Ways of Modelling Tango

  As the stream of videos is becoming overwhelming, a new orientation in the way of looking at visual information is inevitable:

  1. TangoClass - instructional vídeos - TangoLessons
  2. Milonga and Candombe dancing
  3. Tangovals clips - Tango waltzing - Valse - Tangowals
  4. TangodanceClips with Humor



Steve Andreas on Modelling with NLP :

A model has three levels:
1. Epistemology, a set of methods for discovering and testing understandings.
2. Methodology, a description of the understanding itself.
3. Technology, specific applications of the methodology to accomplish a particular outcome in a particular context.

  General/Specific
The more general a model is, the more it can be applied to a wide range of situations.  However, the more general it is, the less information it supplies about specific situations.  E=mc2 is understood to apply to the entire universe, but it doesn't tell you how to make a match or how to build a pump.  More limited and specific models can provide more detailed information.  One important element is to know the scope of the domain described by a model.  For example, NLP is a wonderful model, but it is not useful in designing an automobile engine.

  Creation/Application
A new model is created when one realm of experience (e.g. "particle") is used to describe another (e.g. electron) metaphorically, and then further developed through testing, descriptions of how to apply and refine this metaphor through mathematics, etc.  The initial creative leap is followed by a lot of work to develop the detailed descriptions.

A. How to Start

There isn't "a" way to model something.
A modelling process has been successful when you have a description that enables you to:
 1. Gain the skill, or transform the limitation modelled, and
 2. Teach someone else to gain the same benefits.
 An even better test of your modelling is when you can teach someone else your model and they can teach someone else to gain the same benefits. 
 When you can do this, you have succeeded, and how you get there is not important.

B. What to Model

 The first step is to define the skill, ability or limitation that you want to model, and the context in which it occurs.
 Chunking this down to a reasonable size is very important, particularly when you have limited time.  Even when you have more time it is usually much more useful to chunk down to components, model each one separately, and then integrate these components into a larger model.  One important distinction is between modelling a process that is mostly internal, such as shame or feeling bad about being criticized, in contrast to processes that are interactional, such as negotiation.  Negotiation is inherently more complex, because you have two individual worlds and their interaction to deal with.  It can be useful to chunk down to a particular kind of interaction, or even to one person's process/response to the particular interaction.  A precise model of a small process is generally much more useful than an imprecise model of a larger process -and you can build a precise model of a larger process by modelling small pieces of it and then integrating them.

 There are many possibilities for how to choose a starting point.
Following are a few of the possibilities that have been useful:

 1. Think of a particular difficulty and its resolution (for which there is not yet an NLP pattern).  Usually these will be nominalizations ("difficulty," "resolution"), and your modelling task will be to denominalize it into the processing that the person goes through.  If you model a nominalized experience, it will typically be at a sufficiently general level that your model will be applicable to a wider range of people than if you model a simpler and more specific skill.  However, as the level of generalization increases, so does the complexity of the process you will need to model.

  You can model the problem and its resolution separately -or alternately for contrast -and then model a process that will make the transition from one to the other (more on this later).  This is how Connirae and I modelled the Criticism, Grief, Guilt, Shame, and Forgiveness patterns.

  Remember that your model can only be as good as the experiences that you choose to model.  When modelling grief, for example, we passed over people who said (often with a sigh, and shallow breathing) that they now felt "OK" about the lost person.  Instead we chose people who felt (and behaved) joyously when thinking of the lost person.  If we had modelled the former, we would have modelled a less-than-optimum solution.  However, for practice in learning how to model, modelling a less-than-supreme example can be just as useful.

 2. Think of a particular skill that you, or your clients, want, or need.  Find a particularly good example of someone who has that skill behaviorally, and model what they do.
  In selecting a model, be cautious about people's self-reports.  For example, some people say they are good at motivating themselves because they are so aware of the half-hour process they use to get out of bed!  Others will say they are not good at motivating themselves because they can't continue to motivate themselves at the end of a highly-active 18-hour day!  Find someone who exhibits or can demonstrate to you the skill or quality that you want to model.  It may be difficult to find an exquisite model of a particular skill in the limited context of the Summer Residential.

 3. Explore the structure of anything.  This is how Connirae and I modelled how people represent time and values, and how I modelled the structure of self-concept.  This is potentially much more generative, but it may also be more complex, and the applications, uses and benefits are not usually clear in advance.  Think about problems or limitations for which there are no dependable NLP patterns.

 4. Look and listen around you for someone who is noticeably good at something or consistently exhibits a pleasant or useful attitude and model that.  This may be a particularly useful option at the Summer Residential.  Although consistent attitudes typically generalize widely, they can be fairly simple in structure/process.  There are plenty of attitudes the world could use more of (gratitude, appreciation, friendliness, tolerance, love, respect, connection, equality) and plenty of attitudes the world could use less of (scorn, hatred, meanness, superiority, inferiority, coercion/manipulation, imposition, distance, grouchiness, etc.).  You can think of people in your life whose attitude you particularly like or disliked, and model that.

 5. Notice the universal form to an individual solution:  When a client presents you with a difficulty and you find a solution process that works for them, chunk up to a more generalized form, and apply the solution to others.  This is how Connirae modelled a number of processes:  Self-healing, Core Transformation, Parental Timeline Reimprinting, Timeline Recoding Process, and Naturally Slender Eating.

 6. Model a change that someone made spontaneously.  Find out the characteristics of before and after, and how the transition was made.  I have rediscovered the Swish Pattern, Content Reframing and Change History a number of times doing this.  If nothing else, it's a wonderful way to gain experience and flex your modelling muscles.

 7. Model a skill of your own that other people have commented on, but you don't know clearly how you do.  Ask someone who doesn't have this skill, and wants it, to gather information about it as their project.  Since it is so natural to you there will be many aspects that will be totally unconscious and presupposed, and only someone else asking questions from a perspective of not being able to do it will tease them out and make them obvious.

C. How to Proceed

 1. Contrast

  Some kind of contrast will be extremely useful in helping you zero in on the crucial distinctions operating.  Whenever possible make everything the same except the presence or absence of what you are modelling.
  a. You can compare the "same" person before and after they made a change--whether spontaneous or deliberate.
  b. You can compare two recent experiences in the same person when they did or didn't have the skill or quality you are modelling.
  c. You can compare two people, one of whom has it and the other doesn't.

 2. Selecting a counterexample.

  If you are modelling a problem state, for example, you don't want to select any counterexample.  You need a counterexample that has all the features described for the problem state except that the person's response is useful and life-affirming.  This will be an immense help in disregarding all the elements in the two experiences that are the same, and irrelevant to success/failure.
  However, later you may need to go back and identify other supporting elements that are necessary but not sufficient, and since they were present in both experiences you disregarded them.

 3. Characterizing the Experience and its counterexample

  What are the essential features of the states you are modeling?  What overall strategy sequence does the person go through?  Then chunk down to the smaller steps, and characterize them using any and all NLP distinctions and methodologies you are familiar with.  As you go through the Residential you will be learning more distinctions and methodology to apply.  Among the ones that are usually useful are:

   Rep. Systems
   Strategies (sequence)
    T.O.T.E.  (Test, Operate, Test, Exit), or
    G.E.O.  (Goal, Evidence, Operation)
   Presuppositions/Beliefs
   Submodalities
   Meta-program Sorting
   State/Physiology/Anchoring
   "Parts"
   Perceptual Position
   Attentional Shifts:  Self/Other Content/Context
   Motivation
   Attitude
   Criteria

 4. Content:  Knowledge/Skills

  Most of the distinctions above are pure process differences and do not contain specific content.  However, most real-world skills require knowledge of content.  A geologist needs to know about rocks, chemistry, physics, etc., and a negotiator may need to know about corporate structure, contracts, interest rates, time to develop a product, etc.  These content-area skills are essential for the good judgement required in carrying out the process distinctions in your modelling.  These are easily overlooked in the focus on process, and need to be included as a part of your modelling.  For instance, an editor needs to know the letters of the alphabet, and how to read and speak the language involved.  Even if it seems obvious, include required content areas in your modelling description.

 5. Designing a Transition

  When you have characterized the differences between the problem state and the desired state, this will usually suggest how to get from the problem state to the desired state.  How can you design a sequence of changes to make the transition smooth, efficient, and effective?  A given set of changes may be very difficult when made in one sequence, and very easy when done in a different order.  If there are a number of shifts to be made, decide which will probably be easier or more comfortable to make first, and then experiment to find out the best sequence of these shifts.  (It can be very helpful to model someone who went through this transition successfully, and identify his/her sequence.)
  At this point you should have an outline of a model of how to achieve the desired outcome.  It is probably missing some distinctions and there will be certain contexts where it won't work, but it will work in at least some cases.

 6. Testing and Refining Your Model

  Some refining can be done conceptually, but trying out the model with yourself and others is the best way to learn how it can be improved.  By comparing additional examples with your model outline you can discover additional useful features.
  a. Congruency.  Try out your model with yourself.  What problems could occur?  How can you modify it so these problems are excluded?  Are all the positive functions of the problem state preserved?  For example, if someone feels comfortable while public speaking by negatively hallucinating the audience, this will interfere with a lively, connected presentation.  An alternative way of feeling comfortable will be more useful.  Are there any supporting elements or processes that you can add that would make this process even more positive and beneficial to the person?
  b. Streamlining.  The process you modeled from the counterexample or exceptional model may have steps or aspects that are redundant or superfluous.  Is there anything you can leave out, yet still get the desired results?  Perhaps someone repeats a question inside, and this only delays the response and is not necessary for understanding it.
  c. Amplifying.  How can you add to the process to make it more robust and enduring?  This is best discovered by noticing exactly where the process fails with specific clients, and what you have to add to make it work.  By building this into the process you can extend the range of successful applications.  For instance, the phobia cure will not work well with some people because of perceptual position misalignment.  Adding this in makes the phobia cure work successfully with a much wider range of people.  Sometimes the process can be amplified by changing the sequence, or by speeding up the sequence.

   At this point it can be extremely useful to compare your model of an exceptional skill with:

   1. Someone who is only moderately skilled, to gain more understanding of the relative contribution of individual components to the overall ability, and to highlight aspects that may not have been obvious in your previous comparison.
   2. Someone else who is also exceptionally skilled, to learn different ways to do a particular component of a process, and/or to learn additional supporting elements that your first model never learned -and that you can teach them to improve their performance even more.  (This potential improvement can be a useful incentive to offer a highly-skilled person to get them to participate in your modelling project.  Another incentive is that when you are successful, they will have an explicit model that they can teach to clients or associates, to their benefit.)

  d. Special cases.  Some clients will need more than a small adjustment to deal with objections, concerns, problems, or unique aspects.  Often you can simply add a "standard" step that checks for ecology or reframes common objections, so that the model can be successfully applied to a wider range of clients without further modification.
Source NLP Comprehensive.
See also links Intro-page Provocative Tango.

El Abrazo ...



  Concepts are derived from embodied experience. The close embrace or Apilado in tango is a musical embrace. The encounter in an abrazo is a living moment, less a rigid freeze posture. The close embrace has an open side, between the bodies is a significant angle. It is a diagonal position, a triangle. Inside that opening grows the dance dialogue, on the embodied space between the dancers. The dancers don't really melt together as in a slow, there is no "transcendence" between the contradictions. When the potential space is polluted, that is, dominated too strongly by one side, there is no creativity, no play, no space for experience. As a dancer makes a musical interpretation, the music can be too dominant, having to much overstatements. For this, the narrative line must carry the minimum, not the maximum is necessary for the effect. To get a personal touch, there must be an internal rather than external trigger for action. What does the music creates in me now? These inside feelings and emotions are more instantaneous than simultaneous, they are present or occurring at a specific instant, spontaneous self-generated through an internal impulse, something like being drawn into the music - which is not the same as movements intentionally matched in time.

  Musicality comes when you love the music and know it by heart. A pianist says: "There’s nothing quite like learning to play a piece of music to really get inside it. Once I’m inside it, once I’m feeling through the piece with my own hands and working through its many parts with the microscope of learning, once I really start to “get it” about the music … it’s just staggering."

  Playing piano is not the same as typing notes, an inner soul has to touch the fingers. Touching another person is a form of physical intimacy and plays an important role in dance. One can also be emotionally touched, such as by music. In this metaphorical sense it refers to some action or object that evokes a sad or joyful emotion. Hearing music is more than listening, it is touching all of the senses simultaneously. In singing, the body's pulsations are protruded on to a stream of breath, thus revealing the singers emotions and offering a target for affective identification for the listeners. Even when listening to sounds of musical instruments, a part of the listening experience is a notion of the bodily activities that produce the sounds. A player's sense of a musical style is primarily felt in contact with the instrument, and can not be acquired through discourse. The physical effort to create sound is already part of the music. The bandoneón, originally ment as a small church organ, needs the musician's whole body to express a boundary-transcending sound. A musician is expressing himself through his instrument and connecting awareness to the whole body. He is not unpacking a digital audio format. Dancing on life music feels much different from a mp3 audio file which encodes music into a technological form. We interact through all our senses, the sensing body in movement has much more layers than its visual image.

  Music and the dancers make a triangle. It is as if the music comes into the opening of the close embrace. The gestures arise naturally from the music and their soul. It is making itself up as it goes along, it is organic.   Carlos Gavito: "The secret of tango is in this moment of improvisation that happens between step and step. It is to make the impossible thing possible: to dance silence. This is essential to learn in tangodance, the real dance, that of the silence, of following the melody."

  Social dancing before 1900 involved mainly dances with prescribed, restrained steps. Western males appear to have been released from this straight-jacket to do creative social dance choreography by Vernon Castle in 1911.
Vernon Castle's method of dividing ballroom dances into "figures" may be viewed as the construction of a set of symbols. The mapping of these onto numerical digits is exemplified using figures from the Argentine Tango.
Castle's change from sequence dancing to ballroom dancing can then be viewed as a change from rational dancing (like rational numbers that have recurring groups) to irrational or creative dancing (like irrational numbers having sequences with no repetition). Creative dance also promotes personal explorations in the control of the body and its relationship to space and time and to other individuals. It gives a form of controlled non-verbal expression of emotion, a release of tension, and an opportunity to create (Farley, 1969, 88).
The milonga has been used as an example of Irrational Dancing. It is a very soft private dance, with visual emphasis on the leg movements. This character was changed dramatically in Paris in the 1930's, where the dance was combined with the proud torso of the other ballroom dances, and given a staccato action. This moved the visual emphasis to the torso and head.


Click for more videoclips

The standard ballroom dances have diverse origins. rhythms, tempos, and aesthetics, but have one thing in common: they are all danced by a couple (usually a man and a lady) in 'Closed Hold', in milonguero style changed into a close embrace, giving a wonderful connection with your partner and the music during an exclusive moment.
In this hold, the lady's upper arms are both held horizontal by a suitable placement of the man's arms and hands. This not only makes it comfortable for the lady to follow the man's lead, but also gives the couple a deportment of regal appearance. This deportment is a characteristic of dances coming from Western Europe, and is a heritage of the origin of ballroom dancing in the royal courts of Europe. The erect and fixed torso is even more evident in Classical Ballet, which had the same origins.

Selection of great tangoclips

FLV - Online Flash Video

The peculiar ballroom dancing "Closed Hold" possibly had its origins in the time when men wore swords while dancing. As most men are right handed, it was conventional to wear the sword and scabbard on the left-hand side of the belt, so as to facilitate the drawing of the sword with the right hand. Thus if a man was to put his arm around a lady's back, she would have to be on his right, or she would keep tripping over the sword. Thus he could only put his right arm around her; and if she was receptive to this advance, she would place her left arm over the man's right. From here it is a simple matter for the man to offer his left hand for the lady to hold for additional balance while dancing.
The word 'ballroom' denotes a room where balls may be held: that is: formal social dances. Balls were important social events in the days before radio and television (as in 'having a ball'). The word 'ball' derives from the Latin 'balare' meaning 'to dance'. This is also the origin of the related words : ballet, ballerina, ballad. Ballroom dance is a style of partner dance which originated in the western world. Its performance and entertainment aspects are also widely enjoyed on stage, in film and on television. Choreography or dance composition, is the art of making structures in which movement occurs.


Click for more on tango rhythm

Ballroom dancers will tend to put appearance above connection, while club dancers will tend to focus primarily on their partners. Nightclub and street dances tend to focus on connection between partners and musicality, ballroom dances tend to focus more on performing to an audience. Of course, ballroom dancers do learn about connection and musicality, and club dancers are often excellent performers.
Competetive ballroom dance consists of some number of couples each performing for the audience's attention, and as most of the audience are themselves dancers, everyone gets a chance to try to outperform their peers.
There is also a growing interest in formation dance, which is also performance-oriented. Formation ballroom dance involves anywhere from two to dozens of couples performing a choreographed ballroom dance routine.

more: IRRATIONAL TANGO


PSYCHOCORPORELLE,
dialogue corporel et les contenus intérieurs :

La danse moderne et la musique sont des exemples par excellence de l'expressivité des affects de vitalité, et des actions peuvent éveiller des qualités perdues.
Dans la danse on travaille sur les qualités du geste, ce que LABAN a appelé "valeurs expressives du mouvement". Ce qui est remarquable, c'est que la matière même du geste est ce qui nous informe au départ de notre vie.
Avec un travail des qualités du geste, nous sommes donc au niveau même du matériau des manifestations émotionnelles. On ne leur fait pas jouer ou représenter un personnage, mais explorer une façon d'être différente, un soi qui est soi-même tout en étant ouvert à autre chose.
L'espace-temps de la danse est aussi un moment social. Les outils premiers de la communication sont en effet mobilisés: sensorialité, flux toniques et posturaux. Chaque situation renvoie à des types de relation bien spécifique, qui sont au demeurant lisibles dans les danse traditionnelles.
La relation singulière, entre deux personnes notamment est également lieu d'exploration. Elle s'investit sur divers modes : dans un travail de proximité comme c'est le cas dans les propositions issues de la danse-contact, ou dans une mise à distance comme dans de nombreuses improvisations.
Dans le corps-à-corps de la danse-contact, chacun est tour à tour porté, support, et le centre de gravité du groupe dansant est en dehors du sujet, "entre deux". Nous y voyons surgir de véritables matrices relationnelles qui renvoient à une relation affective : envelopper puis repousser par exemple.
Les improvisations où intervient l'écoute permettent d'intégrer l'autre dans un fonctionnement, de trouver un accord et de construire une relation à partir d'un système non-verbal. Il ne s'agit pas de signaux à émettre ou à capter, mais d'une empathie à développer.
Il existe d'autres approches. Certaines sont le fait d'individus éclairés qui nomment leur synthèse personnelle, d'autres sont de véritables mouvements institués.
Le Body Mind Centering créé par Bonnie Bainbridge Cohen en est un exemple très intéressant, qui se centre sur une approche sensorielle intégrée par le mouvement, et dans lequel la danse-contact joue un rôle très important.
On pourrait également citer la biodanse et bien d'autres qui surgissent régulièrement et dont il est parfois difficile de préciser les ancrages et les pratiques spécifiques . Les approches orientales sont souvent mentionnées avec des raccourcis parfois surprenants. Il faut mentionner l'eurythmie, qui s'inscrit dans l'approche anthroposophique créée par Rudolf Steiner au début du siècle.
Dans une série de conférences celui-ci en expose les fondements : A partir de la vision goethéenne de l'art comme dévoilement des lois naturelles, il s'agit de mettre les participants en communication avec leur nature propre, en communion avec la nature cosmique. L'eurythmie comprend entre autres un système de gestes articulés au langage. La rime, le rythme, tout ce qui élève la parole au rang plus noble de poésie, sont traduits ici par des mouvements d'ensemble . L'eurythmie curative est intégrée au programme de nombreuses institutions en Allemagne et en Suisse.
Click for more: PSYCHOCORPORELLE et DANSE-THÉRAPIE