Wheeee! (boleos)

You can lead high boleos all you like if we're at Portland Place at 9pm and there's nobody else in the room. Or just two couples on the other side.

When they go with the music, and they're well led, they're, Wheeeeee!!

I don't add any force of my own, at least not that I'm aware of, but my technique has improved dramatically just recently, so if you lead them successfully you can get quite big ones in most directions. It's actually quite difficult not to do them, ‘cause when the lead works they're not exactly a voluntary thing. It's nice to be able to relax and let them happen.

Anyway, I was thinking about this partly because of what people were saying about the painful and embarrassing consequences of un-led boleos and ganchos in comments to a previous post. And also because, while I was making an effort to improve my technique, I'd been worrying about whether I'd stiffened up and got scared to do boleos and consequently couldn't do them when it was safe. Anyway I checked with my teacher, and then I found on Sunday that I could adjust to the conditions and just let fly, so that was fine.

But, thinking about it, I do wonder if I can make a partial guess as to why people do un-led ones.

The fact is that boleos are rather difficult to lead well. That means that even if you go to a group intermediate class where they're taught, it's very unlikely that you will experience even one single example of a lead that would actually produce a high boleo on a follower with decent free leg technique. Especially if the teacher doesn't take care to lead it at least two or three times on every follower in the class (or he can't actually lead them well, either - perfectly plausible in some places and situations). And even if you do experience it, your body also has to be ready for it, and you have to have the free leg thing more or less sussed, to get a good result.

If you hadn't yet been to a class where they were taught, you might not even realise that they could be led at all. You might just see them and think they were put in by the follower independently, rather than being an organic part of the dance. Even more so if a lot of the ones you'd seen genuinely were un-led, because the people doing them, who you as a beginner naturally assumed to be good dancers, didn't actually know how to lead or follow them either.

(Remember I'm talking about London here, where there are lots and lots of people trying to learn tango, longing to learn tango, with absolutely no map and no access to any kind of thought-out overview of what it is. Just little bits and bobs of information, little dollops of technique and movement and disconnected partial explanations week by week.)

Either way I think you could be very fairly forgiven for concluding that although there may be some sort of weak indication from the leader, a boleo is mostly created by the follower, deliberately or habitually moving her leg in a learned way. It would be a conclusion very well supported by your personal experience. It would also be, in my view, Very Wrong and entirely at odds with any aesthetic or functional conception of Argentine tango that I could possibly see as coherent, and I think it would do a lot of damage to the technical possibilities of your dance; but it wouldn't be a stupid or unreasonable conclusion, and it wouldn't be contrary to the evidence available to you.

Now you may say that it flies in the face of common sense, because no-one has eyes in the back of her head. But common sense is a great betrayer; and it's mostly based on what you see coming from people you think should know better than you.

All of the above is even more true of ganchos. They're very hard to lead.