Solo

‎I’m such a good lover because I practice a lot on my own.  — Woody Allen

It’s unglamorous and unexciting — sometimes positively boring and frustrating — but my daily hour of solo technique practice is of crucial importance to my dancing. My teacher always says that even the prima ballerina of the Bolshoi does her daily hour of exercises at the barre and, while tango is by no means as demanding a discipline as ballet, it’s still the case that practice, while it certainly doesn’t make perfect (at least not in my case) makes sense.

I put music on the stereo. Actually, although I also do daily listening practice, I prefer, in this case, not to use tango music. This is partly to give my ears a break from the constant onslaught of Argentine melancholy and partly because I don’t listen to the music much when focusing, as I am now, primarily on the quality of my movement. Recently, I’ve variously been practising to Sting, Ella Fitzgerald, Alicia Keys and Björk. Today, I choose the dulcet country and western tones of the Dixie Chicks.

The first half an hour I spend, as always, walking forwards, sideways and (above all) backwards. Whoever said that you should walk in tango the same way as you walk down the street wasn’t a follower. I have never walked down a street backwards in my life. And I don’t wear high heels in real, non-tango life either. For my practice, I put on my very highest pair because I want to develop good balance.

It can be hard to focus and concentrate when no one is monitoring you. I’ve never been good at meditation and my mind wanders during shavasana pose in yoga. But I get the closest I can to becoming a master of Zen meditation during my solo tango technique practice. The only thoughts going through my mind are efforts to lift from my back, keep my hips down and relaxed, my heels as low as possible, my free leg soft with the iliac crests of both legs pointing straight forwards and to push laterally off the floor in the opposite direction from the way I am travelling. Your technique may differ. There are many different techniques that can work well. But at some point you have to make a choice, have a precise technique in mind and try to incorporate it and develop muscle memory.

The journey from your intention to move in a particular way to the place where your body will cooperate can be a very long one and sometimes feels a little like an assault course. I persevere and focus on my visualisations, as a meditator might on a candle. The ground is soft and springy, like a feather bed or like soft sand on a tropical beach; my iliac crests are the headlights of a strange, backward-travelling train illuminating the sultry night; I am just an embrace and a pair of feet, nothing else, gliding effortlessly across the floor of my flat.

Now for the turning exercises: ochos, open diagonals, giros, spot turns, boleos, planeos, enrosques and every possible combination thereof. The little devil on my shoulder (the same one who thinks it’s OK to drink that third glass of wine, to send pathetic emails to my ex-boyfriend and to skip my abdominal exercises today) tries to persuade me to stick to the easier balance exercises. But I persevere and try to find the tango zone: the feeling, not so much of control of the movement, as of taking the physics of the movement itself and making that natural momentum work in my favour. I envisage twisting and pivoting around a ghostly but gorgeous fantasy partner (in my case, Barack Obama, miraculously transformed into an excellent tango dancer) to keep my sense of direction. The floor, I tell myself, is my friend. And in tango there is not much danger of injury, so courage, ma chère, au combat. I just wish some of the men who think following is easy would don a pair of heels and try this. I have a male friend who did just that: took a thrice-weekly technique class in a fetching pair of vertiginous, polka-dotted Comme Il Fauts which turned him into a giant. A poofy-looking giant, but one with excellent balance.

Of course, solo practice is not a substitute for practising with a partner or for social dancing in a milonga setting. When I am actually dancing, I want to be able to focus on quite different things — in particular, the interpretation of the music, the connection with my partner and the embrace — and not have to worry about technicalities such as my posture or whether my weight change is soft or clunky and elephantine. Like a pianist playing endless scales, I concentrate now on the boring, repetitive and purely technical challenges in order to free myself up to think about more artistic elements of the dance later.

You don’t have to be a detail-obsessed nerd with a perfectionism that borders on an OCD to dance tango. But it helps.