If you missed Janet Lott‘s great workshop for tango dancers, Dancing with Gravity, here is an overview that might be helpful. You can take her next workshop coming up, April 28, 2012.
Janet has an MFA from the California Institute of Art, has directed her own dance troupe, and is a skilled practitioner of Alexander Technique. Janet focused on issues of balance and avoiding injury by 
understanding what she calls “tensegrity” of the body.
To help us understand tensegrity and the body we inhabit (one hopes), Janet held up a small model that resembled Buckminster Fuller’s geodesic dome. It was a simple, symbolic model of the body’s muscle anatomy. The bones (pencil-sized wooden sticks) and muscles (elastic bands), surrounded by air, touched only where they inserted, at joints, but never lay on top of each other. They rested, suspended on their own ability or tensegrity.
Janet explained that we have red and white muscles. Athletes who train know these as “slow-twitch” (white) and “fast-twitch” (white) muscles. White muscle is what endurance athletes—marathoners, say—use. Red muscle, which fatigues faster than the white, is what short-distance runners, who quickly become anaerobic (exhaust their air) use.
IMPORTANT! READ MORE ON JANET’S DISTINCTION BETWEEN READ & WHITE MUSCLE HERE.
For the most part in tango, we use white muscle. Although, it does look like some of those fancy stage tango moves require fast-twitch muscle—that’s a discussion for another time.
Janet had us lie on the floor and do almost nothing but lie there with our knees bent. We were letting gravity do the work. I had just read that this position is great for that much-touted muscle called the psoas, which connects our spines to our femurs. It’s big, it’s deep inside of us. Lying down on our backs, we give the psoas a chance to rest and recharge.
Next we played with our range of motion. We broke into partners, one person lying still (corpse-pose-like). The other person started at the “dead” person’s head, gently rolling that bowling ball “limb” on its neck stem/joint with no help from the head’s owner. She then moved to the arms and legs, doing the same rotation of joints. My partner had a hard time letting go and letting me do the work. For me, this exercise in surrender was very relaxing although my partner never even approached my range-of-motion limit. In tango, we don’t need a wide range of motion for most limbs/joints. The exception is the “spinal twist” as we call it in yoga. Spinal twist is what you do when you allow your upper body to rotate in opposition to your lower body, as we do in ochos, forward and back. It is a good idea to get agile and smooth at this motion. You will use it numerous times. Imagine that your spine is the axis we allude to. C’mon, let’s twist again. Like we did last summer . . .
Janet quizzed us on where we think the skull connects to our bodies. We all failed. I’ll let Janet tell you where those important coordinates are—in her next workshop. She asked us to touch where our hips (that ball and socket of a joint) originate. Some got it wrong, but I know my hips well from years of yoga hip openers. In tango, we say we move from the hips, although you will repeatedly hear that you shouldn’t sway your hips, as in salsa or other Latin dances, say. This is true, but—and you can check with Janet on this—I would add that the whole body is engaged in tango walking. I fall back on my panther example: That feline may move just a paw or talon at a time, but watch the way her muscles ripple and support that one tiny move even. Total engagement—whether it’s white or red muscle, fast or slow-twitch, from the breath to the toes to the crown of your head, all is alive.
Once we knew where our heads connected to our bodies and our hips originated, Janet had us do a lot dancing to music, some of it alone, some in partners. She studied the way we moved and came around helping us to optimize our dance. People in the class who announced that they had balance concerns were quite pleased by the end of the class.
I highly recommend Janet’s workshop, especially for beginning tango dancers. She has one coming up, Saturday, April 28, 3–5 pm. Contact Janet for more info or to reserve 415.272.4811 janet@janetlott.com.
What Felipe Martinez, one of the Bay Area’s most respected tango teachers, says of Janet Lott: “In my experience, the Alexander Technique is very effective for cultivating body/self awareness and release of tension, both essential for tango. Janet Lott knows what she is doing.”