Why not support your training with mental actions on the sofa!

Many artists, sportspersons mix their physical training with mental activities - so WHY NOT in tango? To systematically and regularly review the class summaries and repeat, rehearse the movements in your mind will support your development! I describe below how I do today and you can pick what you think could develop your dance.

All stuff at one place keeps me organized

As I mentioned earlier I am in the process of collecting all my workshop content and youtube favorites to a google sheet that I call for Figure Library. I am halfway now with a few hundred entries. Having all this stuff in one place gives me better control on my coming learning. In the Library I have given every figure a name or a short description that identifies it. We are used to it - we started with ochos and americanas, didn't we! For me just reading the list of the figures activates the memory and reveals parts I have forgotten but it's easy to click the url and see the video again. When the library got larger it has been easier to use google mail to organize the review process!

Fast rehearsing with Gmail!

I choose the entries I want to work with and copy the two Library columns - figure name and url - and paste it to a gmail and send it to myself. When I open the mail I can read the names and recall the sequences. There are also corresponding video thumpnails at the bottom of the mail and this offers the fastest way to run a video review. You click the first one, it opens and starts to play at the timestamp by a click on the space bar. After one or two seconds I move to the next video by clicking on the arrow at the right side. 

If you want to repeat click the letter J which takes you a few seconds backward. You can also check possibilities with  H L > < for easier navigation. Sorry to say but sometimes they don't respond - I don't know why - but a click on the video seems to activate the controls again.

This works really well for videos when you have only one figure on it. Sometimes I have several, but gmail offers just the first one on the list. On my lucky day I saved the earliest occurrence first and then I could continue to watch until the last timestamp was shown.

If you want to maintain 100 figures, maybe your content for one year,  you create just four emails for rehearsing. These emails have an individual URL address that you can paste in your calendar or you can save them in a folder at the Bookmarks bar. Just choose the day when you want to work on them! . . . . and this is scalable! In four years you have maybe 400 interesting figures to keep alive for the practica. What do you think?

All above is for youtube videos but I have saved facebook videos as well. However for them I don't have the time stamp function. I have read somewhere that this option exists but I have not managed to activate it. So today I save the figure with information about the moment it starts. Primitive but keeps me going!

Tango gym or repertoire training?

This training of figures is not for bringing all these patterns to a pista. It is based on a different way of thinking. It has lot of similarities with the gym or pilates workouts where I build my muscles and keep my flexibility by repeating a variety of movements. During those workouts I can do moves which I never use in my everyday life but the time I spend on mats and machines has had a positive general impact on my life. In the same way figure training has had a positive impact on my dance, increased the variety of different movements, mobility as well as my readiness for some new combinations in my dance.

My goal

When I start to work on a group of figures I have given them a starting skill value 0. To complete this level I have to know and be able to take the leader steps AND in my mind match them to the followers corresponding movements. This is the only limit I have clear now so the following levels will be defined later. There will be training to fix the figure to different music and to be able to keep the figure going on with distraction. After that I think I am ready to introduce them to a follower at a practica. This is the goal and I don't force these figures to turn up on a milonga flor. My experience so far is that they sometimes show up as fragments on a milonga and some easy ones can turn up as they are during a tanda.

My Solo training heading to the PRACTICA

After said that my practice is build up like this! I update weekly the material I want to review and train. There are technique videos, music training, groups of old figures and sometimes totally new figure groups. I also decide how much time I have for this training.

During the week I watch the videos once a day and review the figures in my mind. Even this means 10 repetitions a week. There are a few fundamental movements I physically do every morning and I keep them going for weeks before a change. A figure group which I know well can be run once or twice a week solo at home. With other words there are a lot of visual and mental activities on the sofa and some footwork on the floor!

My Figures library & Co

I wrote earlier about my collection of figures to show you how I save and easily find back to my favorite figures. But still, these figures are not the chosen ones! That collection is a kind of waiting room for nice moves. I collect and maintain these rows for the day I want to have some new movements or variation on the old giros in my daily dance. Some of these suggestions will never advance to the spreadsheet I call for FIG library. On this spreadsheet I keep the figures I have seriously worked on! Most of the videos show moves from my workshops but my favorites from youtube channels are also included.

FIG library

For these videos I like to have some more information. Sometimes it has been interesting to check the year and month when the steps were initiated to my dance or when I  was working on them for the first time. It has been fun to check what was going on in 2009? What teachers I had then? Just use the filter for that column and you have the information. There is also a column to group the figures, usually about 20-30 rows/items to go together, based on the teacher but sometimes on a theme as canyengue or something. These groups I can easily dance through during a tanda on a practica. At the beginning I made an MP3 file telling me every 20s a new move and for a tango tanda 26 was a good number. Today I try to memorize the lists instead.

The column NUMBER is useful when I have filtered a selection and need to know how many items fit the criteria. No counting of rows but I just place the cursor on the column top letter and in a click I can read the result in the right down corner. Easy and fast!

When I decide to work on a figure in the Collection I cut-copy it and paste it to the Fig library. With other words I add it to the Library and remove it from the Collection.

You maybe want to have all your stuff on one sheet and it is totally up to you. If you change your mind later you can separate them into two sheets. You can still keep them together in the same workbook. There is a tab for each of them as you see at the bottom of the picture.

If you click the picture above it opens up in a new window and you see it clearly!

 

Teacher Notes and other observations

It was too easy to forget what the teacher has told me during a private lesson or on a workshop. I maybe had the correction in mind for some time but afterward I just continue in the old way. Now I write a line for everything I hear from her or him and I read these notes regularly to remind me of the changes needed.

There are labels like body lead attitude abrazo . . . . .
The second level labels are Hand arm foot leg hip timing . . . .

When I read these notes I remember vividly what it was about and hopefully it will develop and come to daylight on some milonga in the future!


Today I am also experimenting with a new sheet for repetitions of the groups in the FIG Library. It is annoying to participate, pay the fee, traveling and stay but forget the most of the content later on. This sheet is for my solo training and it will carry information about my activities so I know what content I have repeated on a specific week. I can easily check if something needs to be repeated again and in this way I don't forget a group of favorites! Coming back about this when I feel that it is working ok!

I use here also the freezed headings and filtering functions. This video shows shortly how!

To keep in touch with your tango steps!

It was a frustrating experience when I couldn't find back to a loved youtube figure I had seen a month or a year earlier. The solution below has been running for three years now and it has helped me many times so far! Some periods I don't use it at all and then suddenldly it is updated with several new lines per night.  It is allways visible and easy to access! I hope it will save time for you too!

I am a PC user and the collection is created on a google spreadsheet. On the screenprint below you find the headings and labels which have helped me to identify a video clip again. Most of my links are from youtube but facebook items and other internet addresses can be saved also.

This spreadsheet is for instant records, to save the moves I like when surfing around. I have created separate sheets for the figures from workshops and one for my teachers observations and advices. I have this split because the number of entries is growing surpricingly fast on each of these sections!

This is the version I use  for the collection! The column headings and labels you find here have served me well during the years.

To manage this collection of links I use some basic functions you find below but the most important of them is to create a backup every now and then!

Watch the video or read the text!

Your choice!  :)

EASY ACCESS and FILTERS

To have easy access I have placed an icon on the bookmarks bar - when the site is open you just drag the icon to the bar as shown on the picture. Ater that you will easily find the site and save your new steps. When my collection had grown to contain several hundreds of rows the filtering function has helped me out! I use the most simple version of it and it is very intuitive at that level.You create a filter by placing the cursor on the row for column titles and via DATA menue you find the option! At the same place you can get rid of it and reactivate it again later.

FREEZE the HEADINGS

Frozen headings have also been easy to apply. It keeps the column heads as well as the lable suggestions visible when the collection grows!

Put the cursor on the row number you want to keep visible and make the rest in VIEW menue

TIMESTAMPS

When you save a youtube address with timestamp you will land on the figure right away.
Facebook offers the same; addresses with timestamp!

Right click the video window and choose the time option!

BACKUP ! ! !

One terribly day in the future a backup can be useful to have and it is easy to fix today! I just send my figure collection, library and teacher notes to another email address. All in one mail as an EXCEL file.  That's all!