Here is an easy challenge to get a feeling for changing weight and settling into one foot and relaxing the other. It is so very simple, and yet so important. Changing weight and settling is what we should be doing with every step we take. We cannot stress just how important this is, or that you should practice it wherever you go. If you think about it every now and then throughout your day, you will find yourself doing it more and more frequently until it just becomes the way you shift your weight. The end result will be a more relaxed and stable posture and better tango.

This is a greatly expanded version of an exercise that we gave as prerequisite homework for our recent classes. Learning how to fine tune your posture is key to creating posture awareness which is very important in tango and in life. This also ties in nicely with a request for an awareness challenge from a friend in Turkey.  Our friend had observed that after a shoulder adjustment, his hips and sacrum would sometimes respond in an unhealthy way. While this is far more than an awareness challenge, it does provide more comprehensive posture exercises to help bring awareness to the possible interactions that may occur as we adjust different aspects of our posture.

In the last few months we have given some rather intense workshops for beginners that included some prerequisite homework. Among them was a series of challenges to get our students into the proper frame of mind for the classes. Everyone came to class with an idea of what they were getting into, and a fresh view of themselves standing and walking through their days. This greatly facilitated the classes and allowed everyone the chance to really get a handle on this dance we love. This challenge is an expansion of the first challenge we gave as homework.

Tango!  Life!  blah, blah, blah.  So many ways to relate the two. Metaphors galore! This isn’t that. This is about awareness. This is about getting feedback from your dance about your life. Tango can help you find your perception of self. Tango can tell you when your life is going right or wrong. When we begin to learn tango many of us have no idea that we are embarking on a journey to overcoming years of conditioning, belief of self, and our own perception of who we are in relation to the world. Our tango, our life, and self perception are reflections of one another. We must dance who we are.

Since we have been behind in posting our challenges, here are two in one, both bringing our awareness to our feet. In tango, often we can get caught up in the placement of our feet, but forget to feel them, or even use them. Here are two exercises to help us be more in touch with this part of our body that carries enormous responsibility.