable then you might as well not have bothered. But therein lies a big problem, as whilst for some people the music is just there to provide a background for the dancing, others consider tango (the dance) and tango (the music) to be inextricably linked and intertwined. If it isn't the right music, it isn't tango. I grew up watching contemporary ballet and street dancers performing to everything from Rachmaninov to Run DMC, and so the concept of there being a 'right' [read more...]
There is no getting away from it, learning tango is different to learning other dances. Other dance classes will start by teaching you some basics that can be used to take you through an entire song, which might include a few fundamental steps, some sequences that you can dance from memory, and maybe a few embellishments to add a bit of flair to the sequence. After a couple of lessons you may not be good, you may not be smooth, but the steps you have learned at those classes will look like and feel like dancing. You will usually have the shape and rhythm of the dance by then, and over the next few months you can start to concentrate on polishing up the edges and expanding your repertoire of steps. But tango is a bit different. Tango isn't danced in sequences like some dances, and the basic [read more...]
As most people probably know by now, when I started teaching tango at Jivebeat it was almost entirely by accident. A random decision to give the regulars at Sevenoaks a tango taster class one evening (you can read about that here ) soon became a regular feature, and pretty soon more people were finding us because of the tango than were finding us for modern jive. This was not a problem for us as we love teaching both, but after a few months we started to realise that people were being confused by the name. Tango at Jivebeat...? Is it really tango? Is it "modern jive in a tango style"? How can modern jive and tango be even slightly compatible? We hadn't thought of this, as since we knew what we were doing we just assumed everyone else would as well. Jive and tango are two separate classes [read more...]
Something we see and hear a lot in tango classes is frustration with the rate of progress that people feel they are making. People come along for a few weeks and enjoy the lessons, but the more they learn the more they realise how much they don't know and they start to wonder what's going wrong. Simple things like walking become a challenge, and we start to hear things like "I don't think tango is my dance", and "I'm never going to get this" by the end of the evening. A lot of this comes from their experiences with learning LeRoc and the rapid progress most people seem to make when they begin to learn it, but is the comparison justified? Or is it only natural that we find learning tango harder than learning LeRoc? LeRoc is a dance made up of large confident moves, and the size [read more...]