Monday 29 March 2010

Ghost Guide version 2.0

Ghost, who I practice with from time to time and some of you know as a regular in the comments, has just rewritten his "Ghost Guide to Tango", his thoughts for himself and fellow students. The old version is still there as well so you can see where he's moved on.

Version 1 discussed his discoveries of can be done. Version 2.0 is about what a reasonable leader of moderate skill can actually expect to work, most of the time, with a follower of the skill level he will normally find himself dancing with. And conversely, which of the things that get taught all the time in classes may or may not be useful as practice tools but turn out to be rubbish at a non-professional level, confusing to learn, or just awe-inspiringly useless for social dancing.

I also think that people need to hear this, so I agreed to provide some comments from the follower's point of view. My comments are written in a different colour, and they're just the sort of thing I'd pipe up with if I were standing there when he said whatever he's saying.

Ghost also has a theory that professional demonstrations are difficult to interpret and often not that helpful to the learner, compared to watching your peers. So to make it all a bit more concise and clearer, he decided to add videos showing two normal-level social dancers, Ms. Pink and Mr. Bond, from the chest down, doing some of the movements that he is talking about. So the reader can see what he's on about (helpful if names in Spanish are meaningless to you - I've met so many people who thought 'boleo' and 'bolero' were the same word) and also what it looks like in real life.

I thought this too was a really nice idea, and I provided some video equipment and did all the video editing. That was fun and I learned a lot. I hope you enjoy the results.

I made a little kung-fu-comedy credits one at the end so it doesn't take itself too seriously. It might not be up on the site yet, but you can check back next week.

The whole thing lives on DB's site, here. (There's a lot on that site by many different authors, obviously not all of which I agree with. But you don't need telling).