On Being Tangoed

Last Saturday I spent the day in a studio in Roecliffe learning how to be better at tango. 

Adam, from White Rose Tango has been running all-day tango workshops for over three years now. I started my tango adventure in that very same studio after he talked me into giving it a go through the power of Smilies and exclamation marks on Facebook chat. (After all, who can resist such a round yellow face? – the Smiley’s, not Adam’s).

After a few years of offering the workshops at two levels – basics and improvers, he has changed the format of the improvers course to be ‘basics plus.’

Anyone who has had the ‘pleasure’ of learning tango will be acutely aware that even tasks as ‘basic’ as walking – something that we do every single day of our lives are actually quite difficult when you have another person glued to your frame. You shouldn’t be fooled into thinking that just because you’ve been dancing tango for years, you won’t get anything out of a course with the word ‘basic’ in it. 

The day itself is split into four hour long sessions, liberally sprinkled with breaks, cakes and cups of tea.

In the basics course, the sessions get progressively more difficult throughout the day.

The basics plus course starts with a revision of the most complex fourth lesson of the basics and goes on from there.  In basics plus, you get to push your skills further with different figures and more building blocks of tango such as sandwich steps, the ocho cortado, and even a little bit of a colgada by the end of the day.  With two teachers and a maximum of 10 people for the group you certainly get a lot more personal feedback and find out exactly what you can do to make your dancing even more brillianter than it already is.

Spending a whole day breathing, dancing and talking tango certainly has its benefits –  instead of having to digest and process all of the million and one things you need to improve in an hour (the length of a normal lesson), you get to be told about them again and again until your body starts to behave itself.  Or not.

If nothing else you have a fun day out in delightful and relaxed company, and go home with a smile on your face. And a very long list of things to fix.  If that’s not worth £50, I don’t know what is!

If you fancy starting from scratch, or honing your skills, hop on over to the White Rose Tango website to find out how to book yourself a place on the next course.