Category: Learning & Teaching

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

One of the most difficult topics for teachers as well as for students is musicality. It is fairly easy to explain musical theory, the rhythmical structure of a tango song, how to identify the strong beat, follow the melody, recognise various instruments and understand when a phrase starts and when it finishes. However, all this information, albeit essential, will not make anyone dance musically. No matter how much time a teacher spends talking about musical theory, this in itself will not produce dancers who are more musical. Then what will? And how can someone who has never danced before become a musical dancer in tango?

First, we need to understand what it means to be musical.

Sensitivity to music is the ability to recognise musical patterns: feel the rhythm, identify the melodic line, distinguish harmonies, sounds and so on. This ability comes in various degrees. Some people only recognise musical patterns and feel them, but are not able to move their body rhythmically (clap the hands, tap the feet, walk in the beat). Other people not only hear the music well, but can also associate what they are hearing with a rhythmical movement of the body. The first musical instruments in the prehistoric times were drums (therefore the word “beat”). Music-making and dancing were often one and the same activity, for ritual and shamanic purposes. Primitive tribes still make music by adorning their bodies with sound-making objects and then dancing. We also sing to make music, the human voice becoming a musical instrument.

Nowadays our musical instruments are technically so complex and the various dance forms so rich that we have a clear specialization in “musicians” and “dancers”. (For the sake of the argument I will keep the singers in the “musicians” group as singers use their body to reproduce music as if it were an instrument). We also know that it requires two different talents to become a musician or a dancer. If the body of a musician uses its movement to extract sound waves from an object, the body of a dancer does something very different: it creates an association between a musical pattern and body movement in such a way that the two fuse into one coherent expression. (Orchestra conductors are possibly the ones who still do both: they “dance” to extract music from the “instrument” that is an orchestra. They are the contemporary shamans.)

We can therefore identify three different abilities: hearing (sensitivity to music), hearing + playing (making music) and hearing + dancing (associating movement with music). Most people have at least some degree of musical hearing and this is why music is still the most widely enjoyed art of all, in any culture.

What does it mean to be a musical dancer? It is not enough to be simply musical, although this is the necessary starting point. A dancer needs to have this particular ability to associate music to movement, to become music that has become movement. Like musicians, people who dedicate themselves to dance have this gift from birth. Yet, as I said, this ability comes in VARIOUS DEGREES.

One can be basically musical or exceptionally musical. Just like there are many naturally musical people who play instruments without becoming a musician, there are many “natural born dancers”. Most children dance naturally when very small. While growing up we often lose the naturalness of our musical movement, our brain and body giving priority to developing other skills. Yet some people keep it and are easy to spot: they have an unstoppable urge to move the moment they hear music that they like. You can see them in night clubs, at parties, even on the street swaying or tapping their feet to the sound coming out of their headphones. People who learn to dance at an adult age are often from this group, because dance is always looking to express itself through their bodies. However, in tango classes I also see a lot of people who either never were “natural born dancers” or have somehow lost this particular connection between hearing and moving.

When a person is a “natural dancer”, certain things in a tango class will be easier for them than for others. Stepping in the beat, recognising accents, making pauses, slowing down or accelerating together with the music, all this will not have to be explained, just shown. This student’s ability will be further fine tuned to the particularities of tango as a music and a dance, often less by watching a teacher than by simply finding his or her own ways of expression. The “naturals” often prefer not to hear too much of musical theory for it takes them out of their intuitive following of music, confuses them, and requires a mental effort they never had to do. They dance to a syncope naturally but have a hard time analysing why and how they do it.

When a person is not a “natural dancer”, things will be more difficult for them and subsequently also for the dance teacher. Everything, from stepping into the beat to choosing when to pause or to accelerate, will require a lot of attention and practice. Because it needs so much work, many teachers (and students) tend to give up on musicality altogether or keep it to basic theoretical knowledge. People tend to believe that it is not possible to make someone a truly musical dancer: you either have this gift or you don’t. I would rephrase it: I believe it is much easier to help someone become a musical dancer when s/he is already naturally gifted for it, but the other task is not impossible either.

As I said, most of us have a musical hearing built into our brain. Anything we already have as neural connections in our brain can be further developed and reinforced. Learning a particular dance is about learning to associate a given movement vocabulary to a given music in a meaningful way. Here “meaningful” means following the musical parameters. Training your brain to better understand and recognise the parameters of a musical piece can help you to associate your movement to it in a more precise way.

To tango students who struggle with musicality, I would give the following advice. You will need to reinforce two areas of your skills: first, your hearing of music, and second your music-to-movement association. Your hearing of music can be improved by listening to it a lot and learning to consciously recognise and identify its parameters: beats, structure, phrasing, melody, instruments and so forth. Here I am talking not only of the theoretical (rational) recognition but also of the “sensations” that hearing creates inside your being. Hearing the violin strike a phrase also means feeling something inside yourself respond to it as if you were a violin yourself (NB: a violin, not a violinist). It might sound strange to you, but this is what happens when you listen to a piece of music you truly love: inside your being something BECOMES it, as if somehow your soul took on that musical shape.

The second skill can be improved in two ways (and I suggest you use both). The first method is to associate the music to some kind of simple movement: walking, tapping of feet, nodding of the head, even singing, until it becomes intuitively right. This will reinforce your sense of RHYTHM. The second method is to allow yourself to dance in a completely free way to tango music, letting go of the tango vocabulary. Thinking of doing the correct moves often requires so much effort on our part that we become incapable of doing it musically. So, take time alone to dance to tango music whichever way you please. Groove to it. Hiphop to it. Sway, rock, swing, whirl, shake your bonbon to it. You will do your brain and your body an immense favor: your nervous system will start building neural connections between what you hear and how you would like to move to it. It will start liberating your DANCE EXPRESSION. In the tango class, associating the “proper” vocabulary to music will then become easier because your body will feel more free moving to music at all. These methods are used with children when teaching them to dance or to play instruments. In your learning process you should take advantage of both becoming like a child again AND using the power of your conscious mind.

For those who find themselves thinking “yes, this is all very nice, but I truly have no sense of rhythm, I am so stiff in my body, I feel helpless and awkward when asked to move to any kind of music” I can say the following: think of people diagnosed with autism. They find themselves incapable of recognising the emotions of others and adequately reacting to them. Yet, with proper technique and practice, they learn to do it by working with the visible PARAMETERS they CAN recognise. They learn to associate a certain facial expression with “fear” and rationally choose an appropriate response. They do not become truly empathic but can live a much more connected life socially. If you feel you are “musically autistic”, remember that your brain has a plasticity you are not aware of and that there are methods of developing your musicality, just as there are methods for autists to lead a social life. It will require dedication, patience and work, but it will pay off in ways you never imagined.

For teachers I would suggest not to give up on the “unmusical students”. Giving up on them says more about your own inability to teach them than about their inability to learn. Most dance teachers are naturally musical, intuitive dancers. If you are one of those, then your responsibility as a teacher is to ANALYSE rationally what you do and to explain it to students who are not able to just copy it. You will have to know a lot more about rhythmic structures, how to count the beat, where to find the syncopes, what makes a phrase a phrase. Just like to an autistic person you would say “I am fearful therefore my body becomes rigid and my face serious” you would have to explain to some students “I pause and hold the pause here because I hear this instrument stop playing and the other instruments hold the same note”. 

It sounds like a laborious and counter-intuitive way, but believe me, it helps with the cases everyone (including themselves) consider helpless. Of course, you can also just give up on them. You can always say that without a natural gift one cannot be a dancer. You will always be right, at least partially, and you will create an air of superiority around your own talent and that of the “chosen ones”. Yet, I personally believe that tango, of all dances, is one that people can enjoy at any age, with any body type and any innate abilities. I also believe that talent is only the beginning of things, never the end, and that with the right kind of practice we can arrive in places we never dreamt of before.

RUSSIAN, CHINESE, GERMAN

May 24, 2015

Sometimes at the end of a workshop a student would say to me: “You teach basic things that make a lot of sense. Some of them are so essential that I wonder: why has no one told me this before?” Another remark I get sometimes is: “You know, I took classes with various teachers and they were all telling me different things, sometimes radically opposed. I feel like every time I had to change completely. I am confused and feel that I have wasted so much time. Why does this happen?”

There is a simple answer to these questions. If tango dancers needed to have their competence certified by a diploma from an officially recognised institution before being allowed to teach, the above situations would become exceptions. The complex answer is that, although tango is slowly moving in the direction of a fairly unified approach to teaching, so far it was exactly the absence of institutionalized education that has given us a dance so incredibly rich in forms, styles and techniques. Each person that has come to tango has shaped it in his or her own way, each beginner has in the long run defined tango just as much as any professional by choosing from whom and what to learn, how to dance, which events to support. All the professionals you admire have developed their skills much more by researching and practicing than by learning it from someone else, they often have literally invented what they are teaching. Differences in approaches and techniques are inevitable.

Tango is an organically growing phenomenon and so far has been quite resistant to the attempts to define it or limit it to a particular form. To me, this is what makes tango fascinating, powerful and intensely alive. This also makes tango confusing, especially for new dancers. Tango is a self-educating community in which professionals are not necessarily those who have studied to become one, but those who manage to make a living from it. It means that everywhere the dancers with most motivation and experience become teachers and/or event organisers. They do it for various reasons: passion, personal development, financial motives, public recognition and so on. The only community in which we see some kind of “institutionalized education” is Buenos Aires. There we find schools, companies and competitions that can provide, if not a diploma, then at least some kind of credits.

So, anyone in tango can call himself/herself a tango teacher. The biggest advantage of this situation is that it allows a powerful growth of the tango community, for each new teacher brings in new students. The biggest disadvantage is that there is no guarantee of quality teaching. Especially in small and isolated tango communities there are often no other options than to learn from those who have been dancing the longest and those who simply want to teach.

Dancers that decide to become tango teachers often start by giving beginner classes. It is easier to create a new group of students that to convince the already experienced dancers to take classes with a brand new teacher. This means that beginners in tango are exposed to teaching of all kinds: from very good to very poor. As people progress, they sometimes navigate to teachers who offer better quality, but at that point they have often acquired inefficient movement habits that are hard to replace. This is the number one problem many dancers face at some point in their development. This is a frequent issue I encounter when new intermediate or advanced students come to study with me.

Ideally, one might say, beginners should get the best teachers. But if beginners get the best teachers, who then will teach the advanced? In reality, the most well-known and respected maestros travel, they do not have their own regular classes and rarely teach beginners. This is a task for the local teachers. Unfortunately, beginners tend to be nonchalant in their choice of teachers. We usually assume than anyone calling himself a professional has solid credits, but we have to understand that in tango this is not the case. People running the tango school closest to your home, the one you would choose out of convenience, might be very skilled or completely ignorant. They might even have studied with the greatest maestros and not have learnt a thing, because, you see, a teacher cannot make you dance tango, a teacher can only help.

Besides, great performers are not necessarily excellent teachers and excellent teachers are not necessarily top performers. This is true for any artistic field, teaching and being an artist are two distinct skills. If a dancer is considered good enough to teach others, it does not yet automatically make him able to transmit his or knowledge effectively. Learning how to teach movement is a process in itself. On the other hand, the fact that someone has a talent for teaching, or the wish to become a teacher, does not relieve him or her of the responsibility to build a solid basis as a DANCER first. A dancer’s most important teaching tool remains his own dance. To teach literature you do not need to be a writer, but to teach dance you need to be a dancer first and foremost.

If you are in the beginning of your tango study and in your community there is a variety of teachers available, I suggest you choose wisely. It might save you a lot of trouble later. When looking for a teacher, look for the dancer first. If you are a beginner and have friends who already dance, let them take you to a milonga (or a class) and have a look at how the teachers dance. (You can also watch them on video, but it’s not the same). Talk about what you see with people who have experience, but also make your own judgement. Try to notice those who are really dancing, with ease and flow, in harmony with the partner. They might be the most spectacular dancers in the room or they might be the quiet couple walking around the floor, barely attracting attention. Social tango is an introvert dance. If all you have ever seen of tango are stage shows, remember that in a class you will be learning a very different kind of tango. This is why you should look for trustworthy sources of information. I can assure you, however, that in a milonga you will notice the truly excellent dancers in a blink of an eye. You will not necessarily like their style, but you will be immediately aware of their quality.

Once you know that certain teachers are expert dancers, how do you know if they are also good teachers? “Look at their students”, you might say. Unfortunately the matter is trickier. A teacher is not a factory. The most competent teachers cannot do anything for you if you are not making an effort to learn or other things are blocking you from improving your dance. The important thing to realise is that it is not about finding a hypothetically “good” teacher, it is about finding one that can teach you WHAT YOU WANT. There are many directions in which you could grow in tango, choose one that inspires you right now. If you know what you want, you are bound to find someone able to teach you that. When you find a compatible and competent teacher, stick to him/her for a while and try to get the most out of it.

There are three signs that your teacher/student relationship is working. First, you progress in the desired direction, provided you are making efforts to learn and your teacher is making efforts to teach. Second, you gain more and more clarity about what you are doing, understanding the dance in greater detail every time. Third, you are enjoying your growth and your dance, you are inspired and enthusiast about what you learn, even if the way there is challenging and sometimes you feel like nothing is working. If the above is not your case, then either your teacher is not right for you or you are not really learning.

Next to local teachers there is also a large buffet of traveling maestros who give workshops at tango events. They are often more accomplished than the local teachers but not necessarily. If you are only in your first or second year of tango study, try not to eat the whole buffet at once. In the beginning it might become very confusing trying to learn with too many different teachers, especially as you never know how competent they will turn out to be. Even if all the teachers are excellent, they will inevitably put the emphasis on what they like, what they do best, what makes THEM passionate about tango. If you do not yet have a global view of the dance as a logical system of movement in which all those variables have their place, it might overwhelm and confuse you. Try them out, but again, choose wisely.

The more experience you get, the faster you become in assessing whether a teacher is right for you, the easier it also becomes to separate the competent from the incompetent. Always remember that you, the student, are the most important factor in the learning process. A good teacher will be able to assess your level of skill, understand how fast and in which direction you can grow and then help you take ONE STEP FORWARD each time. But you will be the one taking the step.

POLISH, RUSSIAN, FRENCH, CHINESE

August 20, 2014

Everybody who has ever taken learning tango seriously, has suffered psychologically during the process. I could even safely say that if you have not suffered at least once while improving your tango, you have probably never learned anything. I often hear students say “I cannot go dancing after a class. Everything feels wrong!” In times of intense learning the suffering can become so unbearable that you will think of quitting tango. But what makes us suffer so much?

When learning a new movement or a new way of doing something, you will go through four phases: unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence and unconscious competence. I did not invent these terms, they are widely used in many fields. Take an example of how to do an ocho. You might be dancing ochos but not be aware that you don’t do them correctly. You have developed a habit of doing them in this particular way. You might lose balance sometimes, or be otherwise uncomfortable, but you don’t know how it is related to your ochos. This is the “unconscious incompetence” phase.

Then the teacher tells you that your ochos could be improved and what exactly is not working well. You start paying attention and suddenly you too become aware of what is not working. This is the start of the “conscious incompetence” phase. You now know what you are doing wrong.

Next, you start trying to do it right, with the available understanding and guidance. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Slowly your ochos improve, but only when you pay close attention, correct your movement, use the right images. This is the “conscious competence” phase. Your competence is growing, but requires a mental and a physical effort to disarm the automatic pattern and to create a new one.

When your body has fully assimilated the new way of moving, it no longer feels like effort and it no longer requires your full attention. It becomes a HABIT, just like doing the ochos the wrong way was before. This is when you become “unconsciously competent”. This is what dancers, musicians, actors, athletes and others are working toward. Only when it is without effort can a movement be truly free. This feeling of EFFORTLESS DANCE is one of the most beautiful experiences in life. Yet, as a teacher, I see far more students stop at some point in their development instead of continuing to improve. Why doesn’t everybody keep on learning, if in the end we get this beautiful reward?

It has everything to do with the second and the third phase.

You see, when you develop a habit it becomes comfortable, even if the movement itself is incorrect or unproductive. You get used to the effort it requires, to the consequences it produces in your body. You settle into it and your body prefers the comfort of an automatic habit to something new every time. Seeking comfort is one of our main driving forces. The trick your brain plays on you, is that you can do bad ochos but still feel like a queen. But then you take a class, you learn what to do and what not to do. You come to a milonga, start dancing and your body, by habit, goes into automatic mode, except that now you are aware of everything you don’t like about it. And that feels terrible. The new, correct movement, has not become automatic yet. Changing an existing habit is like breaking off a long term relationship: you know it is no longer good for you, but you still suffer miserably.

First, you suffer because of your body. You have now rationally learned not to trust a habit that your body has always trusted, so there is an internal conflict. Secondly, it is your ego. It has a hard time coping with the feeling of “nothing working anymore”, especially with so many people around you and one of them in your arms. You feel all kind of emotions, from shame to anger. You feel like a broken instrument, a dismantled doll.

How you deal with this feeling will define what comes next.

If you get stuck in this frustration and start identifying yourself with your “problem”, then the phase of conscious competence will be very difficult. As soon as you start thinking of yourself as “the girl who does not do her ochos correctly”, you, well… become the girl who doesn’t do her ochos correctly! The longer you focus on what is “wrong”, the slower the change will be. On the other hand, if you see this frustration is a vital and positive step, if you welcome that feeling, if you rejoice in the understanding of your “problem”, then the solutions will come much easier. Push, but do not punish yourself. Instead of saying “here I go again, all wrong!” say: “Ha, I did it the old way again, that’s interesting. Let’s try a different way.” To effectively train your body you have to effectively train your mind.

You have to understand that frustration is a sign that you are on the RIGHT PATH. And there is even more good news. If you keep CONSCIOUSLY OBSERVING what you are doing, your wrong habits will start changing by the mere act of observing. I don’t know why and how it works, but I know that it does. Such is the power of human awareness. The phase of conscious competence will require this constant awareness of what you are doing, every time, it will also require a mental and a physical effort, but most of all it will require dedication and perseverance. In tango this is when things become challenging. You see, we are talking about going out here, having fun, socializing, dressing up, flirting, meeting friends and new people, being on constant display… not practicing the violin all by yourself in your room! This is where a lot of people give up, right when it starts to become interesting.

When you learn something with your body and do not spend sufficient time practicing the new way of moving, you do not reinforce the corresponding neural pathways in your brain. Even if something worked in the class and your body already knows how to do it with a conscious effort, the moment you allow yourself to revert to automatic behaviour you are reinforcing the existing neural pathways and therefore reinforcing the habit. This is why, for example, professional ballet dancers still go to a class every morning before rehearsals and performances: so that the teacher can help them correct what they do. In tango many people develop the knowing of “what is wrong” but never get to the stage when it is “right”. They either keep bouncing back and forth between frustration and unconscious movement, or prefer to stop learning altogether because it is too hard. You still can have a lot of fun in tango even if you have never danced a correct ocho in your life, you just need to find partners to share it with. You can say to everybody and yourself “this is the way I do my ochos”, and be done with it. To keep improving the skill is a choice surprisingly few people make.

Do we have to suffer to learn? No, in reality we don’t. Small children learn many things without suffering and beating themselves up, just by remaining curious and open. We don’t have to suffer to learn as we don’t have to suffer to live, yet we all do. Our suffering can be a great catalyst for change, and if you use it as one, you will eventually get to enjoy the “unconscious competence” phase. And then you will know that it was all WELL WORTH THE PRICE.

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

November 12, 2013

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