April saw the return of Emma from her Great Indian Adventure, and with excellent timing too, as it also gave her the opportunity to see her framed drawing, which I’d picked up just a few days earlier (below).

While Emma is gentler than Filippo when it comes to feedback, she wasn’t taking any prisoners in the warm-up dance we did! She was straight into mixing in interrupted steps and changes of speed …

I’ve always been in awe of following as a skill, but never more so than after my last couple of privates. If I combine the technique input from Mabel and Filippo, I now have 11 bullet points on which to focus!

This is problematic given that my tango brain struggles to cope with three things at a time, but there are four pieces of good news – including what both Filippo and I felt was a night-and-day difference in the sensitivity of my following …

My following adventure had some rather large gaps, caused by a mix of general life stuff, and two of my teachers fleeing the country. But a third one hadn’t yet reached that level of despair, so the fun had recommenced.

In my last lesson with Filippo, I’d managed to follow him surprisingly well when he stuck to steps and rebounds and upped the speed, and Irina subsequently led me in a milonga song at Tango Secrets, also with remarkable success (all in relative terms, you understand!). It was now time to see what magic Mabel could muster …

I did religiously do my solo practice work on the technique bullets I listed last time, but my progress had been at worst undetectable, and at best slow. That saw us start by working on the same things as last time: a posture check to start, another halfway through a step, another at the end of it.

It was still more common for me to correct my posture after losing it than it was for me to maintain it throughout, and I was still struggling with pivots. I asked Filippo if he could slow these right down, taking four beats to lead a 90-degree pivot, so that I had time to be clear on the direction and degree of pivot, and could then actively focus on my posture throughout …

Learning to follow still feels to me like an absurdly ambitious goal, but even at this early and utterly incompetent stage, I’ve started to see some signs of progress.

One of these is finding that an approach which was wrong for me when I first started this adventure is now exactly what I need …

It’s been a long wait to resume my following lessons! Diego is in Edinburgh, and Emma has been in BsAs, and I only managed this one before dashing off to Heathrow for a brief trip of my own.

The wait was worth it, though. Not just for the lesson, but also because I finally got my hands on the sketch I’d fallen in love with when Emma posted it on Facebook! I will frame it, but it works pretty well on the temporary stand I’m using, and goes well with my BsAs print …

My latest following lesson was with Diego. He normally comes to my apartment, but as he had wall-to-wall bookings, I had to cycle to his studio in deepest south London, fending off dragons, rogues and vagabonds as I went. It was worth it.

We danced a song, and I entirely failed to follow a cross. Twice. Or maybe more, who knows. He did, however, have good news for me …

One of the resident teachers at the summer Feast was Mabel Rivero. I’d caught a glimpse of a private she was giving at Tango by the Sea late last year, coincidentally to another man learning to follow, and it looked amazing! So as soon as I saw she was teaching here too, I signed up for a private on the Sunday afternoon.

Fernando does have a photo from my lesson, which I’ll substitute when the poor man has a chance to catch up with messages, but for now Mabel is the super-smiley one in the centre as we waited for the train home …

Tango has an astonishing ability to energise. I’d been woken at 4am by a certain chocolate-coloured feline who decided to make a heroically unsuccessful attempt to jump onto the living room window-sill. I was alerted to this fact by the sound of two cacti pots crashing to the floor. (Orange Boy had a solid alibi as he was asleep on my pillow at the time.)

I didn’t get back to sleep, and when Emma arrived for my private some 14 hours later, I was feeling not dissimilar to the cacti. But as soon as we danced the first song, I found myself feeling as lively as a 4am cat …

A busy work trip to Vegas followed by a bout of COVID brought home as a souvenir meant that I hadn’t done as much solo practice as I’d hoped – and it showed! Though Emma seemed more impressed by my following than I was, with rather more ‘Esa!’s than I felt were merited.

But despite me still feeling I was 70% clumsiness to 30% flow, Señor Pugliese joined Emma as co-teacher to deliver one hugely important lesson …

We all know tango is never a straight line. Some days, you feel like Gavito, other days like a baby elephant taking its first steps. Tonight was one of the latter days.

But despite the fact that I felt I wasn’t remotely on form, Emma still delivered another ocho revelation …

This evening was my first following lesson with Emma, and it was an amazing one!

So far, I’ve felt that the act of following itself is really starting to fall into place, but that I had a zillion technique issues to address with my pivots. That’s absolutely still the case, of course, but I felt like in the course of a single lesson my forward pivots went from 20% to 60% (where my current standard for 100% is “could pass for a halfway-competent beginner follower, given a sufficiently dark room”) …

I’m really amazed at how well following is really starting to click now! And it’s all down to an approach I learned in my pre-tango obsession: motorsports.

The biggest problem I had when I started this latest tango adventure was anticipating the lead. I was listening to the music and knew how I would interpret it. At best, I would be expecting to move in one way and then have to quickly switch gears in my head to follow what was actually led; at worst, I was doing completely unled movements …

Perhaps it’s an odd way to express it, but after three more privates, I now feel like I’ve reached the stage of being a beginner follower.

What I mean by that is that, previously, I very much felt like a leader trying to make the very difficult transition to following. Some tango concepts learned as a leader were helpful, of course, but in other ways my experience as a leader was actually hindering my attempts to follow. Now, though, I feel like I’ve (mostly!) succeeded in letting go of the internal struggle between the two, and can actually fully focus on the follower role …

Six weeks ago, I said I was pausing my privates while I figured out my next step. A few days after that, I mulled over the possibility of learning to follow – at least, to some degree.

Sure, I’ve taken a few lessons as a follower, but those have always been geared to helping my lead, rather than actually focusing on following. But I’ve decided it’s now time to have a real go at the opposite (and, I suspect, more challenging) role …