Five Benefits of MJ experience for AT dancing
Personally, I've found that most of the things I learnt from MJ were irrelevant or even harmful to Tango dancing - and much of that had to be painfully unlearned (that area will probably be explored in a (longer) article describing “problems of MJ experience for AT dancing”…)
However, there wera a few benefits from MJ-ing, which I found helped me along a little.
- Not being (too) worried by mistakes
An experienced MJ dancer (or any experienced dancer in most forms, come to that) should be used to rapidly-changing movements, to being able to improvise, and to recover from mistakes. If we go wrong, we don’t tend to panic too much, we know these things happen, and we’re used to being able to pick it up and start again. - Dancing to the music
MJ does allow a lot of musical interpretation, mainly simply because it’s quite loose and unstructured. Similarly for dancing to the beat; the varied nature of MJ music teaches you to be able to dance at different tempos, and to find the beat, so that helps a little with AT. - Close and Personal
The close hold in AT can be a scary thing to encounter – touching chest-to-chest? Shocking!
MJ can give you enough confidence to “invade” our partners “personal space”, so this closeness won’t come as so much of a shock as it may to others. - Dancing Nuevo-Tango style
Conversely, I’ve occasionally seen some very open Nuevo-tango dancers, doing the odd turn and return. The sense of freedom from MJ would probably help in dancing this style, although obviously the technique and framework would be different. - Confidence
Confidence is the biggest thing I've taken from MJ to AT - I'm confident that I can learn to dance so, even when AT has been frustrating and I've felt like a complete clod I've had the belief that I can and will get better.