TucsonTangoFestival.com

10 Ways to Make Most of Your Tango Festival Experience

10 Ways To Get The Most of YOUR Festival

1) Stay hydrated

Drink plenty of water! Our top priority being the the desert is hydration… we convey this to the hotel. The water should never be low at our drinking stations, please drink freely – especially if you are consuming alcohol!

2) Bring a Snack…

We will be providing breakfast at the all night milonga Saturday, but the rest of the milongas run late as well. Be sure you don’t wind up low on blood sugar. Bring a protein bar or some trail mix to help boost your energy.

3) Get plenty of rest.

Take a nap after classes if you are studying all day and dancing all night you will quickly get exhausted. Be sure to plan your times around resting times or more sedentary activities. We have lectures and DJ classes and music jams that will keep you in the festivities while allowing you to rest. If you have class passes think about observing a class as opposed to participating (you need a class pass to be in a classroom!) you might be surprised how much you can learn by watching the efforts of others and listening to the instruction.

4) Ask and Tell!

Ask your tango partner if they are comfortable with your dancing. Ask if there is anything you can do to make them more comfortable. They may be looking for a different style than you are offering. Lay down your ego and connect with the human heart in your arms!

Tango is a dance that is taught differently in different places. Even in Buenos Aires differing barrios use different techniques. This is true, after 10 years and over 60 different instructors (many of which I have hired) I know it first hand! The solution is to find the person. Find the man or woman in your arms. Do not make the dance at the milonga about the technique of style, make it about hte person in your arms and you will find a wider range of joy and success in your connections.

5) Floor Craft!

Minding the line of dance is lot like considerate driving, keep an eye on traffic!

• Mind the space behind to the sides and in front of you. Respect the space of others, do not let a step or move be more important than your dance mates.
• If there is a gap in front of you you are moving to slow.
• Yield  to on coming dancers.
• Do Not Pass.  As a general rule there is no hurry so stay in your lane.  At the same time, you might want to immediately select an inner lane.  Or change lanes because traffic is piling up during peak hours, in such a case, be sure to look before changing lanes.
• Keep a comfortable buffer.  Like with cars, keeping a respectable distance from the person in front of you helps a lot.  Do not tailgate
• If you feel inclined to dance lots of circular moves try the center of the floor where you will find more room and smaller circular flow.
• Take care of your follower.  Keep an eye out if someone near you is wild but a buffer and your back between them and your partner.
• Be selective when entering the floor.  Pick someone you know to follow if possible – it immediately amplifies the empathy factors.

They say millions of locust can fly through an area and never have a collision… if a locust can do it so can we!

6) Watch look and Learn…

When I was new to festivals I would frequently I get in so much of a hurry to get another partner for the next tanda that I would forget how beautiful this dance is to watch. Take a tanda or two during each night to absorb the beautiful dancing. Notice the musicality – how frequently the heads all seem to pause together during a phrase change of the music. Notice the intricacies of floor-craft. Look for the advanced dancer and see what you can get by the magical visual osmosis that is very powerful in the tango dance community. We invite instructors that dance at our events, watch them as they go by and allow these to be moments of inspiration.

Never feel as though you need every tanda to fulfill your festival needs, a lot of joy and learning comes from watching of this beautiful art form.

7) Give a Moment to Someone Else…

Ask anyone that has been around tango for a few years and they will tell you that at any given moment you are surrounded by future friends. There is magic in the abrazo I have seen it, felt it and been the recipient of it myself many times; there is a healing and bonding energy that transpires when you spent full tandas in someone’s arms, frequently you become very good friends. Tango communities are built on a global, national and regional level very similar to how they are made locally: by taking the time to be kind.

Take a moment to look around the room and give a tanda to a new face, a sad face or a lonely face. There is a very good chance that you will be rewarded ten fold in years to come. It is easy to be in the mind set that we have spent hundreds of dollars to travel and dance so we want all we can get from the experience and we should do just that… but… The small kindnesses that we offer can frequently come back to us in wonderful loving rewards. Take a moment and connect with a new person!

We all want instant community, but remember community is built and encouraged by the investments of kindness that made all this happen.

Stretch and Move…

Keep your body in shape! We have free yoga classes every morning. There is reflexology and foot massage machines in our venue. Make use of all of these. Use any tricks of stretching or exercising that you have learned in tango or other disciplines. Listen to pain, it will frequently tell you something is wrong and that you need to rest or change your movement strategies.
Remember the body is resilient; answer the call of your body and take good care to take good care of yourself!

9) From one of our Readers:

“The best advice I every received was to dance with every partner with an open, loving heart. I cant tell you how much of a difference that made for me…. eases nerves, makes you happy; and you emanate so much positive energy that your partner cant resist “falling in love” right back for the 12 minutes of the tanda. ”

Thank you, Sue!!!

10 ) Drop us a Line…

Tell us how we can enhance your experience. We are here and we work hard to make your festival experience the best it can be. We love everything tango Argentino all suggestions are welcome.

Thank you for gracing us with your presence!

Love & Light,
Rusty

Getting the Most from Your Festival

The Tucson Tango Festival is full of exciting instructors, milongas, DJ classes, Argentine History Seminarios, and lectures on community building. How can you possibly absorb it all? Simple: you can’t. You will have to make some choices. Here is some advice from a festival junkie named Rusty:

I love tango festivals and here are some things I have learned:
If you over tax yourself you will be too tired to enjoy anything.
Pace yourself.

• First there is a lot to learn so if you are taking classes here this: Take most of your classes BELOW YOUR LEVEL OF DANCE! My Reasons:
  1) We always think we are better than we are, it is the only way we can dance with confidence.
  2) You will most definitely find that the foundational things you have learned else where will sound and feel different coming from the festival instructors. So there will be a lot here for you to re-learn and re-integrate.
  3) You won’t be as stressed if you allow this experience to be more of a refresher than all new material.
• If you have been dancing for more than two years, be sure to save ample time for milonga dancing at the milongas. Do not try to take all three classes and dance all night, your body probably can’t handle it. Take a class or two and stay a bit later at the milongas so you can integrate what you have learned.
• If you have been dancing less you will want more of the classes and less of the milongas.  Take two or three classes, get some rest and come down to the milonga for a couple of hours, but take it nice and easy picking your tandas and partners carefully.
• Drink lots of water. Stay hydrated and keep your energy up with good wholesome meals.
• Stretch – be sure to stretch those hamstrings and your lower back, standing all day can cause some stiffness. Here is a nice PDF for tango stretching.
• There is no short road to tango.
• Relax and enjoy everything as best you can.
• Take advantage of low energy events to save fuel for the milongas.
• Remember when it comes to the milonga, wipe the practice from you mind and dance the best you can without getting too worried about remembering todays figure or lesson. Those things come from practice and use, at the milongas just dance what you know.

Take your time, take it slow and enjoy the moments as they arrise. This event is for your pleaseure and enjoyment, do not move into stress mode by trying to do too much or by trying to learn too much. You will get more from teh festival if you remember it is a big party, so enjoy yourself.

Love, Light and Abrazos,
Rusty