There is a lot of bad posture on YouTube video, especially the "sway-back" look amongst young women, held up as "expert" dancers and teachers. Dancers around the world then try to emulate this look, only to finish with painful backs, legs and feet.
My Facebook Amigo, Raul Bravo, wrote this excellent post on dance posture. We agree with his comments. We have been teaching and promoting good, natural dance posture for many years.
I remember that my mother, when I was a teenager, advised me to walk standing straight, to spruce up my chest, so I wouldn't be twisted in the typical natural posture of those years.
Even when I watched my father, a weekend millionaire, a specialised worker, one of the immigrants from the country who helped build the national industry, a worker. He walked upright, he and my mother set him as an example for me. I still have the memory of her posture that she kept until the end of her life.
Now, I invite you to observe - in the milonga - very old dancers, I would say timelessly, how
their positions are and, if you can, compare them with those of other people in everyday life.
You will then realise that dancers look different.
In other words, tango helped them find and maintain an upright posture, and none of them ever attended a dance school to receive posture lessons.
Today, on the other hand, we find the most extreme demonstration of postural techniques - which perhaps most forget in time, without having to accept them - as an indispensable condition to dance well.
It would be convenient for us, as teachers, to minimize this information, using technique as a means and never as a objective. Sure, with a specific and precise postural correction, I repeat it as much as possible, only to those who actually need it and not to everyone in general.
Trying to clone dancers is not right, while trying to create dancers with individual personalities is right.
The practice of tango is what, ultimately, helps build a body (a huge number of medical studies, of different specialties, talk about the benefits of tango).
So, "Yes" to Tango to improve many conditions of one's life and "No" to postural techniques to improve one's tango ? Here is one of the questions that constitute the counterculture of tango.
The tango of the milonga has nothing to do with the other "tangis", let alone those "tangis" expressed in exhibitions, by professional dancers.
Milonga's dancers have to "try" to assume the right poses, knowing that they have a limit, which is to lose their naturalness and switch to stereotypes, forced; that is when they risk passing on to their partner something horrible feeling of stiffness, which can't be corrected easily relaxing.
Bodies and postures must instead assume a "present" posture, but soft/flexible, like when bodies are naturally perceived.
So yes, your embrace and dance will enter your partners memory, and they will - following "that" band - surely be remembered.
Finally, both for beginners and those who have advanced in a few years of dance: my greatest wish is that they discover their tango sooner rather than later, so that it allows them to express themselves in their own body with their own language, if more in a personal way and never generalized. , whatever it is, but with its own identity.