Do it a million times...

I went to Cesar's milonga workshop yesterday. First time I took a workshop in two years. The workshop itself wasn't quite interesting, partly because of the overall level of the participants. Yet I learned something from this amazing teacher.


Cesar was a very good teacher. He stressed on fundamentals and the very core of tango. It wasn't about teaching the steps, even in the workshop environment. It was about dancing with feeling to the music, about walking with cadence.

One thing he said had particularly struck a cord. He stopped the class after watching for while and seeing most of the people were just rushing the steps. He told a story of how his father taught him dancing tango.

Cesar's father told him to just walk to the music. After a while, Cesar got bored. But his father insisted that he kept on walking. It was not till the 50,000 times that Cesar walked that he started to find cadence in walking, that he found something interesting in this seemingly boring walking. Repeat a million times, until you are bored...and you start looking for something interesting in the simplest thing... then you find tango.

Breathing exercise

I discovered a practice myself this morning while driving to work. Listening to Pugliese on the road, I suddenly found that I was breathing along with the music. I thought that this is a good exercise. Like in Yoga practice, I was always told to just enjoy the breath, pay attention to the breath and let it take me to the presence. I think it also works in dance.

Try that: find any tango music and try to breathe along the music. It is a good exercise. It helped me to be more center and relax in the dance, more submerging in the music and the embrace.