Welcome Sabine!

Tomorrow is a big day for our tango friend Sabine: she will see the beauty of our city Tampere and will be embraced by our lovely world famous tango scene! Sabine comes from Erfurt, Germany, where she teaches and runs a tango association. Her big thing is the yearly TangoLehrerTreffen, a weekend workshop for tango teachers, where teachers who teach locally or internationally can meet and learn from each other. It happened just this last weekend; we want to hear the news!

On Tuesday night Sabine will teach at Teerenpeli at 19h and she will also dj at the milonga!

During the week she will participate in our private classes as an extra teacher!

On Saturday PyM and Sabine will teach in Kuopio: technique for hombres, mujeres and parejas!

And for Sunday night we head for the milonga Piritta in Helsinki!

What a week! Join the fun! Make her feel welcome!

Inspiration and some practical things

What a great and inspiring weekend we had in Helsinki at the Tango Festival Frostbite! Just a quick note on things that inspired me, and gave me lots if things to work on in my social dance and teaching.

1) Dancing tango slowly, and phrasing the dance. An old idea, of course, been thinking about this for years, but expressing it in the dancing maybe less. In teaching we have been working a lot with the rhythm these last years, and it has worked very well with the popularity of old rhythmical tango music. The rhythmical dancing that we see now in the milongas is a big change compared to what social dancing was maybe 5-10 years ago, when you really could not see the connection between the music and the dance. But nowadays I think it is quite easy to get new dancers to hear the basic rhythm in the tango music and play with that. So maybe we and the community in Finland are ready to move on to the next level in musical dancing! Thank you Sebastian Arce for reminding us!

2) Leader facing outside as a default mode in social dancing. I noticed that in the classes most teachers at the festival did their sequences so that the leader started facing the outside of the dance floor, so that the open side of the embrace pointed towards the line of the dance, and not the leader facing the line of the dance. Then the couple might turn and face other directions, but return again to this default mode. This enables both dancers to take a larger variety of steps: for example a small back step for the leader towards the center, which would be like a normal side step when facing the line of the dance, and the follower has maybe less walking backward to do. We tried this at the Monday class at Spiral, and it seemed to work fine with the experienced dancers at least. I think it created more variety in the dance, and the line of dance really stayed calm and the circle big. I have not tried this yet as a leader (Maria), but I think we'll experiment this!

3) My new love: MILONGA!!!!!