Friday at Intensivo

My brain is seriously starting to degrade, not to mention my emotional-mental state. After a quick sacadas review, we move on to shared axis turns which turn out to be a nice whooshy move for the follower. Again, the idea of the body twisting from the top to bottom or the bottom to top comes into play. We followers work hard to keep the free leg relaxed but to not fall into the next step. Luciana goes on to highlight every shared axis turn.

For sacadas, the leader is going towards the follower's free foot.  For shared axis turns, the leader is going towards the space behind the follower's standing foot and then going around her in a pivot.  The leader's body needs to go in a circle around the follower's body or else she is going to step.  That's the main point I got from the class.

That's it for the Intensivo posts.  Hopefully some of this will get integrated in my body someday.  The Intensivo was great and I really loved working with Lu and her assistants.  I do think that, for me, it is a bit of an overload.  When I have a private, I am usually able to work on one aspect of my dancing and let that settle into my body over time.  With the Intensivo, I felt like I was working on 5 different things at the same time and, since I'm only a so-so multitasker, it quickly became overload for my body.  Let's not eve talk about my brain.  However, this is one of the most concise primers of tango I've ever experienced.  Working on a theme for 5 hours a day for 6 days really let's you see all the minutiae - the overall concept, every permutation of that concept, the technique needed to execute the concept truthfully, the structure of the dance, the mechanics, the direction.   The theme we were working on was "center and circle."