Category: Practicing & Improving

There exists a belief in the tango community that sounds something like this: “If I get to dance with better dancers, my dancing will improve much faster than if I only dance with people of my own level.” Or like this: “Experienced dancers should dance more with beginners. How are these poor souls supposed to learn if they are stuck with other beginners?” A female student leaving a class with the words: “Every new follower should be given a very good leader from the start! If we wait for these men here to become decent dancers, we will be waiting forever!” 

The learning curve phenomenon seems to back it up. For beginning leaders this curve is rarely the same as for beginning followers. Leaders generally have a harder time learning and getting dances in the first couple of years. A beginning (female) follower, on the other hand, if she is a promising dancer, plus young and good looking, will be noticed by more experienced (male) leaders. How often have you heard the story: “Oh, when she started, all the better dancers wanted to dance with her, so OBVIOUSLY she became very good very quickly.” It can happen with a new male leader, too. Being young and good looking helps, but the key word here is “promising”. It means that this person already has something worthwhile to offer, such as an eagerness to learn. 

The notion that if only expert dancers agreed to dance with you, your tango skills would skyrocket is so widespread that it regularly puts me (the “expert dancer”) in comical situations. I had a total stranger once come up to me in a milonga and say: “I have only been dancing for a month, but I figured that dancing with a teacher would be very beneficial for me.” I have been rebuked for refusing invitations: “You have some nerve, you know. How are these guys supposed to become good dancers if you won’t even look at them?” And consider how often you hear the following remark: “You know, when YOU were a beginner, better dancers danced with you because they wanted to help you.” To which, by the way, I always reply: “They danced with me because I was young, pretty and with a background in dance.”

So is it true that dancing with better dancers makes you a better dancer? 

First, let’s define what we mean by “better”. When talking about levels in tango, we are forced to over-simplify things in order to categorise, but in reality there are many variables that constitute someone’s appeal as a dancer. It is never the technique alone, nor the number of steps, nor the ability to lead or follow, nor the musicality. It is all of those things combined. We can at best imagine a dancer’s skill as a DJ mixing table with several sliders. Each slider represents a sub-skill or an ability that can be at a higher or a lower position, depending on this person’s experience, talent and dedication. I can think of several sliders: technique, vocabulary, communication (leading/following), embrace, musicality, navigation, social skills. To this we should add, to further complicate things, the human factor. It is partially inherent and partially learnt in order to fit into the tango community. In many situations, the human factor will be decisive in the choice of partner DESPITE good or bad skills in other areas. 

To think that we can categorise each dancer based on the vocabulary or the number of years in tango would be naive. It would also be naive to categorise dancers by human factor alone. We know that reality is more complex. You have probably met people who dance a lot of complicated steps and all of them badly. You have surely met dancers with a modest vocabulary but a great embrace or musicality. When we speak of “better dancers” or “a higher level”, we therefore have to bear in mind that it encompasses an array of skills, not all of them necessarily in equally high positions on the mixing table. Choosing to dance with a certain person is always a package deal. We will easily accept some flaws if they are compensated by finer qualities.

This said, let’s look into what happens when you dance with a partner whose sliders are – for the sake of the argument – all in much higher positions than yours. If you are a follower dancing with a much more expert leader (and you are not stressed out of your mind by this situation), your movements will feel more effortless, more “correct”, you will feel more balanced, easily musical and possibly dance steps you have never danced before. An experienced leader will create the optimal conditions for your movement to be as good as you can make it. The goal of a precise lead is exactly that: to PROVOKE a well-done movement. Whether the follower is able to dance this movement well, is another matter. The leader will also avoid leading you the steps that would totally overwhelm you. If you have problems with balance or pivoting, you will either feel them very clearly, if the leader is not compensating for them, and become acutely aware of how much you still have to improve. OR you will feel as if they magically disappeared. This can mean two things. One, the leader is discreetly helping you. Two, you are able to do these movements well, but only in ideal circumstances and with an ideal partner (also known as the “conscious competence” learning stage). 

If you are a leader dancing with a much more expert follower and relaxed enough to concentrate on the dancing, then you will find that practically everything you lead gives marvellous results. The tiniest impulse evokes a meaningful response and the blurriest of ideas transforms into something delicious or at least dignified. You will find yourself leading things you have never led before and expressing yourself in the music with much more ease. You might truly feel like a DANCER. Your problems with balance, pivoting or walking may still bother you but at the same time you will feel that somehow they do not bother your partner all that much. The overall experience will be quite enjoyable. However, all of this is only true if the follower decides to compensate for whatever is lacking in your lead. In a milonga this is what an experienced follower will do most of the time if s/he accepts your invitation. 

To understand this, imagine yourself trying to talk in a foreign language that you barely know to a native speaker. You can actually have a very good conversation if that person makes the effort to understand you, to ignore the imperfections, to finish your phrases here and there and to help you find the right words. Your conversation partner will do his or her best to understand you with as little input as possible, but will also limit their own expression to what you are able to understand in return. Now imagine that instead this person points out every single mistake that you make. You would promptly lose track of your thoughts and the whole conversation would become about how to say things correctly instead of what you actually want to say. And if this person starts speaking to you as if you were another native speaker, you wouldn’t be able to hold the conversation at all.

When I am teaching a leader or a follower, I do my best to make the student immediately aware of the results of our communication. Therefore in a class context, in movement terms, we have conversations about “how to speak properly” and “how to express oneself”, with some chatting practice. But in a social setting this kind of feedback would be too confrontational. In a milonga we want to make the best with what we have and to have a good time, not to make other people uncomfortable. This ability to compensate for the lack of skill in a partner is actually what makes a dancer truly advanced. The whole point of improving your technique is to become like a native speaker. This is also what makes dancing with an advanced dancer so fulfilling: s/he is independent of your skill yet able to communicate with you at YOUR best. This does not mean that advanced dancers always enjoy dancing with partners far below their level. Often they don’t. Compensating and trying to understand other dancers with very little input is hard work. Limiting your own range of expression just to have a simple conversation is frustrating. This is why experienced dancers tend to be picky. Not because they are snobs. Not because they look down on less experienced people. But because the inequality of the situation is hardly ever in their favor. 

If dancing with a much better dancer gives you a better EXPERIENCE, does this mean that you automatically become a better dancer yourself? 

Many students choose to take private classes with teachers of the opposite role instead of going to group classes. Working with an experienced partner does indeed create the MOST OPTIMAL conditions for improving your skill. You can be sure that what you lead or how you follow is felt and understood by the other party without the “noise” of their own struggles. You know that ninety-nine percent of all mistakes will be your mistakes. And even if in social context we very much like the phrase “there are no mistakes, only pure improvisation”, in a study you need some established notions of what works and what doesn’t, what is comfortable and what is not, what is right and what is wrong. Taking regular private classes offers a “fast track” and can deliver very good results, but only on two conditions. First, your teacher must give you precise feedback (meaning, not compensate for your shortcomings) and second, YOU must make consistent efforts to improve. 

This way of learning also has a potential risk. The more you practice exclusively with a professional of the opposite role, the more you become accustomed to these perfect conditions. This can leave you feeling helpless with people of your real level. With your social partners you might feel like all your hard-learnt technique vanishes into thin air and this means that you are still very much dependent on the other person. If this is the case, do not despair. You are in your “conscious competence” phase and if you persevere, things will get better.

This is why I recommend starting to study tango by going to beginner classes, not directly with private classes. If you put a total beginner with a professional teacher, the beginner will feel that things work out well most of the time. Working exclusively with a private teacher might make you a very lonely social dancer. There is a risk of ending up with unrealistic expectations for both the people of your own level and the more advanced dancers. The first won’t satisfy you and the second won’t dance with you for some time. Therefore I advise beginners to take regular group classes and to practice with other beginners for at least a year. Even if it seems slower and more painstaking, it does achieve something very important: it teaches you to be patient. It shows you the importance of accepting the struggles of your partner and your own struggles as your partner reflects them back to you. It prepares you for the social context of tango by cultivating compassion.

We often so desperately want to do things right that we forget that we have to do them wrong many times and enjoy the process before we actually get anywhere. Learning together with other people of similar experience prepares you for the group dynamics and partner changing of social dancing in which nobody is perfect. It teaches you to finetune your skill despite other people’s problems. And there is also a tremendous sense of achievement in progressing TOGETHER with your partner when, after mutual struggles, things finally start working. Believe me, there is nothing quite like that feeling. If you ever studied a foreign language, think of trying to have a conversation with other language students. You all struggled and searched for words, yet how glorious it felt to be able to communicate!

Observing that certain people learn faster by dancing with more experienced dancers has led to a serious misunderstanding. Namely, that simply by having access to better dancers anybody will somehow automatically improve. This is not true. Dancing with a better dancer in a social setting will in most cases simply give you an enjoyable experience at their expense. You will not dance better until YOU intend to dance better and until you put some effort into it, with or without their help. If you find yourself chasing the better dancers without offering something in return, you are being a consumer, not an equal partner. If you demand that they dance with you because this is supposed to be the only way for you to improve, you are using it as an excuse to coerce them into dancing with you. 

In smaller communities the argument “how else are we supposed to learn?” is used to pressure advanced dancers to keep in touch with the beginners. Some efforts to mix the community and to create a more welcoming environment for the newcomers is definitely a good thing. However, I believe that we should be less hung up on our general (and incorrect) definition of levels and leave it to the individuals to choose with whom they feel or do not feel like dancing. We have to remember that someone’s appeal as a dancer is composed of several sliders on a mixing table and that people choose to connect with each other for very different reasons. We also have to respect the advanced dancers. They are a small, tough and very motivated minority and want, like everybody else, to dance to the best of their abilities.

All of the above poses another interesting question. If it’s true that we can improve while dancing with better dancers (provided we are making an effort), then is the reverse also true? Do better dancers become somehow less good when dancing too much with people far below their level? 

When professional leaders spend a lot of time teaching and dancing with inexperienced followers, they might develop “unhealthy” habits. These habits come from consciously or unconsciously compensating the students’ flaws and may result in “over-leading”, tension in the arms and forceful movement. When confronted with a partner of their own level, these leaders might put too much energy into leading movements for which an expert follower needs only very little input. Besides, with their students these leaders practice a simpler vocabulary than they are capable of, risking losing the finesse of more complex movements if they do not practice. The same can be said of professional followers who dance a lot with inexperienced leaders. When they have to follow someone of their own level again, they might feel overwhelmed with the complexity and the subtleties of the lead. Dancing with students does not make these followers less accomplished, but it does make them feel rusty. They might, like the leaders, lose the feeling of ease in dancing more complex dynamics, unless they dance or practice regularly with a partner of the same level.

If you spend a day in the forest chopping wood and then try to play the piano, your fingers will be stiff and insensitive at first. If you spend a day entertaining toddlers, to have a complex debate on international politics in the evening might require some mental readjustment. The same mechanism is at play here as everywhere else: the more you practice something the better you become, and the reverse is true as well. This is why advanced dancers from smaller communities in which they are a tiny minority (and often teachers), feel like their skill is deteriorating with time. They feel the need to travel on a regular basis to meet other advanced dancers just to feel complete, to feel like they can still truly dance. 

Whatever side of the equation you find yourself on, understand that it is never the other dancers that directly enhance or worsen your skills. What they do is provide you with a context, but YOU decide how to deal with it. You can choose to work on your dance with the help or despite your external conditions. This dance requires a lot of skill and a profound connection. If tango were a dance in which everybody just happily danced with everybody else regardless of all the variables I talked about, it would be a very different dance. It would never give us moments of such intense joy that its effect on our brain has been scientifically shown to equal that of meditation. We do pay a price for this intensity, for these moments of incredible connection, but the fact that this does not come easy to us for me is just one more reason to love it.

RUSSIAN, FRENCH, FINNISH, POLISH

July 19, 2017

There exists a belief that focusing too much on technique will put you at risk of becoming an emotionally detached dancer. In tango, this is a very serious risk. If saying “this dancer is not very accomplished technically, but has great human qualities in his or her dance”  about someone can be considered a compliment, saying that someone’s dance is too technical and not emotional enough often means that this person did not understand what tango is really about. We seem to believe that technique can become the opposite of emotion, or human factor in general. To my articles in which I discuss the difficulties of learning the skills of tango, every now and then I get the reaction “Yes, yes, that’s all very nice, but you know, you dance tango with your HEART and all the technique in the world will not teach you this!” 

The tension between technique and emotion is not new, we perceive them as sometimes complementing and sometimes opposing notions in many domains of life, not just tango. In all dance forms teachers and choreographers complain about dancers becoming so driven by perfection that, as a ballet teacher once said, “they seem to be in love with their own legs!” In dance, being absorbed by the technicalities of a movement prevents the dancer from “becoming” the movement and therefore from expressing all that which lies beyond, such as intention, narrative, imagery, mood, emotion, soul and passion.

This tension field between technique and emotion is created in the first place in the way we master any kind of complex skill: the learning process takes up most of our focus. As long as you are learning to master a smooth giro, the emotion will be the last thing on your mind. This study mindset, requiring a complete focus on the task, is what we develop in the context of classes and practicas. As long as our bodymind feels overwhelmed with difficulty, we will tend to “do” rather than “become”. If, after we have arrived at a sufficiently skilled level, we keep this mindset of concentrating on “doing”, our movement will never be fully embodied and our being therefore never fully expressed. 

In any kind of a dance class teachers regularly urge their students, now and then, to stop “executing” and to bring their entire being into movement. It is only then that a movement can become more than a physical action. In some cases, to forcefully leave this mindset, a dancer must completely let himself or herself go and take the risk of doing it IMPERFECTLY for the sake of doing it with real feeling. In each dance we are facing the same trap: the risk of concentrating so much on doing the dance that we forget to live it.

In tango the word “technical” is often used to describe an obsession with complex steps or movement. In social dancing to focus entirely on steps and movement is considered the highest degree of treason as you forsake the connection to your partner and dance by yourself, using the other person as an instrument. This is allowed while practicing, in order to improve, but not in social context. Once in a milonga, you are supposed to put your heart and soul into it. Yet, this is not about technique: it is about FOCUS. Technique is a tool helping you to dance with the least effort possible in the most graceful and efficient way. It is this effortless quality that allows for true expression and makes your dance feel free, exhilarating and so close to flying. Technique gives you freedom of expression by giving you the freedom of movement. What we call “technical yet unemotional” should be more accurately called “movement-focused” or “disconnected”, because, when focusing entirely on how to do the movement, we inevitably disconnect to some extent from the partner, the music, the dance and our emotional self. Being technical means having a certain quality of technique, not being technique-obsessed. All dancers wish they were truly technical, for then they could forget about it.  

A very interesting phenomenon occurs when a person who has been trying to do something perfectly, lets go of this focus and consciously connects to the music, or an image, or an intention. Suddenly the technical quality of the movement improves dramatically! Why is that? You see, when you focus exclusively on the physical action, you neglect the other parameters that create an effortlessly danced movement: its musicality, intentionality and connectedness. This is why dancing with a “technical” focus makes us move in a mechanical way, with either too little or too much energy, either emotionally detached or pathetically frantic. 

The above phenomenon explains why teachers so often, instead of reminding you “to put the foot forward heel-first, then roll it until you arrive” will tell you “now, walk softly, like a cat, imagine your feet are massaging the floor”. Imagery in dance is used precisely for the purpose of enlarging your focus to incorporate other things: music, space, energy, your partner, intention and emotion. This is why images are so effective in dance: when they hit the target your movement becomes instantly COMPLETE. You do need, at some point, to understand the mechanics of a movement in order to bring your technique to a higher level, but to go beyond mechanics you will need an image or an intention. And you need it at every stage, not just after the mechanics have become perfect, because, as we see, the mechanics will not be perfect unless your awareness includes more than just mechanics.

Understanding the movement-focused way of dancing makes us understand why we oppose it to “emotion”. In the tango context I would describe “emotion” as the extent to which you let your personal presence be felt and seen by the other person in an authentic and open way, in other words, whether you are fully present in what you do. When you disconnect from various aspects of the dance and concentrate uniquely on doing the physical movement, you disconnect from your emotions as well. 

We should not confuse emotion with being “all over the place”. An excess of emotions actually disturbs your dance, as your bodymind becomes overwhelmed. One of the reasons we have technique is to be able to feel and show strong emotion yet to keep the body movement within our control. Tango is a dance in which the emotions are directed inside the couple, towards the other more than to the outside, even if you are performing. In tango therefore quite often things do not look the way they feel. Not all that looks complex is necessarily technical: sometimes the least eye-catching dancer in the room is the most technical one. Likewise, not everybody who looks emotionally expressive will feel genuinely present in the embrace. Often a somewhat cold or aloof looking dancer will give you the most intense dance experience.

Teachers are often criticised for making people “technique-focused” as they spend so much time on showing students how to do the steps properly. Many people hold the opinion that studying ruins your authentic connection to tango and that you should go about it intuitively, by feeling and desire only, by human factor alone. If you believe that this has been your way through tango and it paid off very well, you probably do not realise that the way you dance has been largely copied from and influenced by people around you, as well as adapted to the movements of your partners, in other words, there is still a technical part to it that has simply not been the result of a structured study. There isn’t much you can do on a dance floor if all you can offer your partner is a big corazón. Technique is not the problem. The problem is the belief that knowing how to move will make you dance, or the belief that being a lovely person and knowing how to embrace will make you a dancer. Neither of these things ALONE will. However, combined, they can bring about what I still consider, after all these years, to be pure magic. 

There is also another reason why in tango we are so sensitive to this apparent tension between technique and emotionality, and it has everything to do with the nature of the dance itself.

One of the reasons many social dancers do not enjoy watching tango artists perform choreography is that, to them, the mere fact of it being a choreography diminishes the emotional pleasure they get from watching it. Yet, paradoxically, those same viewers may be moved to tears watching a ballet or a contemporary dance performance which is always strictly choreographed. It would never cross their mind to look at Baryshnikov dance, shrug and say: “Well, all very well, but that’s choreography, it does not really touch me emotionally.” In tango, however, we believe that the dancers’ vulnerability in the context of total improvisation brings out that deep emotional charge and that profound and very particular human connection that we see as a UNIQUE CHARACTERISTIC of tango and associate specifically with this dance. In a sense, tango is like a thriller: it seems at every turn that the dancers won’t make it, yet somehow every time they do. In tango we want to see human nature act out spontaneously in these moments of utter insecurity, with all the resulting suspense, abandonment and surprises, yet eventually sail through it with mastery and aplomb. This is why the choreographies that we do like in tango are those that are able to invoke this sense of risk, by a very difficult technical achievement, or by a very strong, often extreme emotion, but most of all by invoking this special human connection specific to tango.

Ultimately, it all comes down to connection: connection to yourself, to emotion, to dance, to music, to your partner, to space. Connection in itself is a technique and at the same time a human factor, therefore difficult to explain and teach. Yet it remains the primary feature in tango, making it into what we know and what we so passionately love, and without which all the techniques and emotions of the world are nothing more than notes on a score, simply waiting for you to play the music.

RUSSIAN, GERMAN, CHINESE, ROMANIAN

January 14, 2016

Once, in a class, a woman asked me: “How can I dance beautifully?” It would have been easier for me to tell her right there how to be happy or what is the meaning of life. Beauty in dance is a complex and multi-layered issue and is difficult to convey in a couple of sentences. So how can you dance beautifully? And what IS beautiful?

Our perception of beauty is at once universal and highly subjective. On one hand, scientists have shown that there are certain visual and auditory patterns that we unconsciously consider beautiful. It seems we come into this world with a beauty radar tuned to certain signals. Research suggests that a pleasant aesthetic experience is triggered by patterns found in the fabric of the universe, like the golden ratio, and so our emotional reaction to beauty is a reaction to something that is fundamentally TRUE to us. On the other hand, aesthetic experience varies greatly from person to person. We do not know why some works of art touch one person more than another, but we know that our taste in beautiful things is influenced and shaped by our previous experience, our education and our personality. This is why you sometimes totally dislike a dancer that everyone around you adores.

You can argue about beauty till you are sore, yet everyone will stick to his or her opinion. Why is that? Because beauty is not something we think, it is something we FEEL. Things we find beautiful are those that resonate directly, as scientists observe, with our deepest sense of self. Our inner notions of beauty change over time, through our activities. For such a notion to change we need to have an internal emotional shift. You cannot make yourself like something by simply saying “this must be beautiful, everyone says so” but such a shift in your perception can happen over time. As a beginner you probably thought some tangos sounded boring and silly, but now they touch you emotionally. Contemporary dance, for example, might at a first glance seem foreign and incomprehensible, but the more you watch and learn about it, the more you develop an emotional response to it, until some choreographies directly touch your “beauty nerve”.

The context for us finding certains things beautiful is defined by the cumulative preferences of a particular audience at a particular moment in time. What we found beautiful in tango ten years ago we find less beautiful now. Tango evolves and so do our ideas, collectively. At every moment in time we uphold standards by which we define dance as beautiful. If this were not so, we would not be able to hold tango competitions or even teach how to dance. These collective preferences basically tell a newcomer: “This is what most people like nowadays in this field. It is OK to like it.”

Yet, as often, tango is a special case. It is one of those rare dances in which the way your dance feels to your partner is much more important than the way your dance looks. Therefore you do not have to dance beautifully to give another person a fulfilling experience. It might sound like a paradox when talking about dance, but remember that tango is similar to conversation. You can have many interesting things to say, create an authentic warm connection, be musical, funny, reactive and an excellent listener. And you can be all of that PLUS express your ideas with style. Dancing beautifully is a skill, something you need to train like you would train rhetorical skills to speak in public. Usually only professional dancers take it that far and this is why you watch their videos and not just anybody’s.

Although we value most how it feels, we do believe that a beautifully dancing person will also be a great partner to dance with. The reason for this is that the most beautifully dancing people are usually accomplished dancers in every sense. Aesthetics play a role in both choosing and attracting potential dance partners. Does it make a difference to your partner if you dance beautifully? Of course. A meal is not just a meal when cooked by a great chef. A visually beautiful movement has a wonderful kinetic quality. If you are a good leader/follower and you also move beautifully, you will give your partner a very special aesthetic pleasure.

At some point in your development you might get the feeling that despite all the learning and practicing your dance still looks mediocre. Watching yourself on video or photos is a traumatizing experience, as you compare yourself to dancers you love watching. You could say that you don’t care much for visual aesthetics and concentrate on how to give the best feeling to yourself and your partner. This is a good strategy, which will always pay off. The social environment in tango is mostly about communication, to dance beautifully is not a strict necessity. When you walk into a milonga you see many people not dancing beautifully at all, yet they are all having a wonderful time.

If you wish to develop a beautiful dance, you need to be aware of three main factors that influence the way your dance looks.

The first factor I will call EMBODIMENT. It is the way your body moves at any time as the result of your personal history, your life, your activities and your psychological state. Your body has grown into your current life much like a tree adapts itself to the surrounding conditions. In Western Europe, for example, most tango people have an intellectual background and their professional activities demand to sit for long hours in front of a computer. Such a lifestyle results in a tense shoulder area, forward protrusion of the head, inflexible pelvis and weak legs: just about the opposite of what is needed in dance.

The way you move and hold yourself will define how easy or difficult learning a dance will be for you and also how your dance will look. A lot of students start their tango classes basically as a brain on two legs. The good news is that embodiment changes when your activities change. Your current way of moving influences how you dance, but learning a new dance will also eventually influence the way you move. These changes, especially postural ones, are slow but possible.

A beautifully moving body is naturally toned, holds itself upright without effort, finds balance easily, its posture and gait are anatomically efficient, its movements are smooth and harmonious. Such a body is highly reactive, spontaneously adequate in its reactions and generally relaxed, meaning it is free of tension. Tension is the opposite of movement and therefore the enemy of dance. If one part of your body is holding itself in a tensed position during the dance it will spoil the visual impression, no matter how masterful you are in your steps.

Some people seem to be naturally more in touch with their bodies than others, more conscious of their body parts and their subtle muscular sensations. Just like the “natural dancers” I wrote about in my article on musicality, you can easily spot such people in a crowd. You will notice their relaxed bodily attitude and a distinct harmony of movements. The ways in which they move can be very different, from sensual to elegant to powerfully dominating, yet they all have one thing in common: their movements are free of excess tension. You cannot be tense and move sensually. You cannot be tense and dance elegantly, or play, or make love with abandonment. Tension is not only the opposite of movement: it is also the opposite of joy.

Your embodiment is further defined by your psychological state, your sense of self as a unique separate human being. As Alan Watts wrote “I have discovered that the ego is a chronic and habitual sense of muscular strain”. A lot of tension in our muscles is the result of our ego-related anxieties. Mindfulness meditation or simply being in a happy mood makes your body more relaxed because you loosen up the tightness inside yourself that you unconsciously associate with this feeling of “me” and what this “me” represents. When you relax your mental grip, you let go of some of your muscular tension. In dance it is very important to be able to let go of this imagined tight “me” to dance from your true expansive self.

Body sensitivity is underdeveloped in many people due to a life-long focus on processing and producing information inside their heads. But it can be cultivated. The more you move in awareness of how you move, the more you will improve the way you move, and the better you move, the better you will feel physically and mentally. Many body education techniques allow you to change in a profound way: Feldenkrais, Alexander, Rolfing, Yoga, Pilates, Gyrotonic, Qi Gong and so forth. Dancing tango also re-educates your body, but tango is less effective than, for example, solo dances. Tango is a communication dance in which the priority is given to adapting oneself to the partner and the situation, not to developing a better looking body. Tango is more of a party than a workout, unless you are training intensively. If you want lasting structural changes you should do some bodywork next to tango.

The second important factor in beauty is the MOVEMENT QUALITY itself. Irrespective of style, there are some criteria by which any dance can be considered beautiful. When practicing, remember to work on these criteria and you will soon notice a clear change in the aesthetics.

A beautiful movement is one that makes meaningful lines in space. This means that each movement has a certain given trajectory, logical within the whole. Dance is what happens while you are creating those lines with your body and it comes down to HOW you create them. Making beautiful lines means completing each movement’s trajectory fully. Even if your movements still do not look special, simply completing each of them will make your dance look more beautiful. This fullness is also part of the inherent musicality of each movement. A musician would never skip or shorten a note when playing, it would immediately ruin the harmony. An incomplete movement is neither beautiful nor musical.

A beautiful dancer also keeps his or her energy flowing. This does not mean you should be visibly moving all the time, but even when you are standing completely still you should “continue to vibrate”, as one of my ballet teachers said. “You can always tell a dancer who vibrates from one who is just standing there.” Like musicians: even during silence, as long as the silence is part of the musical piece, a musician will keep the energy moving, expanding, vibrating inside. Energy moves wavelike, compressing and releasing, charging and firing, a movement you find in everything: breathing, muscles, bandoneons, life.  

And so a truly beautiful movement looks effortless. This means that only the necessary amount of energy is spent and for this your whole body needs to participate. In tango this means, for example, keeping yourself balanced on one leg while the other leg is drawing a line on the floor. The movement of the free leg can only be effortless if the rest of the body is working to keep itself in balance. To make any movement effortless you need to build the necessary muscular strength and to learn to be in balance at any time, so that your body is not stressed by the gravity pull and not tensing as a result. Beautiful dance looks like flying, not like moving furniture. Give time to your muscles to build strength and to your nervous system to rewire for better control of what you do.

Tango is composed of two skills (communication and individual technique) and visual beauty is part of your technical skill. When in despair, remind yourself that aesthetics do not just happen, they need to be trained. A beautiful dance has to be re-created again and again every time you dance. For an adult who has never danced before it will be harder to learn how to dance beautifully than to learn how to lead or follow. In our daily life we physically lead and follow each other much more often than we are aware of, so these reflexes are already well developed, while moving beautifully is not. You will have to practice by yourself, alone, and you will need good visual examples. Even if you are a visually-oriented person, you will need a DETAILED EXPERT EXPLANATION of the biomechanics behind that movement. You cannot dance beautifully if the movement is not well understood and felt inside your body. For practicing you will need a mirror (and a video camera) and to remind yourself every time that the way your dance feels to you is NOT the way your dance really looks.

Just like in visual art paint has to become color, so in dance “doing” has to become “being”. This brings me to the next factor: your PRESENCE. You can always tell when a dancer is working hard, stressing about the result, executing a routine or when s/he is truly dancing. “Becoming” dance is what ultimately dance is all about and it means to be fully present in what your body is doing, at once being the dancer and letting the dance happen through you. For this you will need to concentrate your full attention every time on here and now and completely, consciously, abandon yourself to the dance. If you do this, a strangely wonderful thing will happen: people will find your dance beautiful although it might be far from beauty standards. You will be openly and genuinely yourself and this vulnerability, this truth of human experience will never fail to resonate with everyone’s deepest sense of self.

RUSSIAN, ROMANIAN, POLISH

September 6, 2015

During my teaching trips I am often asked by the students what would be the best practice routine to progress steadily and especially what kind of practice is most beneficial: alone, in a couple, in a class or in a practica?

In order to answer this question one should understand that in tango we are talking about TWO distinct skills. The first skill is that of your own capacity to dance to the music, to keep your balance, to execute the steps, to move in space et cetera. The second skill is that of communicating with your partner, or what we call “leading” and “following”, the skill of creating a connection.

When talking about a dance that we do alone on stage (say, contemporary, hip hop or belly dance, to name a few) we are talking about the first skill, namely, your own movement. In “solo” dances there is no notion of communicating continuously with a partner whom you hold closely in your arms. There is a notion of partnering techniques in many stage dances, but they are different from tango, as stage dances are often choreographed and do not happen in close embrace.

To understand why in tango (or other couple dances based on improvising together) we are talking about two skills, imagine a professional well-trained stage dancer whom you teach all the “tricks”: the full tango vocabulary and how to use it to the music. This dancer will absorb it quickly, due to his or her dance background, and will execute them alone with marvellous precision and grace in any given order, perfectly musical. Yet, give this dancer a partner to lead or follow in a complete improvisation and s/he will be a hopeless mess.

Now imagine an average person, a woman, for example, with no dance background whatsoever who starts with tango classes. During classes and practicas she learns how to listen to her partner, how to react to the lead in terms of direction, speed and movement, when and how much to pivot, when to stop, when to go. She visits milongas and dances with anybody who invites her, adapting to any kind of lead (or lack thereof). Within one year this woman develops quite a pleasant embrace, she follows well and mostly in the music, she greatly enjoys dancing tango, she easily accepts all kinds of leaders and therefore rarely sits down for a long time. Her partners like her for her “partnering” qualities (her trusting embrace, her lively reaction to the lead and the music) but also very much for her “human factor”: her enjoyment of the dance, her openness and positive attitude. Considering her popularity, she begins to think of herself as a rather good dancer and it starts to annoy her that the best dancers of the place never invite her. She feels “ready” for them, she thinks they are snobbing her simply because they are afraid to try out someone new. She feels (and has been told repeatedly) that she has lots of very nice qualities in her dance, so why don’t they come after her?

One day she watches a video of herself. Naturally, her visual references are the highly skilled professionals she watches on YouTube as well as the best dancers in town, with their perfect feet, high voleos, amazing speed and elegant postures. She is suddenly deeply disturbed to see herself dance. Her legs look weak and ungraceful, her feet are inarticulate and randomly put; she loses her balance a lot and is slow to react; her upper body lacks stance, her pelvis is tilted, her head locks itself in an unnatural position and so on and so forth. She suddenly understands why some of the better dancers ignore her. At this point she wonders why anyone would care to dance with her AT ALL, seeing how badly it looks. It is in this situation that the separateness of the two skills become clearly apparent: she is not bad at all as a follower but is not yet an accomplished DANCER in the true sense of the word.

At this point she has a choice: either to do some work on improving her dancing skills or to go on being a “nice partner” to those who appreciate her, therefore never moving up to better levels. Women are usually strongly motivated to do something about their skill because in most tango communities we have a gender imbalance and followers, contrary to leaders, need to show much more quality in order to keep dancing. So this woman, too, decides to take dedicated technique classes to improve her skill. Women are generally more eager to practice technique, even if it is only to make their feet and legs look pleasing when wearing a skirt. Men, on the other hand, are often content to practice only being a good leader (or a good “driver”). They are rarely interested in working alone on their pivots, dissociation and balance. Long wide trousers hide the somewhat clumsy movements of the legs and anyway, everybody is mostly paying attention to the beauty of the woman dancing, not her male partner, so who cares how he puts down his feet.

The example above illustrates that in tango we have this peculiar notion of HOW IT LOOKS versus HOW IT FEELS. In stage dances “how it looks” is the most important aspect and how it feels is a strictly private matter for the dancer in question. In tango there are two “how-it-feels” factors: how your own dance feels to yourself and how it feels to your partner, which is of great importance for communication. Although many times people choose their dance partners in a milonga by how it looks, they will most certainly come back to this dance partner (or not) by how it feels. This also explains the recurring phenomenon “he (she) does not look like anything special but the dance felt amazing!” as well as its exact opposite.

If we are talking about two distinct skills in tango, it logically follows that you need to practice both. You could, of course, give priority to one above the other. However, when one of the two skills is heavily underdeveloped it will inevitably affect the total experience. The most delicate, sensitive and well-embracing follower will not be able to give a very satisfying dance experience to her leader if she keeps losing her balance. Or, to take an opposite example, the most virtuoso gyros-with-enrosque leader will not be very pleasant to dance with if he lacks connection.

Herein lies a further difficulty. Although we are talking about two separate skills, in practice they are expressed in one and the same movement pattern. This is why people often do not even realise that we are talking about two different skills. Yet, it becomes much clearer if you consider how humans talk, for example: such an activity is also a combination of skills. The skill of pronouncing the words and shaping sounds that you learn as a child; the skill of building sentences and making yourself understandable that you acquire while still very young; and yet a different intellectual skill of conveying what you want to say in a way that has a certain impact on the other person. All of this also happens within one and the same “movement pattern” of talking. If you look closer into practically any activity, you will see how many different skills are involved.

In tango we have adopted the habit of calling the first skill TECHNIQUE and the second CONNECTION or COMMUNICATION. It is a bit silly, as communicating in tango is also a technique. If your teacher tells you that the communication is “just something you have to feel” or “do it with your heart”, find yourself another teacher fast. There is no doubt that communication is something you have to feel and your heart is somewhere in it as well, but it is an ACTION and therefore can be demonstrated, explained and learnt. A teacher who is not able to explain exactly how one leads or follows, either does not know how to do it or is not able to put it into words. Communication skill should never be confused with the “human factor”. It is true that human factor influences the total experience and can make certain things much easier (such as being attentive and responsive). Still, just as we can teach someone how to talk, we can teach someone to communicate through body movements and intentions to dance tango. 

Back in the old days, when the dancers did not yet have a very developed knowledge of tango as a set of skills and how to teach them, every maestro had to find everything out for himself (or herself) or simply copy someone else. In those days the teaching mostly came down to statements “do as I do” for the TECHNIQUE and rough physical manipulation or “you have to feel it in your heart” adage for the COMMUNICATION part. Consequently, a maestro couple could pretend to hold the holy grail of sacred knowledge if they actually managed to explain how to do it. It was especially the communication skill that led to the creation of many mysteries about what is “true tango” and where to get it, cultivating an atmosphere of mystique around those who danced well, mostly residents of the tango mecca. Students who did not manage to understand how the communication worked felt that it was their own fault: they were either not talented, not sensitive or not Argentinean enough.

You see, it is generally much easier to show and explain how one should walk or pivot than to teach how to lead another person to do it, or how to do it in response to a lead. Take into account that in Europe the first traveling Argentinean maestros had to teach dancers who did not speak any Spanish, so they had to do it in English or another language that those maestros hardly spoke themselves. It is more or less possible to explain a visible movement by using simple verbal vocabulary, but it becomes next to impossible to do it with the communication skill. Communication involves intentions and micro-movements within the main “visible” movement, it is like explaining the subtleties of a martial art, of a meditation practice, of energy and connection in contemporary dance. When a good explanation is lacking, it can easily give the impression of being something mystical, only accessible to a few chosen ones with the “corazón” (or the balls, or whatever you prefer) in the right place. 

Historically, the communication skill got most of the attention, for the simple reason that you needed some basic knowledge of leading and following to be able to go to a milonga. This is why still, just as in the old days, we teach beginners to walk and move together from the very first class instead of first teaching them the technique of their own dance. It is only in the past years, with tango becoming more and more complex technically, that dancers realise the importance of such things as balance, dissociation and footwork. Of course, when practicing in a couple you also practice your technique, but the fact of being with a partner shifts your attention to the communication and away from your own movement. Practicing alone allows you to literally find yourself inside the dance, undisturbed by other factors. You have to understand that in tango the person you dance with is not your primary dance partner, paradoxically. The first person you need to connect to is yourself, then you need to connect to the floor and next, to the music. Only then will you be able to connect properly to another person as well.

Nowadays most competent teachers are able to explain how to lead and follow without involving too much of the “tango mystique”. We have also discovered, in the past years, that it is indeed not as hard as it seemed before. Thus, we can now dismantle the myth of leading skill being something very, very difficult, or that you have to be a “real woman” (whatever that means) to become a milonguera. We have learnt to separate the human factor from the competence, without diminishing the importance of the human factor in the total. Nowadays people learn in two years what it took their maestros to learn in six. The abundance of video material also plays an important role. Of course, teachers who find themselves unable to explain the biomechanics of tango will still fall back on the “mystique” or the human factor, like that (yes, Argentinean) teacher who once told a female student of mine that there was “not enough sex” in her dance. But the students are buying less and less into that kind of reasoning.

To come back to the original question, the most effective practice routine is one that includes both individual (technique) work and couple (communication) practice. Depending on what you feel is most lacking in your set of skills you can temporarily give priority to one or the other, but it is advisable to keep the two skills in balance. People often feel the need to add an extra bodywork activity, such as yoga, Pilates or another kind of dance to improve their tango. Any kind of bodywork that makes you more aware of your movement, strengthens your core, improves your posture and balance, will indeed help you to become a better learner of tango. However, thinking that yoga or Pilates will make you better at tango is like thinking that learning French will make you better at Spanish. You will still need to learn Spanish to speak Spanish. These body techniques are CONDITIONING practices. Other dances will also not necessarily make you a better tango dancer, but they will definitely help you to become a better dancer generally. In my experience, people with a background in martial arts and modern or contemporary dance are the quickest to learn and understand what tango is all about: a continuous exchange of energy through movement. And like in life and in love, there is still a truly magical part in tango that keeps us addicted to it. It remains magical no matter how well we understand its inner workings. It is the magic of two human beings connecting through music and dance and it is magical not so much because of HOW it happens but because of it happening at all.

CHINESE, RUSSIAN, SLOVENIAN, GERMAN

March 2, 2015

We all have had, at some point or another, a feeling of everything working out perfectly. If you have been dancing tango for some time, you have surely experienced this feeling more than once. It is one of life’s best. It feels as if your body becomes the dance, effortlessly, and a sparkling current is carrying you through the song. You are at once fully participating and watching yourself participate. There is a fusion with your partner, a wonderful oneness between you and everything else. All your technical “problems” vanish and everything simply works.

I believe that we dance tango primarily to experience this feeling. When talking about tango to non-tango people, I like to compare it to windsurfing. Surfers, like tango people, are capable of traveling to some faraway location to do the same thing day in, day out: namely, chase the perfect wave. In a sense this is what we do, too: we chase our perfect wave. That particular connection we already felt once, slightly different for each of us and also different for each period of our growth in tango. We chase it in partners, teachers, steps, shoes, music, events.

We also know the opposite feeling, when literally nothing seems to work. Your body, despite all efforts, seems incapable to reproduce the movements as gracefully as before. It feels as if you have somehow lost it and so you attempt to find it back, to force the harmony into place. Usually it only makes things worse. You stress yourself, become angry and depressed, you feel like the worst dancer in the room. You start explaining to everyone around you that you really, really are not dancing well tonight. It brings a short-lived relief, but doesn’t really help.

Why does this happen?

I do not pretend to have the complete answer, but I will highlight a couple of important aspects. The first concerns our skill. The more experienced we are at something, the easier it is to get into the state of “everything working” at any time. This is the whole point of practicing. This is how professionals are able to travel for a half a day, teach several classes and dance a beautiful show on the same evening. The more your body integrates the technically correct and comfortable way of moving, the easier it becomes. There is an important advantage in continuing to learn and practice: you swing less between “highs” and “lows”. And not only that, but you actually learn the tools to transform the “lows” into something tolerable.

If you are subject to severe swings between these two states, this possibly means that your skills are currently in the phase of “conscious competence”. I wrote about these phases in my article “Why we suffer when learning tango and how is that a good thing”. Conscious competence means that you are able to dance correctly and comfortably when the conditions are right and you are making a conscious effort. The moment the conditions are different (you are stressed, tired or distracted), your body reverts to your old, unconscious habits of movement. These habits, however established, feel bad to you because you are have trained yourself to recognise them as incorrect. Say, you often lose balance. When you feel calm and pay attention, you do what is necessarily to arrive well on your standing leg. In a milonga, however, with all the traffic around, a stressful partner or a stressful emotional state, you start losing balance again, which, of course, drives you insane.

Many dancers get stuck in the phase of conscious competence, which can become a source of tremendous anxiety because you basically never know how you are going to dance. To take it to the next level means to fully integrate the good movement habits until they become “unconscious competence”, but this takes time and practice. Meanwhile, you can help yourself by every time consciously re-creating the conditions in which it becomes easier for you to dance better. If stress affects your dancing, look for ways of calming yourself down. If being tired has a significant impact on your dancing, take a nap before the milonga. Stop dancing with partners that make you feel uncomfortable. Start the evening by dancing on the music that inspires you. Socialise. Distract yourself.

The second important aspect is your focus. The way we experience our body at any point in time is influenced by the totality of what is going on inside and around us. It is also influenced by what happened to us before, what mood we are in, our energy and emotions. Our bodymind is a highly complex being. This intelligent system runs a huge number of processes simultaneously at any time, most of which we do not consciously perceive nor control, unless we purposefully train ourselves to. Our conscious attention, however, usually focuses at one thing at a time, or a couple of things at maximum. The narrower our focus, the more what we are focusing upon will color our global perception of that moment. Our mind, moreover, likes to stick to a thought and start spinning and unraveling it like a kitten a ball of wool, sending us into reasoning “tunnels” that create strong emotional reactions.

The highs and lows you feel are your internal experiences of what happens. Your internal sensations are not necessarily a correct reflection of what is going on objectively. Performers are familiar with the following paradox: sometimes a show would feel flawless, smooth and easy yet look nothing out of the ordinary. Then sometimes there would be disturbing internal sensations, feelings of disconnect, tension, fatigue and yet the performance turns out exceptionally well. You also have the one-to-one situations: a show that feels bad and is actually below the dancer’s abilities; and a show that feels totally “in the zone” and takes the dancer’s art to its absolute high point. Needless to say that the later is what all professionals strive for. True mastery does not feel like hard work, it feels like flying. The work has been put into it before.

Besides learning a certain way of moving, dance training also has another major goal: to train your awareness to simultaneously encompass as many parts of your body as possible, including your psychological state. The simple reason behind this is that you cannot control what you are not aware of. This also leads to the diminishing of that feeling of “nothing working anymore” because the dancer is aware that many things ARE working at any time. Both professional and amateur tango dancers train this awareness. However, as an amateur dancer, your internal focus of attention tends to stay much narrower. And then often, what starts as a feeling of uneasiness about some minor thing, becomes a full-blown depression within one tanda.

It’s like any disturbing thought: if you concentrate on it very hard, you enter in a tunnel and the whole world starts to feel like a horrible mistake, while in reality the same sun is shining, the same people go about their normal activities, all that changed is that YOU had a disturbing thought and let yourself get carried away. In this case, instead of frantically looking for ways to control the situation, do the opposite: relax and expand your focus. Internally, take a step back from your feeling of discomfort and look around in your body. Look around the discomfort. Feel where things are working well, which sensations are pleasant. Let it calm you down. Create space around the problematic sensation or area, breathe, relax. Things will soon start working better.

If your first reaction is: how the hell do I do that while also concentrating on my partner and the music, then this is simply something you have not yet practiced. Not only is it possible, you will dance better if you are able to maintain a larger focus on your internal and external sensations. If you can eat your breakfast and read a newspaper at the same time without pouring coffee in your ear, then you can also learn to manage multiple processes at once in your dance. This does not mean concentrating very hard on all the things at once, quite the opposite: it is about letting your focus soften and wander around where you send it while continuing to dance. If this is still difficult for you, then train your focus while going about your daily activities. Now and then let your attention go into some other parts of your body. Feel where your toes are or how your lower back feels while keeping the concentration on your task. Your body will be grateful for this, it loves your attention. You’d be surprised how well it will pay you back.

The good news is that you can relax about one thing: when your dance feels bad on the inside it usually looks and feels pretty much the same on the outside. You just might look somewhat less happy. When you are in a flow you do not necessarily dance better in objective terms, you just feel better, more relaxed and inspired. When you feel like crap you do not necessarily dance badly, either. Your partner might feel some tension coming from you or s/he might not. Remember, other people are just as preoccupied with themselves as you are with you. So next time your find yourself in this state of internal disorientation, don’t panic: you will not lose your dignity in public. People will not point at you saying “Wow, this one there dances really badly today.” Your favorite dancers will still want to dance with you tomorrow, although today it might be hard for you to imagine. You felt better before, you will feel better again.

As I already mentioned, dancers of all levels of skill are familiar with highs and lows, each in their own way. After all, we are not machines. Learning to master the technique, enlarging your focus, calming down your anxieties are all useful ways of catching your perfect wave. Remember also that you would not have perfect waves if some of them were not less perfect. Remember that you can still do very well even with a less perfect wave, if you focus the right way. Because ultimately it is not really about the wave, is it? It is about the ride.

RUSSIAN, CHINESE, FRENCH, POLISH

September 23, 2014

I often hear leaders complain: “When I dance, I get bored with my own dancing. At some point it seems like I have already danced all the combinations, tried all the variations and I just don’t have any inspiration anymore. It is a terrible feeling because if I am bored with myself, I guess the follower must be bored out of her mind with me”. Sometimes a leader would say: “Sorry, but I will only invite you when I feel I am in a top condition. Else I am afraid you will be bored.” My students also say sometimes: “No matter how many classes I take, I always forget the new fancy stuff I learn and revert to the same old combinations that are boring and repetitive.”

The above statements are just as true for the beginning leaders as they are for the advanced. It does not matter how rich your vocabulary of steps is as a leader, the feeling of being “fed up” might come up now and then nevertheless. Why does this happen? And is it true that when the leader is bored, the follower is bored as well?

There exists a myth (mostly among leaders) that to give a follower “a good time” you need to know a substantial amount of steps. But most of the time the follower does not know what is going to happen, she cannot read the leader’s mind and she is way too busy dancing what is proposed by the lead. New doors to new places are constantly opening for her, exposing new landscapes. She is not keeping score of what steps the leader uses or doesn’t, that is uniquely a leader’s issue. Therefore, when a leader is bored with his steps, the follower usually is not. Besides, it is not the vocabulary that the follower finds attractive in a good leader, but the deliciousness of her own movement as a response to his lead that either helps her or doesn’t. Too few dance combinations are never a reason for the follower to become bored, it is the ABSENCE OF CONNECTION that makes her “check out”. This might be because the leader dances in an automatic and unconscious way, devoid of feeling, or because he is too preoccupied with his own steps and forgets about her. A follower does not like being used as an instrument. You could be a tango encyclopedia and bore your follower out of her mind or have only some simple elements in your vocabulary and make her melt in your arms. The value is never in the quantity.

There also exists a myth (mostly among followers) that followers do not like complex sequences. It is true that following a complex tango vocabulary is stressful, requires a solid technique and a high reactivity. However, it is not true that followers don’t like complex vocabulary. The followers LOVE it when it is danced well. Complex movements make a follower explore her boundaries, they are exciting, dynamic and fun. It is just that between simple steps done with quality and complex steps danced badly the followers will always prefer the first.

So why, you could ask, does a leader need to learn complicated sequences if the follower is easily satisfied with less? In other words, how many steps does a leader need to know to be a desirable partner? When I speak of “steps”, I refer to the variety of sequences created with the basic three elements of tango: step, pivot and change of weight. In that sense a leader never learns anything new, he merely learns to improvise in a more a more complex way with the same basic elements.

Asking “how many steps a leader should know to create a fulfilling dance” is like asking “how much money do I need to be happy”. The answer is: money is irrelevant to your happiness. Money is a way to obtain things that bring you joy and satisfaction, but your happiness comes from a different source, namely, your own being. In the same way a larger number of steps will not in itself create a fulfilling dance. But, like money, steps can help you to have more fun and freedom in what you do. You will need a “basic amount” of them in order to dance. How complex your vocabulary should be then depends totally on what you want to do and where you put your emphasis. At the end it all comes down to what you like, what makes tango enjoyable for you. A rich vocabulary is meant first of all to give pleasure to you as the leader.

I personally believe that leaders should keep exploring new variations simply because this is in the nature of their role. The beauty of tango is that it unites two energies: an energy of doing and an energy of being. The leader’s role is to create, construct, deconstruct, discover new possibilities. Telling a leader “Forget complicated steps, just walk in the music, embrace nicely and the follower will be happy” has a lot of truth in it but it is also like saying to a little boy “Here you have some colourful building blocks. You can touch them and admire them, but don’t build anything. That’s too complicated.”

In former days tango vocabulary was very limited but over the years it grew into an almost infinite array of possibilities. We can ignore the rich complexity of tango under the premise that in former days people created deeper human connections in tango without “all those steps”. Yet a rich tango vocabulary is there for a reason, it remains a fact of life and comes with its own advantages. You can enjoy this variety, provided you are not only interested in the quantity, but in the quality. Tango is always much more than the steps you make, but there is nothing wrong with steps.

Leaders get bored with themselves for the same reason we get bored with any activity, no matter how complex it is: it has to do with the feeling of ROUTINE. Routine sets in not only because you repeat the same things over and over again, but also because you repeat HOW you do them again and again. Routine is when you become predictable to yourself, when your reality stops to be surprising and delightful to you. It has a lot to do with functioning on automatic pilot. How to best deal with your boredom as a leader?

There are some “practical” solutions. You can learn new steps, but remember that before you can use them spontaneously in a milonga you would have to practice them so that they are integrated in your existing vocabulary. And even if you are not able to reproduce them in a milonga, don’t despair: the fact of learning something new in a class is already a very good exercise for your brain and will always benefit your tango. In that sense nothing you learn is lost completely. You can also start breaking down the combinations you already know and change their endings, modify the order of elements or the timing, use the right leg instead of the left (or vice versa) and so on. This, in itself, is an exciting and stimulating exercise and will make you grow as a dancer, as well as make your patterns less predictable. You can work on improving your technique, for the more you master the basics, the easier everything will flow, giving you more pleasure in the process (and your follower as well).

There is also a deeper, more important level on which you can deal with the sensation of boredom. It is about switching your focus from WHAT you do to HOW you do it. For this you can turn to the music as your primary source of inspiration and dance the steps you already know based on the energy, rhythm and tempo of the music. This means slowing down when the music suggests it, making pauses, accelerating, putting accents on certain moments. When a leader dances truly from the music he creates a blissful dance for the follower. It is then that you might find yourself in a situation when you just walk for a whole tango and not have one instant of boredom. This is actually what teachers mean when they urge you to “keep it simple and nice”. It is everything but simple, of course, for it requires a sensitivity to music and your unwavering attention. But as long as you allow the music to move you from within, steps will be of minor importance and the quality of movement will be the primary focus. Again, tango is a conversation: when you know what you want to say, the words will come. In tango what we want to say is what the music inspires us to express.

Next time you feel bored, start consciously directing all of your attention to how you move in that particular moment and try to grasp the fullness of various sensations: from yourself, your follower, the environment. Your boredom will cease to exist in the very instant you put your FULL attention into the present moment. For boredom, you see, is a byproduct of a wandering mind that is preoccupied with judging the present and projecting into the future. Your mind thinks that true tango is in the cool steps, a particular embrace, a specific partner or the right music. Yet true tango is in none of that, it is in your NOW moment and only there, along with other important things of life, such as love, joy and happiness.

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

April 29, 2014

Dancing tango starts with learning it. Tango is not a dance of free expression, it has a complex vocabulary and a rather sophisticated technique. It is a skill that needs to be perfected over time. We all have heard stories about “needing to walk for ten years” before knowing how to walk. Yet I see that only a small minority of people continue to improve their skill past a certain point. As a dancer and teacher I naturally ask myself why.

Usually this point comes around the third year in tango. Depending on the progress a person made in that time this can mean stopping anywhere from an “affirmed beginner” to a “stable intermediate” level. Those with more perseverance reach a more advanced level and stop after one or two extra years. Very few continue to work on their skill to reach a truly advanced level.

Why improve at all, you might ask? You can enjoy tango without ever improving, no matter your level. Often it is actually easier to enjoy tango if you are not in the “improvement” mindset. You are less critical of yourself, less alert, less obsessed, less focused on comparing yourself to others. Many dancers, when finally getting to dance with all the partners they desire, stop working on their skill. They have achieved what seemed to be the goal.

For teachers it is understandably frustrating to see people stop learning, as they stop coming to classes and workshops. Another effect of this is that advanced workshops are filled with people who want to be advanced but aren’t. For those few dancers who do become advanced it is frustrating to see other people stop working on their skill because there are less and less people to enjoy dancing with at their own level. We can view the problem of skill stagnation in the majority of tango dancers as a problem for the “happy few”, the professionals and those who reached a high level. Is it then really a problem for tango as a whole?

It wouldn’t such be a problem if not for one thing. The greatest suffering in tango is not getting to dance with people you really want to dance with, which in most cases means with people who dance better than you do. Improving your skill in order to dance with desirable partners is a healthy and strong motivation. However, when you see learning only as means to an end, as hard work, tedious routine or exhausting exercise, you naturally do not feel inclined to do it. And so there is a trap: you want to improve your skill to get that dancer, but you don’t like to do what it takes.

What I see in people who improve steadily is that for them improving has always been a goal in itself. People who keep on learning are those who love to learn. As philosopher Alan Watts said: “You can’t have pleasure in life without skill, but it isn’t an unpleasant task to learn a skill if the teacher in the first place gets you fascinated with it. There is an immense pleasure in learning how to do anything skillfully.” When you say you want to improve but do not apply continuous effort to do so, what it means is that you have lost the pleasure in learning. 

Part of the responsibility for finding this pleasure is on the teachers. As Watts points out, teachers should get you fascinated with tango, which means that they have to be fascinated with it themselves first. And even if a teacher is utterly in love with tango s/he will still need teaching abilities to bring that love across and to teach you how to do it. One thing a teacher can do to stimulate people into taking classes is fascinate them as a dancer. For this tango teachers need to be accomplished dancers themselves and besides also build a good teaching reputation. Good marketing skills help a lot as well.

The other part of the responsibility is on you as the student. The teacher cannot make you enjoy learning just as the teacher cannot make you dance. The teacher can only facilitate it by creating the right circumstances, but you will have to do the enjoying and the dancing. If you put the full responsibility of giving you pleasure on the teacher, then you expect entertainment, not learning. If you enjoy tango and do not have the desire to develop further, there is nothing wrong with it. You just need to accept that those who do like improving will probably not dance with you.

I see many dancers end up in a situation in which they want to dance with better dancers but do not manage to reduce the difference in skill. They don’t progress because they lost the pleasure in learning, and they lost the pleasure in learning because they have stopped believing that they can get to a level of skill high enough to become desirable. They lost confidence in themselves as successful learners. When you do not believe that you can become interesting as a dancer for another dancer, this becomes your truth and therefore your reality. You can accept it and move on. Unfortunately, most people cannot accept it and prefer to think that other people are somehow asocial, unwelcoming or unaccepting of them. This is because it feels as if others are putting pressure on you to do something you dislike. But of course they are not putting pressure on you, they just do what they like doing, which happens to be what you don’t like doing: learning.

You see, when you want to dance with a very accomplished dancer it is a perfectly natural desire. However, if your personal investment in tango skill does not come close to the investment in skill of this accomplished dancer, then expecting him or her to dance with you is presumptuous. If you think that this dancer should dance with you because you have plenty of other qualities to offer besides your skill, you are being a hypocrite. YOU want this dancer primarily for the skill. He or she still might want to dance with you for a number of reasons, but if s/he doesn’t, then it is very probably because of a mismatch in skill. The least intelligent thing you can do is call this dancer a snob, for in his or her position you would do exactly the same. You actually already do exactly the same to people with whom you do not wish to dance when you feel a mismatch in skill. And unless it is your first day in tango you always have people around you who are less skilled than you are. If you dance with everybody no matter their level you are either a beginner or an exception.

You might say that going dancing regularly in itself leads to improving one’s skill, and to a certain extent this is true. However, whether you improve or not by simply going dancing depends very much on what your are doing and the state of your awareness while dancing. If you dance in an automatic mode, reinforcing the existing movement patterns, then you will just get better at the same thing. If your existing movement patterns are correct, that’s good. If they are not correct and you are consciously seeking to monitor and correct what you are doing then yes, you have a chance of improving. Provided that the mental image of your goal is correct in terms of efficient movement, which it might not be. Say, you want a higher voleo. If your internal image of a higher voleo is not sufficiently correct, then you will simply activate the wrong reflexes and learn an incorrect movement, probably straining yourself in places that are not involved in doing a high voleo.

To improve, you need a correct and quite a detailed mental and kinesthetic image of the movement and then a lot of aware practice. Classes and teachers are there primarily to supply you with these images, to make you understand them in detail and to discover the correct sensations your body should feel, so that new movement habits can establish themselves over time. Just understanding something will not lead to improvement, you will still need to practice and stay aware of what you are doing.

This takes time and determination, and if there is no pleasure you will not do it. What is the easiest way to rekindle your pleasure in learning? In a sense it is like coming out of a depression: to enjoy life in important areas you have to start by finding joy in small things. To enjoy learning you have to feel that it brings results. Take one small issue and try to improve it. In a class, with your dance partner, with a friend who wants to practice it with you, during a private class with a teacher that is able to get you fascinated or maybe just by yourself. Set a specific goal and find suitable exercises. Monitor the changes when you go dancing. Congratulate yourself if you feel the changes. When you notice the result, you will also notice a shift in your attitude towards learning and, most importantly, towards yourself as a learner.

We get easily discouraged when we forget that it is all about taking small steps. We see what others have reached and contemplate how far we still need to go to get there. And we start believing that we never will. The learning process can be made more enjoyable by finding the right teacher, a motivated practice partner, inspirational articles to read, inspiring dancers to watch. But it will be truly enjoyable when you realise, again and again, that it bears fruit. When you know that yes, YOU CAN.

RUSSIAN, SPANISH, FRENCH, CHINESE, GERMAN, TURKISH, POLISH

January 14, 2014