Learning to follow still feels to me like an absurdly ambitious goal, but even at this early and utterly incompetent stage, I’ve started to see some signs of progress.
One of these is finding that an approach which was wrong for me when I first started this adventure is now exactly what I need …
Let me tell the untold pre-pandemic story of my first ever lesson of attempting to actually follow …
I should first note that, in one sense, following was nothing new. I was just five months into tango when I first decided to book a two-hour private as a follower specifically because I wanted to understand first-hand how a lead should feel. I wrote at the time that it was one of the most valuable lessons I’d ever had. So much so that I immediately decided to switch my next private also to following rather than leading.
Based on that experience, I adopted the habit of asking teachers to lead me in whatever we were tackling, so I always started from an understanding of the sensation I was aiming to transmit to the follower.
However, taking lessons as a follower in order to learn to actually follow is very different.
The blog post I never wrote
The blog posts I don’t write can sometimes be as telling as the ones I do!* If I attend a terrible milonga, or suffer an awful DJ, I’ll simply refrain from writing about it. (An argument could be made that such negative reviews are as valuable as positive ones – perhaps more so – but my view is that there’s simply too much subjectivity involved: my idea of hell may be your idea of heaven, or vice-versa. So I don’t want to bad-mouth an event simply because it wasn’t to my taste.)
*I should stress that I don’t blog about every milonga these days, nor write posts about private milongas for obvious reasons, so organisers and participants should definitely not read anything into that …
My teacher, Filippo, said that while we need shortcuts when learning our first role, for the second one (when we already have a decent understanding of technique in place) we should aim to get the fundamentals right from the start – rather than learn an approximation and then correct it later. He said that would mean a slower start, but faster progress.
This made perfect intellectual sense to me. It also seemed absolutely the right approach for me personally, and I readily agreed.
That lesson was a disaster.
We spent the hour starting a movement, Filippo stopping it to correct my posture, then restarting it. To get maybe a centimetre further before stopping, correcting, restarting. An hour later, I’m not sure we’d completed a step.
Ok, that’s probably an exaggeration, but it’s how it felt to me at the time. I felt like I’d gotten nowhere, and ultimately ended up taking a very different approach with Diego – namely, he would give me an industrial-sized lead, and we’d consider it a victory if I ended up going anywhere in the same quadrant as the intended compass direction, anytime within half an hour of the intended timing. We then very gradually worked on refining from there, and I subsequently took the same approach with Emma.
Returning to the centimetre-by-centimetre approach
I’m not saying that leading me is challenging, but merely observe that Diego and Emma each left for different (and separate) continents – which left me in search of a new teacher.
However, I had a suspicion that now might be the right time to return to Filippo’s approach. So far, I can follow simple steps and rebounds in a rough-and-ready fashion – which was the foundation I needed to give me some semblence of confidence before getting too far into the weeds.
However, the lead for pivots remains a mystery. I’m very insensitive to it, and can’t even reliably tell whether I’m being led a forward or backward pivot. It struck me that Filippo’s centimetre-by-centimetre approach was likely exactly what I need now, and the lesson we had demonstrated that this is indeed the case.
Specifically, Filippo identified that my lack of sensitivity to the lead for pivots is all about my posture as a follower. Unless I have sufficient forward intention toward the leader, it’s going to be hard to read the signals. If I collapse my core, then things get mushy. If my right arm is too tense, I’ll effectively be fighting the lead. Conversely, if it’s too floppy then I’ll be absorbing it.
In short, fixing my posture as a follower is key to reading the lead. And while all the work I’ve done on my posture as a leader is some help, it’s still a very different ballgame.
So that’s what we worked on, for an hour. And yep, it was very much back to that ‘begin a movement, stop it, correct my posture, resume it’ approach. But this time it was working.
Very, very slowly – with many setbacks – but it was working. Mostly I reached the point of being able to stop and correct my posture myself. Very occasionally, I’d manage to complete three seconds of movement without the need for correction. And yes, when I had the correct posture, then the same lead was so much clearer, and I was much more in my axis when pivoting. By the end of the lesson, we could both see and feel a significant difference.
So, my homework:
- Keep my hips back over my heels, but my chest forward
- Take very slow steps, and check that my hip remains above my heels at every point
- Then the same thing with a side-step and 90-degree pivot, again at every point
- Step around the (imaginary) leader, and stop at the 50-50 weight point to again check my hips and core
- Square up to the (imaginary) leader, and again check hip alignment throughout the pivot
- Do the follower ocho cortado sequence, stopping at every point, including the 50/50 points
As Filippo says, if my posture is correct, then every point should feel stable – completely in my axis. Which will be all the clearer when doing it solo because there’s no leader for support. I’ll also see whether I’m capable of following any pivots in another practice session at QTL.
Finally, I’m putting a call out to see whether I can find a follower at a similarly early stage of learning to lead so that we can practice together and offer each other some guidance. While a beginner leader/beginner follower combo is challenging, I also feel like we could be of a lot of help to each other, as there are probably lots of things we don’t yet get in our secondary role which would be painfully obvious to an experienced follower/leader. If you know anyone who might be interested, do put them in touch!
ben lovejoy: journey of a trainee tanguero 