Why is learning tango so hard?
If one could get paid to be a student, I would be a millionaire by now. I LOVE learning and perhaps that’s why I love teaching so much - because it’s just another dimension of learning.
I have two masters degrees in fine arts and art history and I hold a 500hr yoga certification. I have studied and learned dozens of skills over the years and of all the things that I have learned, tango was the hardest. (Well, maybe facebook marketing was a little harder, but not by much).
It took me years to get proficient at it and having talked to hundreds of dancers over the years, I know I am not the only one.
Now what do I mean by “learning it?” I consider something learned once I can explain and teach it to someone else.
I could follow tango within a few weeks, I felt it in my body right away, but I could not explain it for a long time. In fact, for the first 7 or so years I was in a complete fog when it came to understanding what “dancing tango” actually meant. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. I took dozens of workshops, spent months in Buenos Aires, spent thousands of dollars on private lessons, technique classes, etc… and still…
As a seasoned dancer I didn’t understand what “musicality” meant, I didn’t know that “Pugliese” was an orchestra, the words “parallel or cross system” were beyond my comprehension. It didn’t help that at the time that I was most aware of my lack of understanding of tango I was in a relationship with a very ambitious dancer who believed he knew the answers to everything.
You know how it is… Hours of explosive arguments ensued and I was thrown into a rage because I knew “I was right” but I didn’t know why. I couldn’t explain what I knew in my body. I felt terribly stupid especially when I went to group classes where teachers would show all these complex sequences of movements to leaders and then we, followers, would just be there as moving mannequins for them to practice with. Once in a while the teacher would throw a bone to the followers to pick at, a little detail here and there - “this is where you can put in an embellishment like this.” And I would work that embellishment, attempting to perfect the move so that I looked good executing it while leaders struggled to do their part in a way that actually allowed me to do that.
I couldn’t give the leaders feedback, I didn’t know what to say! “It doesn’t feel good…” would be met with “well it’s because you need to do such and such…”
As a follower I was always in the dark and it seemed like leaders were in the know about something so fascinating. Leaders were concerned with musicality and whether you could enter something from cross system or parallel system while I was tasked with just staying on my axis and praised for being able to follow every lead.
It was maddening.
It didn’t get much easier when I started leading because I realized that I am absolutely terrible with remembering sequences. I would go to a 3-hour workshop, practice a new sequence perfectly and then wake up the next day and not remember any of it. I think I probably retained 10% of what I was taught in classes as a leader. It was so frustrating that eventually I just didn’t care to waste more money. There was just not enough payoff for my investment.
Why was this so hard for me? I had excelled in so many other pursuits so why, with all of my skills in experience was this taking so damn long?!
After years of experimenting and testing I have come to the conclusion that it had a lot less to do with me, and more to do with the outdated education model that tango still follows - teach figures to leaders and teach followers to follow the leaders. (And always too much talking! For every 15 mins of talking to get 5 mins of practicing with someone is not enough.)
I had a different vision. I wanted an environment where the learning took place through dancing, through trial and error, through testing principles rather than memorizing sequences. “Less talking, more dancing,” became my motto. (When asked about their learning style, 80% of my students said that they were tactile learners. That wasn’t surprising, it’s probably the case for most tango dancers.)
I decided to test my theories by starting a weekly práctica for women back in September of 2021. I wanted to find out what would happen if the learning of tango happened less through talking, drilling, or memorizing and more through just dancing a lot with lots of different people. What kind of progress could be achieved if we didn’t think of “leading” and “following” as two separate roles, but rather, as complements of a whole.
There is no curriculum, there is no specific agenda. Everything I teach arises in response to the inevitable problems and questions that the dancers encounter through dancing.
Over the past 6 months I have watched novice dancers successfully integrate vocabulary that took me years. I frequently witness them “invent” movements on the fly, stumbling into complex figures without having to be taught. Within months they are able to dance beautifully on the social dance floor as leaders AND followers. Their technique and their confidence improve. They are able to recognize the differences between orchestras and know how to express those differences in their dance.
Within months… Not years.
So, really, tango is not that hard… really. It’s been hard because of the teaching approach that we have inherited from the past. But we (and tango) are evolving and my experience shows that, given the right conditions, most people can learn to dance tango very quickly.
I’m curious, does any of this resonate with you? What has been your experience learning tango?
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