Blog - Tangosynthesis

When You Start to Learn Tango

01 May 2018 - by Graham

There is no getting away from it, learning tango is different to learning other dances. Other dance classes will start by teaching you some basics that can be used to take you through an entire song, which might include a few fundamental steps, some sequences that you can dance from memory, and maybe a few embellishments to add a bit of flair to the sequence. After a couple of lessons you may not be good, you may not be smooth, but the steps you have learned at those classes will look like and feel like dancing. You will usually have the shape and rhythm of the dance by then, and over the next few months you can start to concentrate on polishing up the edges and expanding your repertoire of steps. But tango is a bit different. Tango isn't danced in sequences like some dances, and the basic [read more...]

Tango Synthesis is Here!

22 Apr 2018 - by Graham

As most people probably know by now, when I started teaching tango at Jivebeat it was almost entirely by accident. A random decision to give the regulars at Sevenoaks a tango taster class one evening (you can read about that here ) soon became a regular feature, and pretty soon more people were finding us because of the tango than were finding us for modern jive. This was not a problem for us as we love teaching both, but after a few months we started to realise that people were being confused by the name. Tango at Jivebeat...? Is it really tango? Is it "modern jive in a tango style"? How can modern jive and tango be even slightly compatible? We hadn't thought of this, as since we knew what we were doing we just assumed everyone else would as well. Jive and tango are two separate classes [read more...]

Our First X-Tango Milonga

26 Mar 2018 - by Graham

On Friday the 23rd March 2018, we held our first X-Tango Alternative Milonga at our regular venue in Sevenoaks. This venture into the world of tango freestyle evenings - milongas - was something new for us and we had no idea how it would be received. How many people like dancing tango to modern or nuevo music? Would anyone come to a tango event run by an organisation with such a non-tango name as "Jivebeat"? Would anyone else like the music I play? But we have been promising ourselves that we would try something like this ever since we introduced tango to Jivebeat classes back in the summer of 2017, so it was about time we got on and did it. We need not have worried. We had slightly over 40 people that turned up, and it was great to see that people had travelled from all over [read more...]

X-Tango - Alternative Milonga

12 Mar 2018 - by Graham

It has been a long while coming, but we have finally announced our first X-Tango Alternative Milonga, and it's going to be on the 23rd March 2018 in Sevenoaks, in place of our usual weekly class. But what do we mean by X-Tango ? What is the difference between that and regular Argentine Tango? And why are we calling the milonga alternative ? The Argentine Tango we dance and teach at Jivebeat is the same Argentine Tango that you will find anywhere else. Yes, if you come to our class you may find that we put the emphasis in different places to where you might expect, and just like everyone else who teaches tango we have developed our own teaching style. But the dance itself is the same dance you will learn in Buenos Aires, Brighton, Bromley, or Bangalore, no matter how traditional or nuevo (modern) your class [read more...]

Why is Tango So Hard?

19 Feb 2018 - by Graham

Something we see and hear a lot in tango classes is frustration with the rate of progress that people feel they are making. People come along for a few weeks and enjoy the lessons, but the more they learn the more they realise how much they don't know and they start to wonder what's going wrong. Simple things like walking become a challenge, and we start to hear things like "I don't think tango is my dance", and "I'm never going to get this" by the end of the evening. A lot of this comes from their experiences with learning LeRoc and the rapid progress most people seem to make when they begin to learn it, but is the comparison justified? Or is it only natural that we find learning tango harder than learning LeRoc? LeRoc is a dance made up of large confident moves, and the size [read more...]

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