Want to be a better dancer? Forget your fancy dance shoes, start with your everyday posture; when your body is well aligned you are more likely to have more control of your own axis.
Bad posture is like an old suit that we put on everyday.
Bad posture is something that we build slowly over time, and forward head posture seems to be a major contributor. Hedy Schliefer talks about that and other things in this video. Its effects on our body and life are sometimes hard to see and feel until we’ve been living with it for a long time. Unlike life, tango is not so forgiving of bad posture. Bad posture makes dancing tango much more difficult immediately. In life, bad posture accumulates and only starts complaining much later on.
I’ve learned so much about posture since I started dancing tango and as a follower I have to say that I always watch the men at milongas to see how they hold their axis, if I know someone has poor posture, I find myself averting their glance so that I don’t have to accept a dance with them. This sounds rude I know, but how rude is it for someone to invite you to dance and then let their body fall into a position that literally pulls you out of balance? It makes it almost impossible to maintain connection and worse, gives one the feeling that they are headed for a face-plant. Not fun!
So when I think about one of my earliest dance classes (before I found private teachers) which was held in an auditorium in the Belles Artes Center in San Miguel de Allende, I am always amused by the memory of the teacher who was walking around with his chest out to exaggerate the camino. He was insisting that we adopt this “proud peacock” posture and commanding us to “Flirt!” with our body. It seemed ridiculous at the time but later I found that when I was having a problem with a particular leader, when I showed him the “flirt” position it helped us enormously in maintaining our connection, which of course improved our dancing.
You can read the whole story and learn more about tango dance posture and Hedy Schliefer by clicking here: Forward head posture and Argentine tango – TangoBreath.