Author: Veronica Toumanova

As a teacher I regularly see students become frustrated when teachers tell them, again and again, to work on something very basic. They think: “I have heard this already years ago and apparently I did not improve!” With every teacher offering a fresh view on the same problem it often feels like the study is a never-ending story. You never seem to “get there”. This despair can become so strong that people abandon studying altogether and just have fun with what they know. So why do we have to go back to basics? And why is it so frustrating?

First, let’s define what we mean by “basics”. Tango is an improvised couple dance with a vocabulary built of very few basic elements. We create all the possible sequences much like words and sentences are created from an alphabet. In individual technique we talk about three upper body related elements (posture, embrace and dissociation) and three lower body related elements (free leg movement, weight transfer and pivot). In couple communication we talk about leading and following the above movements in a musical context: giving or receiving direction, dissociation, embrace shape and distance, pivots, free leg movement, weight transfer, off-axis weight shift and so on. Leading is indicating what you wish another person’s body to do and following is moving your body as a result of somebody’s lead.

Each basic element can be performed in a variety of ways by changing its parameters. To give you a simple example: at the end of a forward step you can go upwards, straightening the standing leg, or downwards, bending the standing leg. This will create different dynamics. You can do this in an associated or a dissociated position of the upper body. While stepping you can open your embrace, close it or keep it the same. You can accelerate towards the end of the step, slow down or pause in the middle. You can step heel or toe first, with a curved or a linear foot trajectory, pushing the floor strongly with the standing leg or just a little. You can make a large step or a small one, put in a lot of energy or just softly slide into it. All this you can do while leading somebody or while following a lead. And here we are talking about just ONE forward step. Consider two people, each with two legs, moving and turning in numerous directions, and just imagine the astronomical amount of variations they can dance with these basic elements!

In the past it often happened (and happens still, here and there) that a teacher would develop one way of doing a certain movement (say, an ocho backward), with just one set of the above parameters, and then claim this was the only correct technique. When studying with another maestro, the students of such a teacher would become greatly confused, as the other maestro would also have his or her own set of parameters for a backward ocho and call it “the only correct one”. And here I am talking about a situation in which both ocho variations are done biomechanically WELL. Imagine the number of ways in which you could do those ochos badly! Nowadays most teachers understand that there are different ways of performing the same movement by changing its parameters. This knowledge allowed an explosive growth of tango vocabulary and also the emergence of clearly distinguishable styles.

A style is nothing else but a preferred set of parameters with which the basic elements are performed recurrently throughout the dance. By arriving downwards on a bent leg while accelerating towards the end of a step gives you a grounded, bouncy kind of walk. If you keep the same speed and travel from one leg to the other without changing the level, you will have a walk that rolls on smoothly. If you go upwards at the end of each step it will punctuate your walk by micro-pauses every time you arrive on a new leg. This is why claiming that one particular style is the only true tango is just as silly as claiming that a large sidestep to your left is the only true sidestep and people who insist on making any other kind of sidesteps are frauds or have no taste.

We start learning tango by mastering small sequences of basic elements, like in a language class a student would start with short pre-defined phrases. The walk, the ochos, the cross steps are all combinations of basic elements, they are not basic elements themselves. The beginner’s sequences are combinations of basic elements with a set of parameters that are the easiest to perform. In a walk, for example, it is better to learn not to change your level too much in the beginning, until you master it enough to be able to go up or down elegantly. At first we learn to pause in a cross step, to catch our breath, and later to walk on without a pause if we want. In former days, if you knew a complex figure you were considered advanced. Nowadays, if you know a complex figure but are not able to break it down into smaller elements and create a variation, you are no longer considered advanced, you just know how to copy. An advanced dancer is able to create “phrases” and change the parameters of the basic elements at will. A beginner can only say “My name is James” whereas an advanced dancer can say “My name is Bond. James Bond.”

Knowing basic technique means performing the main elements well within a simple tango vocabulary. Knowing advanced technique means performing the main elements well within both simple and complex tango vocabulary. The advantage of attaining a good level of basic technique is that complex vocabulary is easier to master. Yet, even if you have attained a solid level of basic technique, you will still need to practice advanced vocabulary before you master it. A way to understand this is to compare it to other motoric skills. While you might recite a short children’s poem effortlessly, the moment you go on stage to recite Hamlet’s monologue you will find yourself struggling with even the simplest phrases unless you have specifically practiced reciting Shakespeare. This happens because the overall complexity of your task is much higher in the second case.

The vast majority of tango classes are about learning steps: all the various combinations of the basic elements. This is done so that people can “converse” with each other in milonga and not end up dancing the same patterns over and over again. Ideally, tango classes let the students work both on the figures as well as on the technique. However, students sometimes learn very complex vocabulary without knowing the basics. This cultivates dancers that do difficult stuff badly. They are trying to recite Shakespeare without having practiced their diction first with something simpler. A poor mastery of the basics can be seen and felt in a dancer independent of what s/he does. Sometimes the sheer complexity of the figures bedazzles an outside viewer, creating the impression that the dancer is a virtuoso, yet ask such a dancer to just walk to the music or do some ochos and the lack becomes painfully apparent.

Why do tango people become frustrated when asked to go back to basics? Many teachers are of the opinion that tango people are essentially lazy. What they want is to party. They do not want to work hard and would love to dance difficult stuff without doing what it takes to dance it well. It is just another hobby for them and you can have a lot of fun in milongas without knowing the basics anyway. There is some truth to this view. Yet, there is also another reason.

A large number of people who come into tango never danced before and have a largely intellectual education, meaning that they have learnt the things they know by READING. Their daily activities are concentrated around processing and recalling information. Becoming an expert in a field that requires intellectual knowledge means working primarily with your analytical mind. When the goal of your learning is knowledge, the learning process can be fairly straightforward. Once you have understood a topic, you do not go back to it unless you have forgotten some of the details. And then a quick review is sufficient to refresh your memory.

This is not how it works in dance. Dance is not only about knowing and recalling, it is in the first place about doing and being. Intellectually knowing what to do is an important part of it, but still only a starting point. You have to train your body to move in a certain way. Learning dance is by definition a cyclic process, as dance only exists in the moment it is performed. Each movement has to be re-created every time, often in different conditions. Perfecting a movement means developing a motoric habit that produces the result you want in any circumstances. And when you are training your body to develop correct movement habits, you do it by repeating and consciously correcting what you do, reinforcing the associated neural pathways in your nervous system.

Progress in dance is achieved by going from simple to more complex movement patterns and back in loops. It is common for a professional ballet dancer to go to a class and get a correction about something seemingly trivial (say, a plié). For a person with no affinity with dance this sounds very strange. Shouldn’t a professional know by now how to do a plié? But in dance – as in playing music, acting on stage, singing or sports – it is not only a matter of knowing, it is a matter of doing it a little better every time. To a dancer going back to basics is what constitutes the most rigorous, most efficient learning. Dancers know that quality lies in the details and the details are always in the basics.

For a novice tango dancer this might come as a revelation. I once had a beginner student who during his second class remarked: “Damn, my walk is still not perfect.” When after one year students expect to move automatically from the “beginner” to the “intermediate” level, they believe that being familiar with the beginner’s vocabulary makes them ready for intermediate level, only to find out that the reality is more complicated. People can know lots of figures and dance all of them badly, or they can know few figures but dance them exceptionally well. This makes any kind of categorisation by level or the number of years in tango very difficult.

If you find yourself hearing the same things about your dance over and over again, remember that this is simply THE WAY IT WORKS. It does not mean you do not progress, you probably do, a little every time. When complex movements are difficult for you, the solution is to break them down into simpler patterns and to work on them until you can dance the combination flawlessly. This is why before we can do anything rapidly we first need to do it slowly; why before turning on one leg we need to have a good postural alignment; why before doing adornos with ease we need to learn how to stay in balance. And this is at once my conclusion and my most important message: dance is really nothing else BUT the basics. The great thing about this realisation is that each time you improve your basics your whole dance improves. This is quite a miraculous feeling and in itself is worth the struggle.

RUSSIAN, ROMANIAN, CHINESE, GERMAN, FRENCH, SPANISH, POLISH

September 28, 2015

Learning to dance tango is rarely a straightforward process. This has been my own experience and I have seen this to be the experience of many people I meet. Hardly anybody would deny that tango is a difficult dance and that mastering it on a satisfactory level can take several years. Also, the process is often messy, frustrating and slow.

When you come to a beginner class, life is wonderful. Your teachers do their best to familiarise you with your role and to cultivate a basic sensitivity to music, movement and the social side of tango. You feel like in every class new doors open to an unexplored and fascinating universe. Towards the end of the first year you feel like you are already a pretty good dancer and if tango got you in a strong grip, you sign up for the next course.

It is usually during your second (or third) year that the truth becomes painfully obvious: you are anything but a good dancer YET. Sometimes you feel like you are not progressing as fast as before or not at all. You feel that your teachers are not teaching you the right stuff, not the right way or not fast enough. Dancers you used to look up to no longer seem impressive. At the same time you notice the truly good dancers around you and wish to be like them, to dance with them, to be accepted as one of them. This feeling of profound dissatisfaction is the start of your very own “hero’s journey” in tango: your quest of becoming a better dancer.

At that point you might stay with your teachers but often you will start looking for a fresh role model. You take workshops with renown couples, watch YouTube videos until your eyes hurt and try to find a steady partner to practice with. You look for what you can call “YOUR teacher”: one able to help you to visibly and tangibly improve your dance. You may take your first private class, craving personalised attention. You might end up going from teacher to teacher, gradually losing hope, as confusions pile up with no results in sight. And sometimes you are lucky enough to meet a person whose teaching suddenly makes all the sense in the world. Your body starts doing things in a way it has never done before. Your dance partners compliment you on the improvements and you feel like you have finally found your personal holy grail. 

How come that are you able to improve with some teachers and not with others, who seem just as competent? Which part of the learning process depends on you as a student and which on your teacher? And how can you recognise that your teacher-student relationship is going nowhere?

To understand this I propose a simple model. In a teacher-student learning dynamic we can identify three important parts: GOALS, STRUCTURE and PROCESS. Goals are about the desired results, what it is you want to learn in a given period of time. Structure is about how to get there, the kind of tools and exercises necessary to reach your goals. Process is about how you and your teacher engage in a live interaction from moment to moment. 

One of the reasons we are happy and excited as beginners is because our goals are defined entirely by somebody else. We fully trust our teachers to know what we should learn, when and how fast. Not having clear goals, everything we learn is new and rewarding. There is very little pressure. The proverbial small steps we take in the beginning of this journey seem huge compared to those of an experienced dancer. The situation changes, however, once you decide to improve your dance and start thinking about your own goals. It is important at that point that you do not stick to long term goals alone. If you tell yourself “I want to dance like the tango star X or Z who already has twenty years of experience”, consider it a DIRECTION, not a goal, and instead define some clear short term goals that will take you in that direction ONE STEP at a time. Too general a goal will frustrate and discourage you. If you wish to get the perfect technique, guess what: it’s a lifetime endeavor. But it is possible to get a better balance, for example, or a more comfortable embrace within only a couple of months.

Before any learning can take place, the teacher and the student must agree on a common goal (or goals). In group classes and workshops it happens implicitly: the class description already conveys, in broad strokes, what you will learn. In private classes the goals have to be talked through and agreed upon explicitly, in detail, or the learning will not be effective. If the student has no clear goals, the teacher can suggest them based on the student’s current level of competence and the desired direction. The goals can be as simple as learning to pivot or as complex as improvising to different energies in the music. It doesn’t matter, as long as the goals are understood and shared. They will depend on where the student wants to go but most importantly, where the student is RIGHT NOW. Some goals will have to be broken down in secondary goals in order to proceed step by step. If you want to learn to improvise to different orchestras but still have trouble identifying the strong beat, you will have to start with that.

The goals have to be shared enthusiastically by the teacher and the student. For example, I am the kind of teacher who is interested in in-depth teaching of technique, among other things. To me, working with a student who is not interested in improving technique would feel like a waste of time. I would send this student to a different teacher. It is important that the students decide what they want but it is just as important that teachers are clear about what THEY love teaching most: they tend to do it better than everything else. Often teachers feel like they have to cater to their students in every way in order to keep the business running. However, knowing what you love to teach will not only make you a better, more enthusiastic teacher, but will also help students who are interested in that particular subject find you sooner. 

As a student, it is important that you understand your goals and trust that you can achieve them. The next step is for the teacher to come up with a STRUCTURE (a set of exercises, a practicing routine) that will help you reach them. This part depends on the teacher’s competence and experience. There is also a responsibility in this for you as a student: you will have to establish a study structure for yourself, a regular practice of some sort. Only studying in classes rarely improves your dance in a lasting way. Whatever you learn in that one-and-a-half hour or less, evaporates from your mind and body if you don’t reproduce it again and again. This is why a part of your study structure should be as mundane as taking notes: simply to recall what you have learnt. The fact that we are studying movement doesn’t mean we shouldn’t use our analytical mind. 

Things go wrong on the level of STRUCTURE when the goals are not defined or the teacher has no clear understanding of the student’s level of skill. Then the material tends to be either too easy or impossibly difficult no matter how you try. If the exercises are too easy, the goals must be adjusted and the bar raised or you will leave the class feeling “well, it’s good to repeat things but I don’t feel like I learned anything”. When the bar is set too high, the goals need to be broken down in smaller ones. In an effective learning process there always has to be a challenge, but the material should not be entirely out of your reach. 

When talking about “exercise” I do not mean literally the kind of movement that you are supposed to do, I am talking about HOW. A walk is a walk, yet we do not teach it to beginners the same way we teach it to advanced dancers. You will be asked to polish your walk at every stage but each time with a different focus. If for a beginner student it is sometimes enough to walk on the beat, an advanced student has to focus on how to put down the foot, to push with the standing leg, to project the free leg, to stay connected in the embrace and so on. When judging how easy or difficult an exercise is for you, ask yourself what is its main focus. Ideally, the exercise should feel difficult, but doable if you apply consistent effort. 

Of course, if you don’t pay attention, if you don’t try to get the point or are under the impression of knowing it all already, the exercises will always seem either too easy or too difficult. And this is where we touch upon the importance of a good PROCESS. First thing to understand about it is that it requires everybody’s full engagement. If you come to a class expecting the teacher to perform magic on you, you are not engaging in the process. And if you aren’t, then no amount of goals, structures, money, famous people, yoga classes or expensive shoes will help you. Engaging in the process for a student means, first of all, to understand and share the goals; second, to follow and trust the structure; and third, to be fully present, to take in the information, to do what you are told to do, to pay attention, to give and accept feedback. 

There are a couple of things that can derail the process on the side of the student. The first, as I mentioned, is not to engage at all, to think that being in a class will somehow magically transform you into a better dancer. Another is to judge yourself too harshly, raising your level of stress to the point of becoming completely discouraged. This is not an easy thing to deal with. We come to tango mostly at an adult age, when we already consider ourselves experts in many areas of life. Accepting to be again literally in beginner’s shoes is a dire psychological blow to our self-image. It is especially hard on male leaders, used as they are, in our masculinity-obsessed society, to the constant pressure of being the best, the strongest and the most competent at all times. (It is not easy for women either, but in different ways). Sometimes it is  hard to silence your inner critic. Yet to be fully present means to be completely aware, paying attention and keeping your mind occupied with the task, not nursing your ego. 

Engaging in the process for the teacher means that s/he gives you regular feedback about how you are doing and how to do things differently. “Process” implies interaction, an exchange between people. It means responding both to the student’s struggles and his or her successes. Not only to point out what is wrong, but to give tools to correct it and, equally important, to point out when it is RIGHT. Harsh judgement on the part of the teacher can result in too much stress for the student, but so can total indifference. An engaged process requires a validation loop. If your teacher does not provide such a loop, ask for it.

If the teacher simply tells you how s/he does things, without checking whether you understand it, without watching or correcting you, then it is a LECTURE, not an engaged process. If your level of understanding is close to that of your teacher then a lecture is fine, it could be just what you need. If the gap in understanding and experience is too wide, however, then a lecture will leave you with a heap of mystifying statements and a sense of failure. Ideally, the teacher should make an effort to present the material in THE WAY YOU CAN UNDERSTAND IT and to do so, the teacher needs to assess your current skills. 

Group classes are marked with levels (or sometimes the number of years of experience) in a desperate attempt to shorten the time that the teachers need for such an assessment and to be able to define a goal and a structure fit for all. In a private class this is what the teacher should start with: for example, by dancing with you or by making you do a test exercise. If you come to a private class and the teacher does not take some moments to do a general assessment of your level of skill, the process will not be effective. You might get exercises that are not reflective of your goals, too easy or too difficult. You might not understand what the teacher is telling you because you are not speaking the same “language”. This is an often occuring painful paradox in tango: you go for a class with an amazing dancer, you feel that this person is brilliant in, oh, so many ways, you try to do what you are told and at the end leave the class feeling lost and frustrated. When this happens, it means that something has gone wrong in the process.   

If a teacher tells a group of advanced students to ground themselves, they know what it means and  do it correctly. They have previously gone through a process of learning what exactly “grounding” means. If a teacher told this to a group of beginners, they would look down in amazement, wondering how their feet have managed to leave the ground without them noticing. Before you can teach people to do anything, you have to understand their current idea on the subject – or the absence thereof. The reason so many students leave so many classes with profound statements such as “lead her by intention”, “maintain the connection” and “find the floor” stuck in their head without a clue of what it means, is because the teachers do not explain it in a way that the students can understand and reproduce. In other words, because the teachers, no matter how brilliant, DO NOT FULLY ENGAGE IN THE PROCESS. 

It might look as if I am suggesting that the effort of making the student understand something is entirely the teacher’s responsibility. It is not. To successfully transmit an idea both parties need to be CONNECTED on some common level of understanding. Now, some teachers are opposed to the idea of having to explain it to you in YOUR terms because they believe it is your job to crawl up the thorny path to enlightenment just like they did when they were “your age”. And for some (very few) students it works. There are people in tango who are so motivated and obsessed, they will walk the world around twice to get the understanding they need. They usually become really good and many of them start teaching. Yet we have to remind ourselves, as teachers, that not everybody is a jedi. Very few people actually are. If, as a teacher, you have disdain for the (majority of) students who need the material to be clearly explained, and explained again, who will stagnate, doubt themselves and give up as soon as something seems too fuzzy and too difficult, then you should limit your audience to those you wish to coach for tango olympics. To an ordinary person, who dances tango as a hobby, your teaching might be ineffective at best and traumatising at worst. If you want to teach any person, you have to accept that not everyone learns the same way, not everyone has the same capacity or motivation and not everyone is a future tango wizard.

For both the teacher and the student to be fully engaged in a process, they need not only motivation, but also physical and mental resources. If in an event a teacher gives four workshops a day with a huge number of students of very mixed levels, all the while worn down by the fatigue of performing, travel and late milongas, then for such a teacher to fully engage in a process with every student will be next to impossible. In this case, a student will have to put in a lot of effort, ask for personal attention when possible and be patient. Some teachers favour the lecturing style because of their lack of energy in such a setting, meaning that only the most advanced dancers will truly get the point (others will leave mystified, but frustrated). There exists a conspiracy theory that tango teachers do not like to reveal all their secrets in order to remain superior and desirable, and maybe it is true in some cases. In my experience, however, the unwillingness of a teacher to fully engage in the process is due either to a lack of teaching skills, lack of motivation, lack of resources or all of the above combined. 

If you want to significantly improve your dance and have found teachers that you like, then I suggest you keep a checklist. Frequently ask yourself, how clear are you about your short term goals? Are you in agreement on them with your teacher? Does practicing clarify things for you or only makes it more confusing? Don’t be afraid to tell your teachers that you don’t understand something. Remember that it’s the teacher’s JOB to explain things to you in a helpful way. Manage your challenge level wisely: let it be difficult but not totally overwhelming. An effective learning process brings more clarity to the subject and obvious results in your dance: obvious not only to you, but to your teacher and to your dance partners. If after a while this is not the case, it does not necessarily mean the teacher is not right for you but it does mean that there is a glitch in the process.

You also need to remind yourself that, while your teacher must take the responsibility of teaching you, you must take the responsibility of learning. There is no magic, just understanding and practice. Learning is not something you get, it is something you do. And the more you do it, the more successful you become. This path is yours to walk and it can feel very lonely at times, but trust me: the further you go, the greater the view.

RUSSIAN, POLISH

January 9, 2018

One day a new student came for a private class and said to me: “You know, I have taken classes with all these wonderful teachers. I am a beginner, so of course I struggle, and I keep being told that I have to dance like a macho. But I am not a macho. I don’t want to be a macho. I really dislike machos. Does this mean I can never dance tango?”

In my years as a teacher I have heard many examples of students being profoundly marked by something a teacher said to them. These words stay with people for a long time. Some are revealing, consciousness-shifting experiences. Others can leave the student deeply confused, even traumatised. I believe it is important to understand how we convey dance with words, how we talk to our students and our dance partners, what terminology we use to give feedback, to correct and to inspire. Each body discipline has developed its own vocabulary, which does not only name the specific movements, but also reflects, on a deeper level, the discipline’s underlying philosophy. Tango is no exception. 

Let’s consider some of the body disciplines that tango people often exercise besides tango. If we analyse the fitness vocabulary, we will encounter what I would call a “fighter’s mindset”. The moves are called kicks, punches, crunches, pushups, the person is encouraged to overcome the body: to push, to destroy in order to rebuild, to go beyond its limits with power and determination, to focus on better results. Burn that booty! Crunch those abs! It works when it hurts! 

Yoga, on the other hand, reflects a very different philosophy. It has developed for many centuries as a spiritual practice so there we find a poetic reflection of life’s basic unity. There is a rich imagery full of animals: swans, cobras, dogs, cats, cows, but also warriors, babies, trees, the sun, the moon and so forth. When clarifying the poses, yoga teachers would invite their students to “grow roots into the earth”, “reach for the sky” and “open their hearts”. It is a practice directed at developing a profound conscious presence while doing physically demanding exercises.

Body practices such as Pilates, Floor Barre or Gyrotonics have a more neutral, to-the-point terminology. These disciplines were developed for professional dancers originally and are rooted in anatomical knowledge. A movement’s name is meant to convey how it is done: leg scissors, swimming, roll up, shoulder bridge. Gyrotonic is possibly the most poetic of the three, with nature-related names such as “dolphin” and “wave”. Teachers of these disciplines  talk to their students about “navel to spine”, “pelvis tuck” and “the spine lengthening”. This bodywork aims at creating a better alignment, more flexibility and a stronger, healthier body. 

Classical ballet talks to its students in French. If you do not speak French, ballet classes feel like a bizarre mystical cult, yet in itself ballet vocabulary is surprisingly straightforward. You will find knee bends, leg circles, kicks and jumps, plus some historical words, reminiscent of the French royal court: crowns, arabesques, curtsies. Modern and contemporary dance use a mix of classical and more recent dance vocabulary, depending on the style. In dance the mastery of movement serves artistic expression, so dance terminology is always a mix of biomechanics (push, stretch, extend, point) and expressive imagery (reach, grow, slide, caress, expand, explode).

Tango terminology reflects its philosophy as a couple dance based on a very close connection, but also its spontaneous development. Many of the tango moves we dance today originated in a misstep. The dancers would say “hey, that’s interesting”, elaborate it into a new move and give it a name that came to mind. Movement labelling in tango is both straightforward (walk, turns, embrace) as well as imagery-based (eight, halfmoon, hook, merry-go-round, a-thing-that-flies). The way teachers explain movement to the students reflect biomechanics but also the connection to the partner, or what I call the “human factor”. For biomechanics tango teachers often borrow terminology from other body disciplines, depending on personal experience. The connection, however, is something quite specific to tango. And this is where it becomes really tricky. The moment we start talking about the human factor, things become, well… personal.

It is one thing to learn what to do with different body parts and another thing to be told how to relate to another being. Human factor is the kind of information that allows you to move better and to sustain connection. It is, paradoxically, also a technique, meaning that it can be improved with effective guidance. Just like a dancer can be taught to stretch the leg, s/he can be taught to embrace with feeling, to be more present in the dance, to be giving and reactive. But these things are more difficult to explain than leg stretches, they are more subtle and the result of an INTENTION rather than a direct action. Therefore they demand an intention-based terminology. Tango has always struggled to find such terminology. These struggles gave us the well-known “dance with your heart” mantra, “dance as if no one is watching”, “abandon yourself to the lead” and “dance as if you were living a three-minutes long love story”. 

The problem with these kinds of statements is that they are too vague to give results but still feel like they make a point. They are prone to various interpretations, so people tend to believe they understand what they are being told or feel too ashamed to admit they do not. What exactly is not clear about “dancing with your heart”, right? Well, NOTHING is clear about that. It’s a poetic metaphor for showing your authentic self and making your partner feel that you love this dance, enjoy this music and appreciate him/her. See how many words I used to describe my interpretation of that metaphor? You might have understood it differently, however. For example, that dancing with your heart means thrusting your chest forward. Or, perhaps, to let the energy wash through your heart chakra. 

Another problem with human factor statements is that they are often implicitly judgemental. Dancers are told things such as “You cannot be insecure now! To dance tango you have to be sure of yourself!” or things like “You have to bring out your full femininity. Be sensual, be sexy. Show him you want him.” These statements bite harshly when said in a moment of vulnerability. Telling a leader who struggles to keep his balance “Get out there and be a man!” does not make him dance better, it shatters his self-confidence. Telling a tense, panicking woman who can’t get comfortable in the embrace to “be sexy” makes her want to go home and cry. 

Among the worst examples – in my opinion – are the ones that oppose one culture to another. Telling people that Argentinian men dance better because “they are not afraid to embrace a woman” achieves nothing except damaging the student’s already fragile self-esteem. Saying that “no woman embraces like a Russian woman” implies that women of other cultures can pack up their shoes. We should remember that each culture has its own attitude to physical touch, its own history of gender relations, its own notion of private space, resulting in behaviour that will influence how people dance and communicate. To dismiss these differences is both ignorant and disrespectful. Does this mean a person from one culture can never dance like a person from another culture? Possibly, yes. Does this mean this person cannot dance tango? No, that’s absurd.

Except for the cases in which a teacher or a dance partner enjoys feeling superior while making the other person feel diminished, the above statements are actually made with truly good intentions. They are an attempt to describe something that is very hard to describe: namely, a kind of a mental and body state that helps create a fulfilling dance. But because it is such a blurry domain, a lot of it is badly explained and frequently misunderstood. Yet we have to talk about it, to teach it, to practice it. Without human factor tango would not only be devoid of meaning, it would simply not work.

So, how to talk about human factor to another person without becoming vague and judgemental? 

If we look closer into what we actually are trying to say with things such as “be sure of yourself” or “bring out your sensuality”, we will realise that they describe the RESULT of an intention but are formulated as an instruction. And this is bound to confuse people. Feeling and showing self-confidence is the result of a prior process. No one has yet become confident or sensual just because s/he was told to do so. It’s like telling a depressed person to cheer up. So what we really need is to formulate the PROCESS of getting there in neutral and precise terms. Preferably, in movement-related terms. For this the teacher (or the dance partner who is giving advice) has to understand what it is exactly s/he is asking the other person to achieve by being “sure” or “sensual”. What is it for? Confidence could lead to more decisive movements or a more upright posture. Sensuality, in some cases, could mean softening the tension in the arms, in another case it could mean moving in a more grounded way. Find an intention or an action that serves that purpose and then, when seeing the result, tell the student or the dance partner: yes, this is what I mean. Now your movement feels sensual to me, it feels confident, I feel you are fully present. It will make the other person feel good both about the result AND their personal qualities. 

To the student from the beginning of the article I said approximately the following: “When teachers tell you to dance like a macho, what they are trying to say is that they would like you to be more determined in your every move. When you walk, walk with the intention to really go forward, as if you had a clear goal in mind. If you decide to do a move, finish it, even if you end up messing it up. Pick up from there and move on. Being determined in your mouvements does not make you into another person, it simply brings out the more determined version of yourself. Some people might call it “macho”, I call it being sure about what you are going to do. Anyone who tells you to become someone else in order to dance tango has not understood what tango is really all about. So yes, you can dance tango. We all can. But sometimes expressing our true self in dance is the most difficult and the most terrifying part of it all.”

GERMAN, RUSSIAN

February 1, 2017

Think about the last tango class you went to. There is a fair chance that at some point the teacher said: “Now, imagine that…”, followed by a mental image. Maybe it was directly related to tango culture (“imagine wearing a very tight skirt”) or to something generally familiar (“imagine a balloon held gently between your and your partner’s chests”). The teacher then asked you to move with that image in mind, to “embody” it. You might remember how your movement suddenly changed in all of its aspects. By becoming the image you allowed the image to become you and the movement you were trying to do suddenly worked in a different way. 

Imagery is a didactic and choreographic tool used in virtually any dance. But why? What makes images so powerfully effective? Which images work for tango and which don’t? How can you use images effectively in your practice as a student, dancer or teacher?

When teaching or learning to dance, we rely on four modes of conveying the movement: a visual example, a kinaesthetic or sensory example, functional explanations and imagery. Visual examples are given when the teachers perform the movement in front of you. The kinaesthetic quality of a movement can be felt in another person’s body through the embrace or in your own body with the teacher’s guidance. Functional explanations are verbal descriptions of various mechanical details, a breakdown of movement into parts: positions, use of muscle groups, postural alignment, applied force and so on. Imagery is used to represent a composite concept deeply associated with the movement.

Ideally, during a tango class a teacher operates in all the above modes, providing you with as much information as possible from as many angles as possible. Sometimes a teacher has a preference or a particularly developed competence in one of the modes. However, using only one mode is not enough. If a teacher shows the movement but is unable to explain how it is done or to provide useful imagery, we say: “s/he is a very good dancer but unfortunately has no didactic skills”. Visual and sensory aspects are the RESULTS of biomechanics. We also need to know HOW TO GET THERE. Of course, a lot of information is already contained within the example: directions, dynamics, positions, speed and so forth. The more a student is experienced, the less explanation s/he will need to copy a movement skillfully. However, in order to reproduce a movement in all its deeper aspects, the student needs to conceptualise it in the same way as the teacher. This conceptualisation is where it all starts. By looking at how a person moves, an experienced teacher can immediately tell what CONCEPTION of a particular movement this person has in his/her body and mind. This conception is always an image and often it is unconscious. The next stage is to make the person aware of the current conception and to start changing it by offering different images.

This explains why you can never learn tango by only watching YouTube videos, what you are seeing are just the results of the dancers’ understanding of the movement. The most important bodywork in dance is invisible. While you are mesmerized watching the free leg draw an intricate adorno, it is the standing leg and the dancer’s core that are making the effort of keeping the dancer in balance. If you are advanced, a video could be sufficient to make you learn a new sequence or to improve a certain alignment. A beginner, however, will need a live person to show and explain how a movement works, over and over and over again. 

Functional explanation of movement is a very valuable tool. It often demonstrates the degree of the teacher’s biomechanical and anatomical knowledge. Yet, functional explanation has one important drawback: it works algorithmically, emphasizing the order of things, charging the mind with too many details and conditions to remember, giving multiple tasks and engaging our slower, verbal, analytical way of thinking. If I were to tell you in a detailed way how to do a cross step in terms of all relevant parameters, I could talk for an hour and at the end you would be so loaded with information, you would stay frozen in your tracks. Our bodies do not move because we give them rational verbal orders. Also, humans can only hold a tiny number of conditions in mind at once to perform a task. Following a purely functional explanation leads to robotic movement, devoid of expression and musicality, this is why functional explanations are never enough to make people dance. Our bodies are not machines. We are living creatures and we move, literally, in mysterious ways.

A visual example shows you the result; a sensory example makes you feel the result; a functional explanation makes you understand how the body parts work together to create the result, exposing the underlying programming and hardware; imagery, however, does something entirely different. An effective image contains at once an explanation and a result. This explanation, or more precisely, the included understanding of a movement is visual, sensory, immediate and intuitive. Do not let the word “image” fool you: it is not only about how something looks, it is about how something looks and feels and happens, at once. Images make you grasp, holistically, the essence of a movement by associating it with something you know. If images are used effectively in dance training, the students will not necessarily require all the mechanical and anatomical details, although in my experience tango students do appreciate this kind of information. Adults often possess some anatomical knowledge and like to understand their bodies intellectually. Yet, after a long explanation on biomechanics, it is always an image that sparks that final understanding and makes the movement work. 

So, what are the parameters of an effective image?

An image, contrary to functional explanation, must convey not only the mechanics of a movement, but most of all its basic INTENTION. Intention is a directional desire that can be expressed by a verb. Intention is the deeper energetic impulse from which the movement derives its shape. If we tell the students: “imagine you are a waiter in an expensive restaurant presenting an exquisite dish to your customer”, this image will have an immediate and very similar response in most people. Each person will straighten up, slightly lift the chin, assume a proud, somewhat arrogant posture and then perform the “presenting” gesture of the arm with a sense of emphasized decorum. Instead, if you say “imagine a proud posture”, this will not have the same immediate and uniform result. It would lead to approximative, caricatural notions of what “a proud posture” means to every single student and, most of all, it will remain STATIC. 

An image must be PRECISE. It must describe a very specific and familiar situation or sensation in order for the student to INSTANTLY identify with it. When teachers say things such as “imagine you are a macho” or “imagine dancing with your heart”, most students will have problems identifying themselves with something at once so general and so prone to diverse interpretations. If the image makes you ask more questions than it answers, if it leaves you with a foggy feeling, it means that the image is not precise or not familiar to you. Unfortunately, a great many tango teachers bedazzle students with all kinds of unskillful imagery, leading to confusion about the most basic biomechanics. For example, consider the often used image of “separating your upper body from your lower body”. It seems to be very precise and to give a clear intention. Yet, this results in people inflating their rib cages, thrusting the chest up, holding in the breath and stiffening in various parts of the body: the opposite of a good dance posture. The term “separating” describes the result, it does not tell HOW to get there. An effective image offers a specific directional vector and a PROCESS. Now, consider the suggestion to “imagine zipping up a pair of very tight pants”. The students will ground their feet on the floor, straighten their legs, suck in the lower abdominals, and bring the pelvic area slightly backwards. At the same time they will straighten the torso upward through the spine and open the chest somewhat forward and up. Now we have a result much closer to what we are looking for in dance posture – and everybody is still breathing.

An image has to speak to people, to come from their own experience. You can only tell someone to “put down his feet softly like a panther” if this person is familiar with panthers. This is where cultural differences play a crucial role. I have heard of an Argentinian teacher telling her students to put down their feet as if crushing an ex-lover who had been mean to them at every step. To me, with my cultural background and experience, such an image is too violent. A more neutral image of “gradually pushing a button into the floor as you arrive on your foot” works better for most of my students. The image of “dancing with the woman as if you wished to have sex with her later” might be comfortably appropriate in one culture yet may block all movement in someone from a different culture.

Ideally, an image should activate a reflex, bypassing all mental effort. Impersonating characters and animals works to a certain extent, provided the students are familiar with what you are talking about. Moods can work well (such as “imagine feeling bouncy, like a Sunday walk, lazily strolling, relaxing in the sun”), as long as they indicate a specific behavior. An image does not necessarily always serve a movement, it can also serve a general attitude in dance, such as “I hold myself proudly like a queen” or “I project my energy into the space in all directions at once”. When your students come to your evening class exhausted from work, do a warming up exercise asking them to jump up and down like children and then to let the tension softly melt through their feet into the ground. Their faces will relax and they will start smiling, letting the energy circulate more freely through their bodies. If you want to learn more about useful dance imagery, I highly recommend books and videos by Eric Franklin.

Yet even the most effective images do not necessarily work for everyone, for various reasons. If you feel a pang of recognition and your movement instantly acquires a specific quality that you were looking for, then the image worked. You should keep it in mind for later practice and dancing. If an image did not work for you, simply find a different one. Each movement can be “imaged” in a myriad of ways. Mystically, images sometimes have an expiry date, they might stop working after a while. This can mean that you have integrated the movement into your system and the image is no longer recognised as fresh. Although each image emphasizes one particular aspect of a movement, at the same time, and this is truly wonderful, it involves your WHOLE BODY in the totality of the given movement. This is also what makes images so powerful: by concentrating on one single intention your body suddenly organises itself around it in a very intelligent and extremely efficient way. 

It may happen that images do not work for you at all or only occasionally. Instead you learn best from visual and sensory examples or with detailed functional explanation. In this case simply tell the teacher that all these “soft panther paws”, “balloons stuck to the chest” and “crushing the brains of your exes” are not doing the job for you. Ask to give you the information in a way that makes you feel the “click” and improves your movement. We all have imagination yet our brains are not all wired in the same way. This is why it is important to find teachers who speak your “language” in terms of learning and to become such a teacher to yourself. Remember that our movements are governed by a system far more complex and intricate than anything we can understand and it is always a combination of things that makes us move in delicious ways, feeling at once light and powerful, spontaneous yet in control, free to express ourselves in dance. Images are often the only gateways leading you to this freedom.

RUSSIAN, ITALIAN, HUNGARIAN

May 5, 2021