Breaking down tango steps & sequences :: The Mini-Milonguero Dip :: A practical YouTube/Video Tip

Let's face it. Human males are visual troglodytes. "We like to watch, Eve."

And with tango, due to the complexities and nuances of the quality and character of motion through time and space and to the music - weight shifts, where your weight is on your foot aka where your center of gravity is in relation to your foot, where you want her weight to be, where you want your foot/feet to be, where you want her foot/feet to be, etc. Sometimes if you lead her to shift her weight just a little too far, the opportunity to do what you were planning to do is lost. In a few-to-several-hundred femtoseconds of little brain farts bubbling up in the primordial soup.

I know many of us leaders, perhaps most of us, use YouTube to glean/harvest/study new vocabulary and "stuff" for our tango roll-o-dex of moves. Or maybe movements is a better word. Ah. I see it's actually "Rolodex".

Using the video settings to slow down the speed to .50 or .25 is helpful, but scrubbing the video back and forth is hellatiously frustrating, especially on a mobile device.

After years of being hellatiously frustrated by the inability to have really slow simple control to break things down step by step, I had a eureka moment a couple of weeks ago.

Now, after being hellatiously frustrated reading all my drivel, here is the actual tip.

Slow the video down to .25 speed on your computer or iPad, then video that with your phone. Then using your phone, it's much easier to scrub back and forth step by step to figure shit out.

With the Austin Spring Tango Festival coming up, and being slightly week in my small space Rolodex of movements, we've been taking classes with Vania on the subject, and practicing a few times a week. We've been working on incorporating a cross-footed ocho cortado to the cross (aren't they all?) with a front cross step back to the close side on her part simultaneously with a mini-milonguero dip on my part. Mini-dip. Not mini-milonguero, although I'm sure they exist.

Sadly, the milonguero dip has been missing from my tango Rolodex for all these years.

My thick skull couldn't absorb it until I broke it down step by step and body position by body position. I'm slow that way. And I guess I've been slow on the uptake of figuring out that I could video the slowed-down video. Oh well.

Anyway.

That is all.

Oh. Here's the video. From timestamp 0:40, then he repeats it at 0:48. Michelle and Joachim. I like their "stuff".