The Tango Walk

27 Sep 2024 - by Graham (from Newsletter)

The tango walk is a notoriously difficult thing to get right and there are stories of tango masters not letting their students progress for years until they have perfected it. But what is so difficult about “the walk”? Don’t we walk everywhere all the time?

In normal everyday walking our natural action is to sway gently in the direction we want to go, then as gravity starts to get involved our free leg moves roughly to where we want to end up. We don’t think about it of course as it is all instinctive, but normal walking is a largely passive activity.

Tango walking however is far more active. Whether you are a leader or a follower your walk does not just have to move you from A to B but it also has to impart some energy to your partner. You are moving two people with every step so that extra energy has to come from somewhere. And the “somewhere” is your standing leg.

A step starts the same way as normal walking, with a slight shift of weight in the direction you are heading (this is the famous ‘intention’ that I will talk about in another article), then the muscles in the leg and foot get involved and you use them to actively push you to your destination. But – and this is the tricky bit – you need to do that without changing height, jumping, or over-reaching your step or your walk becomes ‘bouncy’! So no knee bends and no collapsing your core. The active push must come from the lower leg, the ankle, and the foot itself, so think about pointing your toe and using that action to generate the push.

Get the walk right and your tango will be transformed!