Advanced Tango Class taught by Rebecca

From 7 pm to 8:30 on Fridays, enjoy the challenges of a truly advanced class that includes time to practice integrating new material into your dance. Class being by permission, all your partners will be skilled and pleasant dancers. Among the Fridays, there will be ganchos, boleos, deep sacadas, altered sacadas, beautiful sequences with surprising segues, ideas about how to hold the body and flex the muscles, the occasional fancy or sassy embellishment, the occasional challenge to build your own creative sequence, and some attention to musicality, that endless pleasure. Our first class involved a lot of alterations, some zany embellishments, and a short sequence from Evan. Our second class explored a few of those deep sacadas that also work like barridas and start out like ganchos! Our third class worked with "alterated" sacadas, varying muscle tone, and a surprising segue from follower's sacadas. After that we enjoyed 2 Fridays with Josh Rigley as a guest teacher with me, and we played with the twisted sculptures our torsos can dance in lunge-like poses that are surprisingly pliable, with finding the extreme degree of a twist or a turn, and with the concentrated set-up that can launch a sudden cool move seemingly out of nowhere. After that we worked with the slight pull-and-press that can flavor back crosses, and with various expressively embellished escapes, then learned double-time ochos with a series of accompaniments, and last Friday explored some very weird ways of walking with a partner, and some underused, beautiful sacadas. In April I'll've been dancing tango for 35 years. I started learning in New York, from Danny Trenner who had just arrived from Buenos Aires, and after a year or so working with him, we went together to BsAs for a couple of months, and I learned alongside him from every older couple, or man, who was teaching back then, legendary dancers and milongueros who each shared their unique moves, style, techniques, and values in this very individualistic dance. All that history still moves me and influences everything I do in tango; at the same time, I've also had the great joy of working with several brilliant young partners over the years, and have learned a lot from them. In this series of Friday classes I share some of the material I learned by teaching it with these young fellows, or discussing it when practicing with them. All of them, like me, are dedicated social dancers, and so everything I'm thinking of is improvised, lead-and-follow-and-collaborate-in-the-moment tango. This Friday we'll meet in room 17U at the Ripley Grier Studios at 520 Eighth Avenue, near 36th Street We're near Victoria's Milonga, in case you want to extend your evening of dancing. Please bring ID for entering the building, and allow time to show your ID and for the occasional line at the Security desk. $40 for just this class, or $100 for any 3 Friday classes. Attendance is by permission, meaning, you have to check with me before coming to the class 😉 If the Friday classes aren't for you, I'll encourage you to come to my Monday classes, which are for everyone.