Author: Veronica Toumanova

What is the most important thing in tango? Different people might say it’s music, or connection, embrace, joy, social interaction, developing your skill and so on. Fortunately, we all have different priorities and preferences. However, the most important thing in tango is none of these. Nevertheless it is so important and so all-encompassing that we tend to overlook it altogether. That most important thing in tango has nothing to do with tango, yet it determines your tango experience in every possible sense.

I have now got your full attention, haven’t I.

Here it comes: the most important thing in tango is your point of awareness.

I first thought of calling it the level of awareness, but level is too hierarchical, and awareness is not really bottom-up. It is more about expanding in several directions at once. What happens when you shift your point of awareness is extremely difficult to describe (I actually doubt we know what happens, it is a mystery of consciousness), but I can illustrate it with examples.

Think of yourself as the very fresh beginner you were when you just started learning tango. Remember how you felt, what you knew and thought about tango. Pugliese at its most dramatic probably stirred your soul. Being able to do a high voleo (or lead one) seemed like the ultimate tango bliss you will ever have. Dancing with that guy or that girl seemed as unattainable as becoming a movie star. Now think about where you are RIGHT NOW. You might have gone from grooving to Gotan Project to enjoying a quiet walk to Firpo, and yet are still considered a sane person. You might have learned to do a voleo but discovered that you still don’t know how to pivot after all these years. Shifting your point of awareness is exactly this: becoming a different person, yet remaining yourself.

When you come to a tango teacher, you probably say: “I have this problem. I keep losing balance and I also feel very uncomfortable when I do this and that.” The teacher will dance with you, look at you, make you do some exercises, explain you some theory and then things will start to change. You will first, with teacher’s help, become acutely aware of when something is not working. Next, you will understand why. You will be given tools and images to CORRECT what you are doing to get a different result. You will now also become aware of when something IS working. At the end of the class you will find your point of awareness shifted. You now know much more about your “problem” and the ways of solving it. But you do not only know it in your mind. You actually PERCEIVE and FEEL much more of what is going on. You have a new, all-inclusive, bodily understanding of that subject.

Quite magical, if you think about it.

Learning tango does not happen in a class, learning happens INSIDE YOUR BEING. It happens by continuously shifting your point of awareness (POA, in short). Your teacher can help you shift it, but cannot do it for you. You will have to allow the shift to happen. Your teacher can teach you things because s/he has a different POA in that subject. S/he sees and feels things in your dance that you are only vaguely aware of. S/he also sees connections between various problems, and sees that the solution might not be where you were looking for it. S/he also understands your psychological profile and chooses a personal approach: what you are ready to hear and what you are not ready to hear. Your teacher will not try to bring you AT ONCE to her/his own POA if the gap between you two is significant. A good teacher will help you nudge your POA just a little bit further from where it is right now, every time.

Why is your point of awareness so important? Simply because it defines every experience you have, your every behavior, perception, goal and judgement. The paradox of awareness is that you often feel as if your current POA is final. Until something you read, something you hear or feel or think gives you a nudge. For most people this point is constantly shifting, for we are always expanding, learning something new, reflecting on things, trying things in a different way. Great and sudden shifts are called epiphany or revelation. It is what Buddha felt sitting under the tree, or something you might feel watching a great dancer perform. A sudden shift of POA feels as if you just gained a huge new body of knowledge, as if suddenly you understand and feel things in a fresh, enhanced, more complete way. We are always aware when our POA shifts. It can be an “aha” moment or it can be just a “yes, right, I see” moment. Apart from learning that Santa Claus does not exist, it is usually quite a pleasant experience.

Now, how will this help your tango?

The work of a teacher is to understand where his/her students stand in their awareness and how to bring them one step further. The work of a student is to understand that his/her point of awareness needs to shift all the time if learning is to be successful. You can block your POA or let it flow smoothly.

Each excessively rigid opinion of yourself or the world will block your POA from shifting. If you think “I will never learn how to do this, my mother always told me I had no sense of rhythm”, you are blocking your POA. If you think “true tango is only so-and-so, forever and ever, amen”, you are blocking your evolution. If you think “good dancers are snobs, they only want to dance with good dancers” you are blocking yourself from becoming a good dancer. You cannot despise someone and aspire to become like that person at the same time, that’s just absurd. If you think “tango is only for young women who have long legs that kick very high”, you are blocking yourself from finding out that it is not true. If you are thinking “I don’t know how to do this now, but I will know soon”, then you are allowing you POA to flow.

What is the most optimal condition for learning? It is to become a clean slate. Become like a child who is learning how to walk. The child never curses himself for falling, he just gets up and tries again. Learn in a curious and a totally neutral state, free of all judgement and previous ideas about yourself. Shed your problems, your values, and just see where your POA will want to flow next.

Tango, as a phenomenon, also has its collective point of awareness which is ever-shifting. Just look at what we thought beautiful ten years ago and what we enjoy now. Tango flows, and so should you. If after reading this you feel that you gained some new understanding, then congratulations: your point of awareness just shifted.

RUSSIAN, CZECH, GERMAN, CHINESE, ROMANIAN, HUNGARIAN, POLISH

November 8, 2013

All beginners are alike, each advanced dancer is advanced in his or her own way. When people come to tango (or when tango finds people), they all feel equally helpless, they all discover that they don’t know how to walk without losing their balance and embrace another person without their head getting in the way. They discover that they cannot walk, embrace and listen to the music at the same time. And when they come to their first milonga, they discover that they have first to learn how to LOOK at another person.

The “theoretical” model then goes like this: a beginner gets to intermediate level in one-two years, advanced level in three or four, master level at five and becomes a teacher just after that. But in reality it is rarely true, except for the “becoming a teacher” part. We all know dancers stuck at “poor intermediate” level after 10 years and those who are “very advanced” after 3.

Why does this happen?

If you want to become a ballet dancer, you have to be six years old, have the right genetics, good musicality, natural turnout and a huge motivation. You also need very motivated parents. In professional dance the beginners are alike, so that the advanced can be alike, too. Professional dance education is highly institutionalized to be able to deliver very high final quality and measurable results.

To become a tango dancer you just need to find a beginner class. Tango comes to all kinds of people. Some are musical, others not. Some are at ease in their bodies, others need to be reminded that they have a body. Some are young, some are old. Some want to dance well, others want just to dance. How many have started tango to meet the opposite sex? How many to recover from a breakup? Besides, tango education is not institutionalized, everyone can call himself or herself a tango teacher, rightly or not rightly so. And so every student advances at a different pace and in a different direction. If you look at the incredibly rich variety of forms and styles in tango, you will see the richness of choice. You will also see the virtually limitless complexity of tango.

How does someone become an advanced dancer? Like in any other domain: you have to want it and you need a regular routine of study and practice. Taking classes without going to milongas is like booking beautiful trips but never actually traveling. Dancing in milongas without a regular study will only make you excellent at your own bad habits. You need dedication to become a good dancer, not only passion. You will need good teachers, too. In tango, unlike in professional dance education, there is no guarantee of good teaching (or even good dancing). It is pretty much the matter of compatibility between what you want and what the teacher can give you. Tango, in a way, is like the path to enlightenment: there are guru’s of every kind, you will have to find the one right for you.

What does it mean to be advanced in tango? Here is my personal view. An advanced dancer is first of all musical, has a good understanding of tango vocabulary, can improvise easily, has a good level of technique and is able to improve by himself or herself. An advanced dancer has a good posture, a comfortable and functional embrace, and feels at ease when dancing. The leader dances the sequences, not the sequences dance him, and navigates the floor safely. The follower keeps her balance without leader’s help, completes her movements musically and is a “safe” follower on a crowded dancefloor.

A truly advanced dancer is able to “downshift” and make the partner still feel good. If you think of yourself as advanced leader but you feel incapacitated with a partner below your level, then you are not really advanced, you are just “highly specialized”. You have learned to speak about quantum mechanics but are incapable of discussing the weather. If as a follower you feel a terrific dancer with partners of high level but you cannot keep your balance or complete your movement with a lower-level one, then you are not advanced, you are “dependent” (it has been pointed out that the originally used term “co-dependent” is a psychiatric term and has a different meaning). A queen is a queen no matter who she talks to.

Such dancers are a small minority in tango because to get there requires a strong motivation. And because motivation is fueled by interest, I notice that each advanced dancer is really advanced in only some of the above aspects. I know dancers who are exceptionally musical but lack in the embrace, excellent in complex sequences but not able to comfortably walk. I know leaders who are very enjoyable, but a danger on the dancefloor. There is also another important criteria. An advanced dancer is someone with a PERSONALITY. S/he does not wish to become an exact copy of someone else. A truly advanced dancer will never stop looking for his/her own expression in dance.

In some cases I also see a different dynamic. The more the dancers advance, the more they become alike. This happens, for example, when a teacher is unable to explain the intrinsic mechanisms of the dance and the students can only copy the outer form. This also happens when a community is over-identified with one particular style and this style is considered the only “true tango”. The students start believing that it is the FORM that makes them dancers, and the teachers protect this form from everything that it is NOT. For me, when tango starts being only about form, it stops being about tango. As soon as formalism or mindless physical exercise take over, art quietly leaves. Form is essential but not the essence, the essence of tango is CONNECTION, and if we limit tango to one particular style, we stifle its artistic development. Forms change. Choose your tango, but let others have their tango, too. If you were God and one day, out of boredom or curiosity, you decided to create tango dancers, would you make them all alike?

Paradoxically, tango is not about making you advanced, it is about making you dance. It is about discovering YOU in tango. For this you need to continuously look for the connection to yourself, for what makes YOU love tango. The only way to grow is to keep wanting to become a better you.

RUSSIAN, HUNGARIAN, ITALIAN, POLISH, CHINESE, BULGARIAN, KOREAN, CZECH, GERMAN, ROMANIAN, SLOVENE, TURKISH, FRENCH, FINNISH

October 30, 2013

Tango is a dance, but learning and teaching tango is not like teaching and learning other dances. Partially it is and partially it is not. Because of the “not” part learning tango should not be compared to learning a dance, but to learning a language. 

Tango as a dance consists of two components: your own movement and the giving/receiving of the impulse. This is because tango is based on IMPROVISING TOGETHER.

When you learn a dance that you do alone in front of a mirror, you are perfecting your own movement and you are mostly performing choreographies. You are not inviting another person to follow your movement, nor are you learning to understand another person’s lead. In this, tango is much closer to contact improvisation. You can be an accomplished, say, ballet dancer and be totally hopeless in tango if you do not learn to communicate with a partner.

How do you learn a dance that is more like a language? In quite the same way you would learn a language. You will need vocabulary, pronunciation, grammatical rules and so on. So far nothing spectacular. But then comes the crucial point. In order to speak a language with ANOTHER PERSON you actually have to have something to say. And to be understood by others you have to be able to say it WELL. And that has nothing to do with the language itself.

You see, a language teacher can teach you a lot about structure and order. But the creativity in what you are actually saying comes from another place entirely. A major problem for tango teachers is that they have to teach you a language AND be literature professors at the same time. They have to teach you to understand, love and master READING in that new language. They also want to teach you CREATIVE WRITING in the language. Can a tango teacher teach you to say interesting things? And to say them well? Can a tango teacher actually teach you how to dance? Yes, they can. They CAN be a language and literature professor and creative writing coach in one. But they have to know how. Some of them do, and some of them don’t. Be patient with tango teachers, for theirs is not an easy task.

When you come to your first French class the teacher does not say: “Let me tell you what I love about that particular passage in Proust, when the light of the setting sun suddenly touches the spire of the faraway church and how it affects the main character.” What you learn in your first French class is: “Je m’appelle Marie. Comment tu t’appelles?” 

The most heard critic of tango teachers is: why do you keep teaching people sequences? They start dancing like robots. They just repeat the same sequences. They never get to the creative part. Why do you teach people complicated figures? Why don’t you teach people how to walk properly, to enjoy, you know, the SMALL STUFF?

You have to understand that, if steps are “words” in tango, the sequences are its poetry. Sequences are the haiku’s of tango, they are some dancer’s creativity made movement. Can you write poetry without first reading poetry? Yes, you can. But your poetry will probably become better if you read a lot of other people’s poetry. Sequences can be beautiful and not so beautiful, simple and complex, silly and serious, just like poems. It can be children’s verse and it can be Brodsky. The problem is not the sequences. They have to be DANCED WELL to really come alive. Tango teachers teach you sequences to teach you to DO THEM WELL and to nurture your own creativity.

You also have to understand that not everybody will write his/her own poetry. That the majority of tango dancers will keep repeating the poetry of others. And a lot of tango professionals, too. Is that a problem? No. Do we get angry with musicians for always playing that damn Bach again? Not if it is played well.

When a teacher says: “Look, you can only walk the whole tango and you are already dancing!” and then looks triumphantly at his/her beginner students, the teacher needs to understand that when s/he walks with his or her partner, the “conversation” they have goes something like this:

“Oh I love the feeling of having your free foot just at the tips of my fingers, so to say. – Yes, I know, I can feel how you control it, and I very much enjoy how you are sending the impulse right to my center from where, like a little lively fire, it travels all the way to my foot. – That weight transfer of yours was delicious. The way you first slightly caressed the floor and then sailed there, smoothly like a boat on quiet waters. – I know! And I love how you accompanied me in your embrace, as if I was a sleeping child.”

Whereas, when their beginner students are told to just walk, their “conversation” goes like this:

“Je m’appelle Marie. Comment tu t’appelles? – Je m’appelle Jean. Comment tu t’appelles? – Je m’appelle Marie. Comment tu t’appelles?”

Students need to reach a certain level of awareness to be able to understand and enjoy the SMALL STUFF. Before you can like Proust you have to read some children’s stories, some crap romance, some good romance, some thrillers, some chick lit, some Tolstoi. And some people will never like Proust. Some dancers will never like just walking. Some people will prefer playing with difficult figures to just sailing the dance floor. YOU as a teacher have had your fun with volcadas in those days when it was fashionable, haven’t you? Yes, the walk is the basis and the beauty of tango, but teachers, do not become caminata nazis, now and then give your students some other things “to read”. And then go back to what YOU like. Maybe YOU don’t like Proust that much, either. Do not judge your students for not liking (yet) the same thing you like. You have had some years to develop that preference, and they have not.

As for the creativity issue, the critique of “you should not teach people sequences but basic elements” is only partially correct. You should teach people the correct use of basic elements in the context of sequences. You cannot tell a dancer: “Here you have a step and a pivot. Now have fun with it.” It’s like telling a beginning musician: “Here is a piano. See, lots of shiny keys! Now make some music.” Or, to keep with my initial metaphor, saying to a French class student: “Here is a dictionary. Write a poem and it’d better be a good one!”

RUSSIAN, TURKISH, CHINESE, CZECH, GERMAN, ROMANIAN, POLISH

October 22, 2013