You’ve all heard this phrase used by Tango teachers to get their students to walk:
“You must PUSH from the floor!”
I’ll spare you here and get straight to it.
ALL MUSCLES PULL!
Read that again, I’ll wait.
Why am I yapping about this ?
Mostly because of the fallacy language that people use to create understanding which does the polar opposite when reasoning or facts you can check yourself gets involved.
Years ago when I used this phrase on a student I had at MIT, who, at the time, was getting his phd in Biomechanics, said to me, “Ummm Miles, you know that all muscles pull, right ?”. I stopped and asked what he meant and he dropped the fact with deets.
The reality is that “pushing from the floor” is an illusion of gravity. In reality you are pulling yourself across the floor (forward, side, or back). There is no push!
Read that again.
To be fair there are muscles that seemingly push, but all the muscles attached to your skeletal frame do, in fact, ‘pull’. However as I said there are muscles that do ‘push’ but it is the way that they are attached and contract that creates the illusion of pushing which is in fact … say it with me … PULLING.
When I started teaching from this precept, a curious thing started to happen. Understanding started to happen. And more importantly most dancers started to be responsible for their own movement.
Oddly enough the reasoning actually coincided with another precept I liked to say a lot, “I Move Me”. Which is to say that the dancer, not their partner is responsible for them moving themselves! Which is akin to you pulling yourself across the floor.
Far too often one of the many fallacies of tango is that (due to the mistranslation of entregar and entregarse early on) is that the Followers head was filled with bullsh1t about ‘submitting to their partners’ and the like. Which created the delusion that the Follower wasn’t responsible for their actions, the Lead was. Which naturally fed into the belief that the Male Lead was in control. You can see where this is going right ?
For those of you that can’t see it, it led to hanging, pulling, and being lethargic and the follower not being aware of their own body in relationship to their partner. Not to mention a few other things that would definitely make this a TLDR;
Suffice it said that the statement, “push from the floor” Is yet another tango fallacy that needs to stop.
Sadly, I know I’m out here in the field waving my arms and no one gives a f4ck. “It’s just a phrase Miles! No one actually believes that!”. Ummm … wrong. They do. I wish I could show the countless videos I still have in my student progress lesson archives that tell a completely different story. The amount of tango misinformation floating around out there that people literally have paid their tango misteachers to hear is nothing short of staggering.
So please for the love of my sanity, and clarity, STOP saying this. And when you hear it being used, drop some truth.
And that concludes our Tango Reality Check for the day.
Thanks for playing.