Live the healthy happy life you deserve
PERSONAL HEALTH & WELLBEING
PERSONAL
Tango classes can assist with:
Stress, Anxiety, Depression, Insomnia
Tango dance has been shown to produce a broader range of clinically significant improvements in psychological function and sleep disturbance than meditation or exercise. Specifically, tango induced clinically relevant decreases in stress, anxiety, depression, and insomnia, and increases in mindfulness, which were maintained over time.
Tango not only raises mood, but also has a demonstrable impact on the distribution of stress and sex hormones. The stress hormone cortisol decreases while dancing, whilst both partners experience elevated levels of testosterone and dopamine.
Mourning, loss and loneliness.
“Touch is truly fundamental to human communication, bonding, and health. It is our primary language of compassion, and a primary means for spreading compassion”. Dacher Keltner PhD UC, Berkley.
Connection with other people, both physical and social is beneficial for physical, emotional and mental health. Tango offers very close non-threatening physical connection during the dance. Tango dancers quickly adopt the Argentine (and Latin) habit of embracing when they meet. Tango also provides a safe, healthy, non threatening social atmosphere for people to gather and socialise in a non-work, low-stress environment.
In our experience the gentle touch of Tango and social interaction helps people to emerge from mourning, loss and loneliness.
Personal relationships
Tango can help heal strained relationships and maintain loving relationships.
The embrace is central to the dance of Tango. “We embrace, connecting our bodies, closing our eyes, mixing our breath, walking every musical note”. “Tango is a 3 minute romance”. The tango embrace will emphasise the felt sensations of the embrace, rather than what it looks like for a detached observer, thus underscoring the importance of experiencing the dance for fully comprehending it.
Tango simultaneously, intensely engages the senses of sight, hearing, touch and smell. It requires a high level of concentration to listen to and interpret music and to instantly convert the interpretation into action, via only sensing movements in the dance partner’s body.
Tango combines yin and yang energies from both partners in a constantly changing physical interaction, a conversation without words, bound in a mix of music, social interaction and ambience / mood. Tango is often described as “one body, four legs”.
Education & Social Cohesion
More than 400 studies related to interdisciplinary neuroscience reveal the hidden value of dance. For instance, we acquire knowledge and develop cognitively because dance bulks up the brain. Consequently, the brain that “dances” is changed by it. As neuroscientist Antonio Damasio points out, “Learning and creating memory are simply the process of chiseling, modelling, shaping, doing, and redoing our individual brain wiring diagrams.”
Dance is a language of physical exercise that sparks new brain cells (neurogenesis) and their connections. These connections are responsible for acquiring knowledge and thinking. Dancing stimulates the release of the brain-derived protein neurotropic factor that promotes the growth, maintenance, and plasticity of neurons necessary for learning and memory. Plus, dancing makes some neurons nimble so that they readily wire into the neural network. Neural plasticity is the brain’s remarkable ability to change through out life. (Judith Lynne Hanna, PhD, is author of Dancing to Learn: The Brain’s Cognition, Emotion, and Movement).
Pierre Dulaine, through the US program “Dancing Classrooms” has demonstrated improvements in student behaviour and academic performance in schools that have adopted his programs. This program was extended to a successful social experiment with Arab and Jewish children in Israel, reported in the documentary, “Dancing in Jaffa”.
It is well accepted that the southern European family structure is beneficial for children. Engaging children in adult social activity helps children develop mature social behaviours as they move into adulthood. Dance is a particularly effective way to integrate generations in mutually enjoyable social activity. We believe that dance could have a long-term beneficial effect on high-risk social behaviours.
HEALTH
Heart health, Mental acuity
A study of 48 thousand healthy people indicated a 46% lower risk of cardiovascular death in dancers over a decade compared with infrequent or non-dancers.
The only physical activity to offer protection against dementia is frequent dancing. Dance has a much greater effect on warding off dementia than any cognitive activity.
Risk reduction
• Reading - 35%
• Crosswords - 47%
• Regular dancing - 76%
In addition dance increases serotonin in the brain, reduces stress and depression and induces feelings of emotional well-being. Dancers have stronger bones, less falls and less fractures.
Managing motor-neurone diseases and balance
Tango teaches balance, posture, and core strength. Tango dancers learn to maintain their centre, stand on one leg at a time and to walk very slowly to complex musical rhythms. The Tango walk can become part of a person’s way of walking and holding themselves, efficiently and confidently.
Many studies and programs around the world indicate that Tango is beneficial as a therapy for people with Parkinson’s Disease, assisting balance and mobility, as well as self worth and social connection.
Dance as a form of therapy - specifically Argentine Tango -- has the potential to significantly improve balance and reduce falls risk among cancer patients experiencing peripheral neuropathy, according to new research conducted by a multidisciplinary research team at The Ohio State University.
Research also indicates benefits with mobility and wellbeing with arthritis patients.