At our recent Privates Retreat, we did yoga on the terrace every morning. Throughout the week I discovered several useful new relationships between yoga and tango. I’ll start with the relation that I already knew about.
WARRIOR 2
When we dance, we want to activate (contract) stabilizing muscles across the body. When we stabilize our joints, we create a sensation of stretching and length through the spine and limbs. This stretching sensation helps us to keep the arch of connection and the embrace taught, and our leg muscles ready for controlled action.
The stabilization chain muscles are: peroneals, quadriceps, piriformis, transverse abdominals, shoulder rotators, and triceps.
You can get them all going by doing the yoga asana (pose) known as WARRIOR 2.
TREE
Many dancers have a hard time stabilizing their hip joint. When they put their weight there, they may tend to fall backward or be heavy.
We realized that all of our yogis could do the TREE pose beautifully, so we started reminding them to tree while dancing – especially after back steps and pivots. Everyone could do this, and it made them stronger, lighter, and smoother.
TWIST
For both roles, giros and ochos involve lateral movements, and often pivots.
We see that too many dancers have been taught to pivot in ways that destabilize them, we teach dancers to initiate all lateral movements, including pivots, from the oblique muscles.
We discovered that our yogis could do this perfectly if they told themelves to TWIST. Yoga twists involve lengthening the spine before beginning any rotation. Rotation also starts at the center of the body rather than at the extremities. These yoga instructions are another way to be sure we’re using our obliques.
HEART-OPENER
One of the biggest struggles of every tango teacher seems to be getting their students to “relax their shoulders”. We already learned this instruction is useless, because the moment you start concentrating again, the shoulders jump into action. So we replaced with an action that the shoulders can do all the time, external rotation.
In close embrace, Marks with big pectorals don’t need to do anything else. But if you don’t happen to have big pectorals, you need to give them a lift, up and forward, in front of the armpit.
This action turns out to be the same as what yogis call a “heart opener”. There are lots of yoga poses that do this, but generally they involve some kind of leverage, with the floor. But anyone familiar with this action can also do it in the embrace.
Images from yogapedia.
