DNI, La Viruta, Running Before You Can Walk

Tuesday night I was just burned out and didn't feel like going to Practica X and dancing poorly. I've really gotten worse, or perhaps I now know how bad I am.

Last night (Wed.) I went to the Viruta and there were very few people there. I didn't really feel like asking anybody who was good to dance, so I ended up dancing with Joana or something from Sweden. She's a frustrated tango beginner who is apparently a Lindy Hop instructor in Sweden. She actually asked me to dance, so we danced about 10 tangos and that was my night.

The fact is that you have to dance with people at your level -- or pay people who are really good, or somehow get them to dance with you con gusto -- so that you don't feel like you're wasting their time. Although you do have to keep asking good people to dance, because one generous person can change the whole landscape and give you a chance to get to work. Dancing with beginners is good to feel the woman's weight and so forth, but if the woman cannot walk (as in tango, if she can't walk at all it's another story) it's hard to work on your camminata. This is something that I've been saying since my salsa days: the woman's development has very little to do with the man's development. My great analogy is that when you learn to drive, they don't give you a fucked-up car with all kinds of strange alignment problems where the brakes and gas don't work. So why should beginners learn together?

I avoided all of this bullshit in languages by just working with tapes and I never spoke with any other learners. Which is kind of what people keep telling me: just take private classes. We'll see how that works out, I think I've struck a deal with some people.

So anyway, I was talking to my chica last night about learning to walk in tango and how important that is, and I said, "look, learning to walk is nice, but it doesn't help with the fact that you have to know giros, for instance." But her position is that learning to walk is balance and movement, and until you know how to walk you can't run. What is running? She says, "DNI, for instance, that's running."

Now, don't expect too coherent a conversation with most people here in Argentina (no, it's not my Spanish, I had years of more-than-coherent conversations in Spanish in Spain), but the idea that people have of DNI is wrong (at least at my level). All the different schools, from Copello to Aoniken at La escuela argentina de tango to whomever else, all of them basically teach a sequence and then correct you using that as a basis. At DNI that's true too, and in fact they pay very special attention to make sure that the students can do the sequence (and that they've explained it well enough for the students to follow it so that they teachers can just correct you). I've never seen any fuera-de-ejes or anything else that's weird in DNI, whereas in Copello Tango 1 we did do a few volcadas.

Now, there are places -- in the classes with Fabian Peralta, for instance, and this guy at the Sunderland -- where you apparently just walk for hours. But aside from those, all the classes are pretty much the same. And the DNI propuesta is not really that radical -- it just puts emphasis on some different stuff, but it's (as far as I've seen thus far) very compatible with all the stuff I've seen in Tango Salón thus far. Which doesn't mean that I don't need to work on walking and balance and basic shit.

Although last night I realized that I need more giros, because otherwise you're just doing stupid little half circles all the time. You need to be able to go 360º to get any interesting movement patterns on the floor.

Well, tonight to class at 7pm at DNI and then later to Catedral. We'll see how all of this goes.