During my teaching trips I am often asked by the students what would be the best practice routine to progress steadily and especially what kind of practice is most beneficial: alone, in a couple, in a class or in a practica?
In order to answer this question one should understand that in tango we are talking about TWO distinct skills. The first skill is that of your own capacity to dance to the music, to keep your balance, to execute the steps, to move in space et cetera. The second skill is that of communicating with your partner, or what we call “leading” and “following”, the skill of creating a connection.
When talking about a dance that we do alone on stage (say, contemporary, hip hop or belly dance, to name a few) we are talking about the first skill, namely, your own movement. In “solo” dances there is no notion of communicating continuously with a partner whom you hold closely in your arms. There is a notion of partnering techniques in many stage dances, but they are different from tango, as stage dances are often choreographed and do not happen in close embrace.
To understand why in tango (or other couple dances based on improvising together) we are talking about two skills, imagine a professional well-trained stage dancer whom you teach all the “tricks”: the full tango vocabulary and how to use it to the music. This dancer will absorb it quickly, due to his or her dance background, and will execute them alone with marvellous precision and grace in any given order, perfectly musical. Yet, give this dancer a partner to lead or follow in a complete improvisation and s/he will be a hopeless mess.
Now imagine an average person, a woman, for example, with no dance background whatsoever who starts with tango classes. During classes and practicas she learns how to listen to her partner, how to react to the lead in terms of direction, speed and movement, when and how much to pivot, when to stop, when to go. She visits milongas and dances with anybody who invites her, adapting to any kind of lead (or lack thereof). Within one year this woman develops quite a pleasant embrace, she follows well and mostly in the music, she greatly enjoys dancing tango, she easily accepts all kinds of leaders and therefore rarely sits down for a long time. Her partners like her for her “partnering” qualities (her trusting embrace, her lively reaction to the lead and the music) but also very much for her “human factor”: her enjoyment of the dance, her openness and positive attitude. Considering her popularity, she begins to think of herself as a rather good dancer and it starts to annoy her that the best dancers of the place never invite her. She feels “ready” for them, she thinks they are snobbing her simply because they are afraid to try out someone new. She feels (and has been told repeatedly) that she has lots of very nice qualities in her dance, so why don’t they come after her?
One day she watches a video of herself. Naturally, her visual references are the highly skilled professionals she watches on YouTube as well as the best dancers in town, with their perfect feet, high voleos, amazing speed and elegant postures. She is suddenly deeply disturbed to see herself dance. Her legs look weak and ungraceful, her feet are inarticulate and randomly put; she loses her balance a lot and is slow to react; her upper body lacks stance, her pelvis is tilted, her head locks itself in an unnatural position and so on and so forth. She suddenly understands why some of the better dancers ignore her. At this point she wonders why anyone would care to dance with her AT ALL, seeing how badly it looks. It is in this situation that the separateness of the two skills become clearly apparent: she is not bad at all as a follower but is not yet an accomplished DANCER in the true sense of the word.
At this point she has a choice: either to do some work on improving her dancing skills or to go on being a “nice partner” to those who appreciate her, therefore never moving up to better levels. Women are usually strongly motivated to do something about their skill because in most tango communities we have a gender imbalance and followers, contrary to leaders, need to show much more quality in order to keep dancing. So this woman, too, decides to take dedicated technique classes to improve her skill. Women are generally more eager to practice technique, even if it is only to make their feet and legs look pleasing when wearing a skirt. Men, on the other hand, are often content to practice only being a good leader (or a good “driver”). They are rarely interested in working alone on their pivots, dissociation and balance. Long wide trousers hide the somewhat clumsy movements of the legs and anyway, everybody is mostly paying attention to the beauty of the woman dancing, not her male partner, so who cares how he puts down his feet.
The example above illustrates that in tango we have this peculiar notion of HOW IT LOOKS versus HOW IT FEELS. In stage dances “how it looks” is the most important aspect and how it feels is a strictly private matter for the dancer in question. In tango there are two “how-it-feels” factors: how your own dance feels to yourself and how it feels to your partner, which is of great importance for communication. Although many times people choose their dance partners in a milonga by how it looks, they will most certainly come back to this dance partner (or not) by how it feels. This also explains the recurring phenomenon “he (she) does not look like anything special but the dance felt amazing!” as well as its exact opposite.
If we are talking about two distinct skills in tango, it logically follows that you need to practice both. You could, of course, give priority to one above the other. However, when one of the two skills is heavily underdeveloped it will inevitably affect the total experience. The most delicate, sensitive and well-embracing follower will not be able to give a very satisfying dance experience to her leader if she keeps losing her balance. Or, to take an opposite example, the most virtuoso gyros-with-enrosque leader will not be very pleasant to dance with if he lacks connection.
Herein lies a further difficulty. Although we are talking about two separate skills, in practice they are expressed in one and the same movement pattern. This is why people often do not even realise that we are talking about two different skills. Yet, it becomes much clearer if you consider how humans talk, for example: such an activity is also a combination of skills. The skill of pronouncing the words and shaping sounds that you learn as a child; the skill of building sentences and making yourself understandable that you acquire while still very young; and yet a different intellectual skill of conveying what you want to say in a way that has a certain impact on the other person. All of this also happens within one and the same “movement pattern” of talking. If you look closer into practically any activity, you will see how many different skills are involved.
In tango we have adopted the habit of calling the first skill TECHNIQUE and the second CONNECTION or COMMUNICATION. It is a bit silly, as communicating in tango is also a technique. If your teacher tells you that the communication is “just something you have to feel” or “do it with your heart”, find yourself another teacher fast. There is no doubt that communication is something you have to feel and your heart is somewhere in it as well, but it is an ACTION and therefore can be demonstrated, explained and learnt. A teacher who is not able to explain exactly how one leads or follows, either does not know how to do it or is not able to put it into words. Communication skill should never be confused with the “human factor”. It is true that human factor influences the total experience and can make certain things much easier (such as being attentive and responsive). Still, just as we can teach someone how to talk, we can teach someone to communicate through body movements and intentions to dance tango.
Back in the old days, when the dancers did not yet have a very developed knowledge of tango as a set of skills and how to teach them, every maestro had to find everything out for himself (or herself) or simply copy someone else. In those days the teaching mostly came down to statements “do as I do” for the TECHNIQUE and rough physical manipulation or “you have to feel it in your heart” adage for the COMMUNICATION part. Consequently, a maestro couple could pretend to hold the holy grail of sacred knowledge if they actually managed to explain how to do it. It was especially the communication skill that led to the creation of many mysteries about what is “true tango” and where to get it, cultivating an atmosphere of mystique around those who danced well, mostly residents of the tango mecca. Students who did not manage to understand how the communication worked felt that it was their own fault: they were either not talented, not sensitive or not Argentinean enough.
You see, it is generally much easier to show and explain how one should walk or pivot than to teach how to lead another person to do it, or how to do it in response to a lead. Take into account that in Europe the first traveling Argentinean maestros had to teach dancers who did not speak any Spanish, so they had to do it in English or another language that those maestros hardly spoke themselves. It is more or less possible to explain a visible movement by using simple verbal vocabulary, but it becomes next to impossible to do it with the communication skill. Communication involves intentions and micro-movements within the main “visible” movement, it is like explaining the subtleties of a martial art, of a meditation practice, of energy and connection in contemporary dance. When a good explanation is lacking, it can easily give the impression of being something mystical, only accessible to a few chosen ones with the “corazón” (or the balls, or whatever you prefer) in the right place.
Historically, the communication skill got most of the attention, for the simple reason that you needed some basic knowledge of leading and following to be able to go to a milonga. This is why still, just as in the old days, we teach beginners to walk and move together from the very first class instead of first teaching them the technique of their own dance. It is only in the past years, with tango becoming more and more complex technically, that dancers realise the importance of such things as balance, dissociation and footwork. Of course, when practicing in a couple you also practice your technique, but the fact of being with a partner shifts your attention to the communication and away from your own movement. Practicing alone allows you to literally find yourself inside the dance, undisturbed by other factors. You have to understand that in tango the person you dance with is not your primary dance partner, paradoxically. The first person you need to connect to is yourself, then you need to connect to the floor and next, to the music. Only then will you be able to connect properly to another person as well.
Nowadays most competent teachers are able to explain how to lead and follow without involving too much of the “tango mystique”. We have also discovered, in the past years, that it is indeed not as hard as it seemed before. Thus, we can now dismantle the myth of leading skill being something very, very difficult, or that you have to be a “real woman” (whatever that means) to become a milonguera. We have learnt to separate the human factor from the competence, without diminishing the importance of the human factor in the total. Nowadays people learn in two years what it took their maestros to learn in six. The abundance of video material also plays an important role. Of course, teachers who find themselves unable to explain the biomechanics of tango will still fall back on the “mystique” or the human factor, like that (yes, Argentinean) teacher who once told a female student of mine that there was “not enough sex” in her dance. But the students are buying less and less into that kind of reasoning.
To come back to the original question, the most effective practice routine is one that includes both individual (technique) work and couple (communication) practice. Depending on what you feel is most lacking in your set of skills you can temporarily give priority to one or the other, but it is advisable to keep the two skills in balance. People often feel the need to add an extra bodywork activity, such as yoga, Pilates or another kind of dance to improve their tango. Any kind of bodywork that makes you more aware of your movement, strengthens your core, improves your posture and balance, will indeed help you to become a better learner of tango. However, thinking that yoga or Pilates will make you better at tango is like thinking that learning French will make you better at Spanish. You will still need to learn Spanish to speak Spanish. These body techniques are CONDITIONING practices. Other dances will also not necessarily make you a better tango dancer, but they will definitely help you to become a better dancer generally. In my experience, people with a background in martial arts and modern or contemporary dance are the quickest to learn and understand what tango is all about: a continuous exchange of energy through movement. And like in life and in love, there is still a truly magical part in tango that keeps us addicted to it. It remains magical no matter how well we understand its inner workings. It is the magic of two human beings connecting through music and dance and it is magical not so much because of HOW it happens but because of it happening at all.
CHINESE, RUSSIAN, SLOVENIAN, GERMAN
March 2, 2015
Veronica Toumanova 