192  Denver Labor Day Weekend & Crowded Dance Floors

Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2001 17:22:27 -0600
From: Tom Stermitz <Stermitz@RAGTIME.ORG>
Subject: Denver Labor Day Weekend & Crowded Dance Floors

Denver Labor Day Weekend & Crowded Dance Floors

Thanks to everyone who came and who put effort into the Labor Day
weekend. The final count was 160 visitors, plus a few.

I only danced with visitors, but still didn't get to half of them.


Crowded Floors

As people may have noticed, the floors were somewhat
crowded....Crowded, but very well navigated. For the experienced
dancers this was a dream come true. I would like to testify that
tango dancing rarely gets better than this, and the milongas felt
very, very close to what it is like in Buenos Aires (without the
cigarette smoke).

But, obviously some people were a bit daunted by the crowded
conditions and the intensity. I heard that complaint from a few
people. I would like to address it.


A good leader has 4 connections: His Partner, the Earth, the Music
and the Crowd. When all 4 of these are really great, then we
(leaders) find the highest level of energy, musicality and trance.
Since the followers are feeling every beat of our hearts, they also
reach that exquisite state.

Friday night was a bit rough. Social energy was more scattered.
People were just starting to find new partners. There were quite a
number of collisions. The floor felt confused.

My observation is that people who are used to having 3-4 steps to
recover, had difficulty when they only had 1-3 steps. This led to an
inconsistent "Crowd Rhythm", which makes it pretty hard to predict
where the guys in front, in back and to the side are going.

On Saturday we gave navigation classes, and lo and behold, by
Saturday night everybody was in nice, polite lanes...except for a few
who had not attended the classes.

By Sunday everything rocked. Fast energized dancing. Extraordinary
connections with the partners. Hardly ANY collisions.


Here are some tips to make things work in such crowded conditions:

(1) Vocabulary: Some of your "moves" simply won't work. You need to
have the rhythmic vocabulary, in particular a quick, rock-step to get
you out of trouble, and if you do a turn, sometimes the only place
you can put your partner is the spot you just vacated.

(2) Moving the Tables in: I know this sounds crazy, but it helped
immensely. First of all, on Friday we had major problems with people
standing on the dance floor, walking to the bathroom and the waitress
clearing the tables. By moving the tables IN about 4 feet, the people
standing could hang out BEHIND the tables, clearing the floor and
ACTUALLY MAKING MORE ROOM for the dancers.

(3) Lanes & Corners: One of the things I worked very intensely with
in my class was to get the leaders to navigate to the EDGE of the
dance floor, up against the tables. Also, I really had to push them
not to "cheat" at the corners. In other words, by moving the outer
lane really out, and increasing the lane by 10 feet at each corner,
we actually had 40 EXTRA linear feet to work with in each lane. There
was a second lane just inside the outer one. Only by the third lane
this did things break down...like I said it was full of people who
hadn't been in the classes, kind of milling about.

(4) Respecting Lanes: The single biggest source of collisions comes
from people who straddle the two outer lanes or zigzag from the
inside confusion out to the proper lanes. If you collide more than 2
times in the course of an evening, then you need to pay attention to
your navigational skills. Obviously a beginner or an intermediate is
still working on their craft, and deserves sympathy, not
condemnation, but I had a number of collisions with people who think
of themselves as advanced dancers...sometimes several collisions with
the same guy!

(5) Tempo of movement: When it is going just right, everyone moves
slowly along at about the same pace, neither crowding the one in
front, nor holding up traffic behind.

(6) Uniformity of the Crowd Rhythm: When we are all reacting with 1-2
step rhythmic movements, we start to build up a uniform "feel" to the
dance floor. Each leader is able to figure out just how much time he
has to avoid the people on all sides of him.

(7) Lunges, Rocks-Steps & Boleos: Any movement that puts your long
legs stretching away from you is very hazardous on the dance floor.
In these conditions, you have to shorten your footsteps, and keep
your legs down and under you. In Buenos Aires I have experienced it
so crowded, that I had to find the little spaces between the partners
around me in with to rock-step my partner's feet, or even use the
space under the nearby table! This is a little extreme.


Can you reach tango heaven when it is so crowded?

For me it is precisely this crowd energy that completes the tango
trance. It takes getting used to, but there is an amazing intuitive
aura that comes over me when I reach that stage. Steps happen to the
music by themselves, and I am become the watcher of the game....

Kind of zen-like.

--
Tom Stermitz
2612 Clermont St
Denver, CO 80207
home: 303-388-2560
cell: 303-725-5963