Dance: How long does it take to learn Tango? Reach dance studio Sunday social 3/13/22

 I went to a Latin social last Sunday at Reach dance studio in south OKC. They are newly testing out Sunday evening party. I go to dancing like going to gym (pre-covid time lifestyle), and such party can be a good fit for my lifestyle. There, I came across a friend and ended up teaching Tango for about 30 minutes.

The deal was, she had 25 years of experience in Ballet, Jazz and other dances in professional dance settings. One of those dancers who can do "just dance it, think about it later", a trait of naturals.

In the 30 minutes, many of Tango basics could be covered (axis, embellishment, walk, walk and pivot [back/front ocho], grapevine [molinete], Tango embrace, plus a few rules). 

These primers are meant to be like an additional line in geometry, to help seeing the basics in apparently super-complicated Argentine Tango dance. Once you get the concepts of the dance, you can use now-ubiquitous YouTube videos to see how they are used, find drills, and you can practice.

[That's back ocho and grapevine!]

I'd say if she does that (i.e., picking up Tango drills to use her ballet background, which has very good inherent affinity with the Tango dance, and getting ready to use them), she would be a quite decent Tango dancer in the area in no time.

Learning speeds differ among learners.

For most adult learners starting from scratch, Tango is said to take months only to walk properly. I am no mystics nor have conflict of interest of benefiting from keeping students for long. I want to call the "it takes long time" saying a bull. But for many, it indeed takes that long time.

On the other hand, we have seen on TV shows that aspiring young dancers with little or no Tango background can do fine performance on stage with just one week preparation time. That's what "real dancers" can do. The friend would be on this track.

The difference is from preparedness.

For Tango, people preach strongly about connection. Connection is a person-to-person level dance skill. It is actually an advanced-level skill, like techniques in sparring in boxing. 

For most adult learner-from-scratch-Tango dancers, the hurdle is before connection. 

In boxing analogy, you'd better learn a lot of things before even considering sparring; how to throw punches, how to predict and dodge opponent's punches, build basic physical strength to keep moving and to endure hits, and so on. They are all what you do by yourself.

These "throwing punches" equivalent would be knowing how to connect to your own body and move them beautifully and efficiently. And that is the major difference between "normal" beginners and "dancer" beginners.

If you think your connection and partnering are poor, the first thing is to check what you can do. What you think you are doing is very often different from what you are doing.

"Show me your back ocho. By yourself." And you lose your own balance? You may not be ready to talk about connection yet.

25 years plus 30 minutes can get her above many other Tango learners already. 

I hope she'd take interested in Tango and stick around. I'd love to have more decent Tango dancers around here.

Science/Life: Cancer Center annual symposium (3/4/22), coming back to "normal" at work

This past Friday (3/4/22), we had our cancer center's annual symposium.

Quote from the website: 

"Since 2011, SCC has hosted an Annual Cancer Research Symposium to provide a forum for cancer-focused researchers from a variety of disciplines to present and share their research.

The one-day conference covers three different program areas including cancer biology, cancer prevention and control, and cancer therapeutics, with a trainee poster presentation competition for each of the program areas preceding the conference start. The symposium hosts more than 250 participants annually. The target audience is faculty, staff, graduate students, postdoctoral trainees, and research members."

At the first session in the afternoon, I gave a 12+3 minutes talk, outlining my recent bioinformatics project on drug target identification.

This symposium is scheduled on March, which may not be the best time considering upcoming AACR (American Association for Cancer Research) annual meeting in April. The contents may be overlapping with the AACR meeting talk or a manuscript with the same contents being submitted to a journal and under consideration for publication.

The meeting was online. But this week they had lifted mask mandate from non-patients-facing areas (mask is encouraged, though) and in-person meeting will start this week.

It took exactly 2 years to come back here.

Covid was a major disruption for work. In fact, the bioinformatics project came into being because I was looking for a project that I could do with less lab work, more remote work, and in a small team. Data-mining fitted the bill.

Now, for covid, I am optimistic. In the two years, we got vaccine for severe disease prevention, anti-viral med and refined use of steroids for severe condition, and free at-home diagnosis kit for early detection. Also, we know who are unreliable source for medical information, don't we?

In the past two waves of delta (Aug-Sept) and omicron (Dec-Jan), most people filling up ER and ICU were vaccine laggards, or high risk individuals such as immune-compromised. 

Probably, I am not going to die of covid. I dodged it and I will be fine.

(...unless nasty lethal variants evolve. And in the case, I am not going to die alone. ...yikes)

On the Friday, I was ready to rewind. I went to a tango milonga (8-11pm) then to Salsa/latin social (11:30-2:30ish). Good dancers were coming back, and I got a few pretty good tandas and dances. Two back-to-back dance parties was also the first in this past two years.