The Beginners Guide to
Argentine Tango Teachers
- Teo Bartek
People
Are Attracted To The Passion of the Tango Dance
Many people are attracted
to Tango because of the passion of the dance. Tango promises a way of expressing feelings,
which are locked deep inside and which have few avenues of expressions in modern life. But
often this promise is elusive and difficult to attain. How can this dance be danced? How
does it work? How can two people glide so effortlessly around the floor executing complex
movements in perfect harmony with each other, with the music and with all the other
dancers?
A parade of instructors
from Argentina go from town to town promising to help the novice quench his or her thirst
for the real thing-the essence, the utter joy of true tango. But often these novices find
that their efforts are fruitless. Upon the dance floor all the complicated patterns they
worked so hard to learn in class are utterly forgotten. In the moment of action all these
theories are useless. The body just doesn't know what to do.
So the quest continues.
Maybe the next workshop with a more renowned and advanced dancer will be the answer. But
still no results. After a period of time frustration sets in and the person quits tango.
"It's too hard to learn. It is too difficult to do." Does that scenario sound
familiar? Many of us have either had that experience ourselves or know somebody who has
experienced this when trying to learn tango. It is very common.
This article is to help the
novice Milonguero understand the different types of tango that are being offered in the
tango marketplace today. This is a tango "buyers guide" for getting what you
want from tango.
To understand what you want
you must know what the choices are.
1. The Milonguero
and the True Tango.
Many people want to dance
the tango at the many milongas in North America, South America and Europe. They dream of
immersing themselves in the music and with their partner experiencing the feeling of
losing themselves in the flow of all that is around them. They want to be a
milongueros-the kind of people who dance tango in the clubs and salons in Buenos Aires
today.
Are you a milonguero? Do
you feel the music? Do you dance for the personal enjoyment of dancing spontaneously, not
doing mechanical steps? Has the music and the feeling of tango affected you so deeply that
you consider tango to be not a dance but a way of living? Do you want your steps to come
from the feelings that arise in you because of the music? Do you want to be able to go to
a milonga and dance socially with many different partners easily and effortlessly?
If you answered yes to one
or more of these questions you have the potential to become a milonguero. The tango
practiced by the milonguero is an art. It is not just a hobby. It is not another dance
where you learn the steps and dance them mechanically with someone who knows the same
steps.
Tango
Music Is Very Special
Tango music is very special
to the milonguero. Tango stirs up all the feelings you have inside your soul. You might be
happy your job is going well, but at the same time sad because you had a fight with
someone you love. You might feel hopeful about the future but feel compassion because
someone close to you is ill. Tango will make you feel reverence for life, yearning for
something more, nostalgia for the past, regret for the present and hope for the future,
all at the same time. It is music that is specifically designed to make you feel-intimate,
romantic, tender, sad, passionate, angry, and peaceful all in one song.
Tango musicians are
different from other musicians. One milongero said that to her the tango musicians
disappear and what is left is only the music. In other conventional forms of music it is
the musician who is visibly expressing himself, not allowing the music to flow through him
like the tango musician.
The true tango danced by
milongueros is what is called club style or apilado style tango. It is easily learned by mastering some basic
elements of embracing, walking, pivoting, weight distribution and cadence. These elements
are challenging and require a lot of time and detailed attention. But the movements
required by this style of dance are within the capability of most people. It can't be too
hard because tens of thousands of ordinary people in Buenos Aires do it easily and with
great enjoyment.
By learning true tango you
are learning how to dance, from your heart. You are not just doing mechanical steps, which
come from your head. After a while these movements become second nature and you feel like
really dancing and creating on the dance floor. That is why it is so much fun and is so
addictive!
Milonquero-Styler
Tango is:
1) Tango that comes from the heart.
2) Subjective, man and women, very personal.
3) Danced by all age groups and does not require exceptional athletic ability or training,
i.e. Ballet is not a pre-requisite.
4) Danced primarily for your partner, the music, the for the joy of the dance, with little
concern for those who are watching.
5) Danced in close embrace and the position of the body is used to lead, not the arms.
6) Taught by milongueros not professional dancers and entertainers. Some milongueros
perform, but are milongueros first.
7) Teaching is motivated by the love of the dance. Financial gain is secondary.
8) Danced socially by ordinary people in Buenos Aires.
9) The primary sense used is the kinesthetic sense, sense of touch.
You feel what your partner is doing through your body.
The True Tango: Gachi and Sergio
2. The New
"Athletic" Tango.
People with exceptional
flexibility, agility and athletic ability may want the challenge of doing more demanding
and complicated patterns. To serve these people a new form of athletic tango called new
tango has been devised by professional dancers and performers from Buenos Aires to market
to the American public. But this form of tango requires great skill, conditioning and
training similar to ballet, figure skating or gymnastics. It is for people who are
performance oriented. The steps are intricate and the follower must know exactly how they
work or she cannot do them. Therefore it is difficult to dance new tango socially with
many different partners. The steps are mechanical and are done in a prescribed pattern.
New tango is not danced spontaneously with the music. Even the emotional displays are
rehearsed.
The social form of tango
"salon tango" itself requires a great amount of training. To master the walk,
the embrace, the forward and back ocho, the boleo, the molinete, the enrosque, the
syncopations, the traspie, the various pivots, the ganchos, and the pencil require months
of practice. Multiple this by five for new tango. Moreover, new tango requires exceptional
flexibility and strength, to achieve the extensions necessary to do some of these
movements. You cannot expect yourself to do this in one workshop. A new ballet student is
not expected to do a pirouette after her first two-hour class. The difficulty and
complexity of the steps forces the new tango student to dance mechanically from the head.
The sense of freedom and spontaneity that is the essence of true tango is never achieved.
Often people mistakenly
sign up for these classes before they are ready, hoping the workshop will prepare then for
the dance floor. I was one of them. I have seen people at new tango workshops trying to
learn complicated and physically demanding forms of the moliete with sacadas and boleos
who could not even do a back ocho. Sometimes the steps taught are physically impossible
for some people to do just because of the structure of his or her body, i.e., the man is
very tall and the woman is short or the person does not have the flexibility to twist his
or her body into the position necessary to do a step. You can waste your time in a new
tango workshop learning steps your body can't do.
You can choose to do this
kind of tango if you want. But be very clear on one thing: This is not the true tango. It
is not the tango of the heart; it is the tango of the head. It is not the tango of
spontaneity; it is the tango of steps. It is not the tango of passion; it is the tango of
contrived expressions of emotion staged for dramatic effect. It is not the tango of the
people; it is the tango of professional dancers who train long and hard to master the
physical demands of these invented steps. The number of available partners who will be
able to do these steps is very small.
New tango training tends to
make the dance more impersonal by shifting the attention away from the partner to those
who are watching. As Sally Potter complained to Pablo Veron after their big stage
performance in the movie Tango Lesson, "Pablo, I couldn't find you. You were out
there, with them." meaning that his attention was no longer on pleasing her. It was
on pleasing the audience. This is very unsatisfying to a woman, and reduces her to the
role of a puppet that is pushed around the floor for the amusement of the audience. A
milonguero cherishes the woman and with loving attention moves with her around the floor
in a tender tango embrace to her great satisfaction.
Click
here for are some insightful commentary about Tango Nuevo from Ogor
Polk, a San Francisco-based tango aficionado.
The New Tango: James and Rachel
The New Tango is:
1) Tango that comes from the head.
2) Objective, leader and follower, impersonal.
3) Athletic, physically demanding, requires training and conditioning. Not easily learned.
4) Danced on the dance floor, but like show tango, it is done primarily for those who are
watching. The partner and the music are secondary. (Show tango is a more complicated form
of new tango.) 5) Danced in an open position with a lot of space between the partners. It
requires a spacious dance floor and a trained partner.
6) Taught by professional dancers and entertainers. In general, they are not milonqueros
and do not dance with people at clubs in Buenos Aires. They dance mostly with each other
on stage. They are classically trained in ballet, jazz, tap and modern dance.
7) Oriented toward pre-set steps, not improvisation.
8) Not easily danced in a social situation.
9) Not danced by people in the salons in Buenos Aires.
10) The primary sense used is the sense of sight. You see what your
partner is doing through your eyes.
How to
Progress Rapidly in Tango
If you want to progress
rapidly in tango concentrate your learning with one teacher and one style of tango. It is
best to get private lessons. In a private lesson you get the full attention of the
professional for a full hour. While in a four-hour group class, you are lucky to have the
personal attention of a professional for five minutes. And a four-hour workshop cost about
the same as a one-hour private lesson and it saves you a lot of time. Select your Tango
teacher carefully. Make sure they understand what you want to achieve, and make sure they
are qualified to teach this to you. A skilled dancer is not necessarily a skilled teacher.
Ask how long they have been teaching, what style of tango they teach, and who they learned
tango from. Then try out a few lessons with them before committing to learning from them.
Once you've committed to a teacher, stick with that teacher. Don't take a few lessons from
many different teachers. In the beginning this will just confuse you.
Many beginners are often
under the misconception that progress in tango is related to the number and complexity of
the patterns you know. Therefore they go to workshops to try to learn as many steps as
possible. The truth is that there are a finite number of movements in tango that are
repeated in many variations. These variations are the "steps" you
"learn" in workshops. But it is not necessary to memorize these set steps. It is
better to learn, the "building blocks", the movements that are the basis of the
steps. If you can master these movements then you can learn as many steps as you want,
easily, or invent your own steps on the dance floor. For example, if you train your body
to perform the molinete correctly, then you have the mechanical ability to do dozens of
variations of the molinete. And you can learn these variation easily. It is only a matter
of memorization. But if you haven't trained your body to properly perform the physical
moves necessary to do to the moilnete you'll have great difficulty doing any step based on
the molinete. Workshops focused on steps don't begin to give you the personal attention
necessary for you to learn all the movements that make up the moliete or any other step.
The Worst
Way To Learn Tango
The worst way to learn
tango is to take group lessons from a series of different teachers. Each teacher has his
or her style, philosophy of dance, vocabulary of steps, and approach to teaching. In the
first stage of any class you must adjust to the new teacher and mentally incorporate what
you are learning with what you have learned in the past. Usually the teacher tries to
denigrate what you have learned before so that you can accept his or her way of dancing.
It is confusing and emotionally draining to have to adjust everything you learned before,
in order to accommodate the new teaching. The difficulty is compounded by the fact that
after you've expended all this energy to adjust to the new teacher, the class is over. The
teacher is gone to a new city and not likely to return for a long time.
But a few weeks later you
will receive a notice of another great stage dancer and teacher from Buenos Aires coming
to town to teach a workshop. By attending a series of workshops like this you must go
through this breakdown and readjustment process over and over. It is good to readjust your
dancing from time to time. It helps you to grow. But it is detrimental to the new student
who doesn't yet understand the basics of the dance and has no context in which to place
the teaching. It is like planting a flower in a pot by your kitchen window, and then every
day transplanting the flower into a new pot in a new location in your home. The flower
will have a tough time growing when it has to readjust to a new environment every day.
It is fun to go to group
classes. The social interaction is exciting and you get to meet famous and exciting stage
dancers. It is fun to do as long as you don't let it confuse you and undermine your
self-confidence. Go every once in a while. You can learn some interesting new steps. Then
go back to your regular teacher to have the steps cleaned up, adjusted to the capability
of your body, and incorporated into your dance style. Your teacher might be able to modify
some of the steps so that you can dance them socially at milongas.
The
Limitations of Learning Tango in Workshops
Realize the limitations and
drawbacks of learning in groups. A steady diet of workshops from different people who
don't know you can be hard to digest. If you want to progress rapidly in tango,
concentrate your time learning one style of dance from one teacher in private lessons.
Then practice what you've learned dancing socially at milongas as much as possible.
If you are interested in
ultimately performing new tango you can start by taking private lessons in salon tango.
Once you have mastered the basics of the true tango, you will be prepared to take classes
in new tango. If you are interested primarily in being a miloguero, and want to experience
the joy of dancing and improvising in a social situation, then avoid workshops in the new
tango altogether, for they can only confuse you. Learn salon tango well, then later, if
you want to jazz up your already solid dancing skills with some athletic movements, then
take some workshops in the new tango.
If you are confused and
frustrated and if you cannot follow different dance partners at milongas or lead different
dance partners at milongas, it is probably because you are wasting your time trying to
learn steps which are beyond your capability. Tango must be learned in stages. Start with
the basic salon tango and get on the dance floor as soon as possible. And above all, have
fun!
"Ecstasy is a state of
the soul transmitted through the body"-Deepak Chopra
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