Don't forget to take time to relax

Sharing some advice from Terpsichoral Tangoaddict...

'For me, it's the most difficult thing of all: combining a deep sensitivity to the music with precise technique. Improving your dance requires cleaning up your act -- but not cleaning it so thoroughly that your tango becomes cold and sterile. And that's why it's vital to go to the milonga, drink your glass of wine, relax your

vigilance, forget about the precision of your footwork and the elegance of your posture, just throw your arm around the man's back, snuggle into him, immerse yourself in the music and *dance*. Not 

practise -- DANCE! With joyful abandon. It's especially crucial when you have been practising a lot, when you've been cultivating careful self-awareness and the necessary fernicketyness about technique, when you've been focusing on the quality of your movement, the demands of mutual geometry, the

chess-like strategies of figures. When you've been spending time on that, my friends, that's when you most need to forget it at night and go to the milonga. Muscles grow stronger when you go to the gym regularly -- but they do so in the rest periods, when you aren't working out. And your dance will develop, slowly but surely, in the lovely oblivion of the milonga, after practice, when all thoughts of technical care are driven out of your head by the music's powerful spell, when Prospero burns his books and Caliban is free to roam at last.'