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Head Tilt

The tilt or position of one’s head (for lead or follow) is far more important than you might imagine. First and foremost, where the head points the body tends to follow. There’s a reason for this, your equilibrium, contrary to popular belief your balance is not generated in the center of your belly. This ‘myth’ is better known and often repeated as to indicate your ‘core’ muscles. This is a lie. Your balance, stability, and equilibrium is generated from one place only in your body: your inner ear! And where the inner ear points….the body tends to follow suit. So in effect tilting your head to either forward, either side, or back will tend to generate a state of non-equilibrium in you, and thereby you’re now leaning, and more likely hanging on your partner in a variety of Tango moves (as a Lead OR as a Follower!).

In short, the tilt of one’s head causes an orientation issue that you want to avoid. Best practice ? Lift up your head! Pretty simple. Right ? Wrong. You’re so used to doing this that you’re not even aware that you’re doing it. For Followers the practice is to tilt their heads into their lead’s shoulder and neckline (mostly it’s a height thing). For Leads it’s watching their Follower’s feet. Neither of which is desirable.

There are two other reasons why Dancer Head Tilt is an issue, aside from the aforementioned: 1.) Physiological and Kinesthetic Body Posture. 2.) Visual alignment.

1.) One’s body posture, or just posture, is the stance that you take with your own presence on the floor and how you move, and the stance that you take with your partner. By tilting your head towards or away from your partner (either as a Lead or a Follow) you are honestly, disrupting the physiological posture that we want to generate in every move, at every point along the curve of dancing with someone. By tilting one’s head you are compromising that physiological posture!

2.) This may come as a surprise but when you tilt your head consciously, or unconsciously you are breaking the visual line that you generate with your own body. Now add in to the equation that you’re breaking the line of the couple by tilting your head and you begin to see that you have a problem. We do not want to do this in any way, shape, or form.

So in short: Lift up your head! However, as was pointed out earlier. The solution is not that simple. The reason ? Ingrained habit. You will go back to tilting your head repeatedly with every step because it’s what’s comfortable for you. Keeping you head in a floating but neutral position is difficult for someone that’s never done it before. It will seem like work at first. But once you start seeing it in your posture, and start the correction process, it will take you some time to unlearn what you have learned. Warning: Fixing this issue will create other unintended issues, you will find that your balance and stability will change as a result. You will find that your motions and vocabulary will change as a result and become seemingly more difficult for a while. The reason ? Because your center point has changed. Duh! Give it some time, it will get better.

Good luck.

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Keep something in the back of your mind: What you’re seeing in a youtube video is a couple that is performing for the 15th row for a room full of people. They’re not social dancingWhereas this website is all about ‘Social Tango’  or how to make things function on a social dance floor. Social Dance floor ? Your local milonga! They are showing you flashy moves as a presentation, to show off! But not stopping and talking about how this works which is what you need to see. This website and all of it’s content show you the how and  why you’d want to put that piece of vocabulary there, or how to make things work. This website is all about those things and more!

You could watch Tango YouTube videos and thereby spend your time, trying to infer, and figure out how things may work in that particular situation. Bend your body this way or that, twist and force this position or that. Place your foot here or there and figure it out. This is known as Tango Twister.  Which can be a lot of fun, but more than likely it won’t help you, because you’re missing something: The explanation from an experienced teacher showing you how to properly excute this stuff from a Leading Perspective as well as from a Following Perspective!

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