PS. I’ve just published a guide, How to Hear a Milonga which you can pick up completely free of charge, with a link to a questionnaire to evaluate your milonga experience.

You can buy me a coffee or become a paid subscriber. Also, follow me on Facebook and on YouTube.

After dancing at the downtown milongas in Buenos Aires, like Milonga Parakultural at Salon Canning, I came to the view that what they dance they cannot teach, and what they teach is not what they dance.

This view was reinforced by several experiences such as:

• seeing a teacher who teaches in his lessons the tango walk and the big figures in an open embrace dance compact tango milonguero in the close embrace at Salon Canning: no continuity between his lessons and his own dancing at all;

• seeing teachers of close embrace tango milonguero outside of Buenos Aires dancing in an over-active, uncontrolled and space consuming way no different from the other styles;

• having women who took courses in close embrace tango dumping their weight on me, and dancing in the same mechanical and non-responsive way as women trained in the other styles, maybe even worse;

• seeing close embrace dancers on videos from tango milonguero encuentros in Europe and the US showing none of the freedom of movement that you see at the downtown milongas in Buenos Aires;

• analysing videos of Pedro ‘Tete’ Rusconi, a major promulgator of tango milonguero, and finding that his video lessons bear no resemblance to his actual dancing.

• teaching close embrace tango and finding the results just as disappointing as elsewhere: tense, lumbering dancing that resembles nothing like what I saw and experienced in Buenos Aires.

I came to the view that there is something dysfunctional about teaching close embrace tango milonguero as a premium technique comprising of ‘just walking’ and ‘abrazo’, after the students have gone through the standard sort of training in the tango walk, the paso basico, the ocho, etc.

I came to the view that these students have been given dysfunctional ideas about dancing, and now they have imported them into dancing with a close embrace.

So I decided to research alternatives and came to the conclusion that somatic movement education — Feldenkrais Method, Contact Improvisation — provides a better analysis of the type of movement that you see at the downtown milongas, and that this movement is radically different from what is being taught in dancing lessons.

The question, then, is how the dancers in Buenos Aires learned this type of movement, and whether this movement can be taught in lessons.

I came to the view that these dancers did not learn this type of movement in lessons, and that it cannot be learned in lessons, regardless whether they had taken lesson.

There have been attempts to teach Feldenkrais Method for tango, but this would not be a tango lesson, it would be a somatic movement lesson.

The problem is with the idea that there is a special type of movement, like the tango walk, which is uniquely tango, that can be taught in lessons.

There isn’t.

The idea that there are movements that are unique to tango is a myth created by teachers.

What you see at downtown milongas is dancers adapting to the situation of a crowded dance floor and simply turning on the spot before moving to the next spot in the line of dance.

That is all there is to it.

I came to the view that this tango can only be learned by dancing in the natural context of the milonga, on a dance floor packed with dancers.

The context of a packed dance floor is what does the teaching.

So I wrote Somatic Milonguero to provide a systematic argument for this.

Naively I sent copies to various teachers who professed to teach tango milonguero, assuming that they will see the argument on its own ground and ask some intelligent questions.

Instead, what I consistently got in return was either dead silence, ‘who is this for?’ or ‘how can I teach this?’, and ‘but you still need teaching’.

I came to the conclusion that I am not really dealing with people who are interested in tango dancing, but rather whose main interest is the teaching.

We are dealing with some sort of an addiction: an addiction not to tango dancing, but to tango teaching.

If these people were making a lot of money this would be understandable, but it seems that they are addicted to the relationship they have with their students,

Another alternative is that people only know how to sell lessons, but have no other way of attracting people to their milonga, if they have one.

It seems that I am not the only one noticing that milongas are effectively being strangled by the teachers constantly piling on ever more movement and technique material on the dancers.

There is a growing ‘teacher fatigue’ that you notice in online discussions.

As a result, it is not merely a matter of figuring out the conditions for learning tango milonguero.

It is a matter of dealing with the teaching itself as a negative influence on dancing tango.

It would not be a problem if the teachers were not the gatekeepers supplying the people for the milongas.

Discussions on Facebook tend to skirt around the issue, pointing out the problem but avoiding the inevitable conclusion that the teachers are more of a negative than a positive.

I recently saw a story about Ryan Breslow, the CEO of a fintech company, who said:

We had an HR team, and that HR team was creating problems that didn’t exist. Those problems disappeared when I let them go.

So I decided that I need to write another book, Tango Unplugged, to explain the problem with the teaching system.

I explain how the entire system of steps, figures, techniques and styles is designed purely by and for the teaching system.

I then consider the economics and marketing of tango, and pose the fundamental choice that we have.

We have to decide what is the product that we are selling: the lessons or the milonga.

It is a basic economic principle that you get more of what you incentivise, if you are in the business of selling lessons then you are incentivised to teach more than the minimum necessary.

Schools routinely over-teach: teach things that are not merely unnecessary, but that is actually dysfunctional and counterproductive.

Tango academies defer actual learning which can only happen on the dance floor.

The problem is that, while a bit of teaching is useful - a handful of movements in a handful of lessons - the more you teach after that the worse it gets:

Sola dosis facit venenum.

The dose alone is the poison.

When I said this to a tango teacher, I got a wall of text response saying basically: how do you know when is enough?

That is precisely the question.

The only way to know this is to attach the economics of the teaching directly to the economics of the milonga.

You have to change the incentives by monetising directly the milonga, and indirectly the teaching.

For that to work the milonga needs to decouple from the studio system of teaching tango as the point of entry for newcomers.

The milongas need their own recruitment and a ‘getting started in tango’ mechanism outside of the system of teacher-fronted studio-type lessons.

This means: we get you on a crowded social floor as soon as possible, and the floor does the teaching.

This is what the downtown milongas in Buenos Aires have that the milongas elsewhere do not: a recruitment and getting started system that is not dependent on the teachers.

And crowded floors.

What is necessary, and what I provide in Tango Unplugged, is a way or organising and promoting the milonga that dispenses with studio teachers as gatekeepers.

PS. The second expanded edition of Tango Unplugged, is in the works. If you have already purchased a copy you’ll be able to download the new edition at no extra charge. If you want to be notified when the new edition comes out make sure to subscribe below.

PPS. I’ve just published a guide, How to Hear a Milonga which you can pick up completely free of charge, with a link to a questionnaire to evaluate your milonga experience.

You can buy me a coffee or become a paid subscriber. Also, follow me on Facebook and on YouTube.

1. The model is plausible on paper but unorganised in practice

Every element (few movements, silent period, simplified input, exploration, milonga immersion) is individually useful. On paper, this produces a plausible learning path. The problem is who performs the functions once you try to run it with actual beginners.

Response:

Wendel wants me to provide a syllabus and a method, but my approach is anti-syllabus and anti-method. Complaining that I do not provide a method is therefore begging the question. I explain how people become competent dancers, not how to guarantee dancing competence.

Caveat: teaching can create a block to skill acquisition. In the case of tango, the so-called basics of salon style and technical correction actually prevent the natural development of tango movement. So facilitating natural development means not teaching salon style basics as the correct technique.

Wendel has a blog but has never put his system into a book, and now is turning what is a failure into a virtue by saying that his approach is ‘practical’ because it’s not on ‘paper’. If Wendel has a system he needs to put it on paper and give us the empirical proof that he demands of others. Practice what you preach!

2. “Few” movements ≠ easy

Even a small number of movements first have to be physically understood, remembered, and made available within the couple. Posture, weight, partner, music, and space all compete for attention at the same time. A brief introduction therefore does not yet provide a stable foundation.

Too little repetition threatens stability; too much repetition, according to Tabachynsky’s own logic, risks turning the movement into a trained pattern. The practical question remains: When are these few basic movements stable enough for the learner to actually begin exploring with them?

Response:

I propose the slow dance and simple walks. The slow dance is easy and is a stable foundation. Instability is the product of the technique of pivoting with separation. If you teach that then you make everything unstable and difficult. As I argue in Tango Unplugged, concepts like posture and balance can be traced to kinesiology and sports science, and not somatics, and these are opposing frameworks for approaching movement. Paxton’s basic forms should be practiced a few times to get a feeling for integrated movement and revisited regularly. Then start exploring asap.

3. A silent period does not organise itself

Someone must host beginners, seat them, explain the códigos. And adults will not pay admission week after week to watch.

Response:

I agree. However, as I said multiple times, I cannot cover everything in a single book. This material is addressed in Tango Unplugged, but Wendel just found other stuff to object to. Wendel needs to read up on how to approach proper academic discussion otherwise he should not offer to review people’s books. If he believes that books are just ‘paper’ he should not read books or to offer to review them. Also, you cannot keep changing ground.

4. Simplified input requires reliable, competent providers

Experienced dancers disagree about what matters, and when something fails they will explain, adjust the embrace, offer corrections — teaching is then happening anyway, just informally and worse.

Response:

There are two kinds of experienced dancers: salon style and milonguero. Milongueros only want one thing: the embrace. Teaching at milongas is against the milonguero codes and if the woman puts her arm around me pushing my arm down I don’t ask her again. Men should dance only what is within their means given their current vocabulary level and stick to the inner ronda if inexperienced. Explanation is pointless.

Instead, the experienced dancer should simplify to the level of his/her partner and this has been established as a natural process in linguistic interaction and should be no different in dancing:

When a competent speaker addresses someone whose competence is lower, the speech register shifts automatically. Delivery slows, pauses lengthen, pitch range expands, utterances shorten, subordination drops away, high-frequency words replace rare ones, and repetition and rephrasing increase. Psycholinguistics treats this as input modification, studied as infant-directed speech with children and as foreigner talk with adult second-language learners; Ferguson established the parallel between them as simplified registers. The speaker does not plan the adjustments and has not been trained in them. They are calibrated online against feedback from the listener, which keeps the input marginally above current competence — Krashen’s i+1 — and Snow’s work shows maternal speech complexity rising as the child’s own complexity rises. Long’s interaction hypothesis places the mechanism in the negotiation of meaning rather than in the simplified output as such: comprehension checks, confirmation requests and clarification requests are what drive the modification turn by turn.

5. Music is underdeveloped in the model as a distinct learning problem

Music is certainly present in Tabachynsky’s model, but as a distinct learning problem it remains comparatively underdeveloped. Music imposes a temporal structure on movement. The dancer has to decide not only where to move, but when: when to start, stop, accelerate, delay, or remain still.

At the same time, the partner and the available space may suggest something entirely different. The music may invite movement while the floor requires waiting. There may be plenty of space just as the music suggests a pause. The leader may have a musical intention while the partner’s movement makes the intended solution impossible.

Tango arises from continuously negotiating these demands.

Response:

I agree with most of that. Somatic Milonguero is focused on movement, and I address music directly in Tango Unplugged. Long story short: Wendel assumes the rhythm theory of music, which is typical of studio-based choreography teachers, but this does not apply to tango. As a musician selling original arrangements of tango music for guitar and working on restoring historical tango recordings, I have deep understanding of the architecture of tango music. I advocate Ignoring the rhythm because it usually is imagined and not actually there and when it is there does not need to drive movement anyway the way it does in salsa or bachata. Tango music is not a rhythm but a combination of harmonic and melodic ideas. The real problem is tango DJ’s who are creative with their sets and do not allow dancers to become familiar with the music.

6. Disturbance produces adaptation, not good adaptation

A crowded floor forces reactions; bad emergency solutions can fossilise.

Response:

Bad by whose standards? Who decides what is bad and on what basis? If they suck, they won’t get dances. It’s tango social Darwinism. I am not a fan of inclusivity politics and if you suck maybe you should find some other hobby. Still, downtown milongas consistently produce good dancers. The proof of the pudding is in the eating!

7. Imitation does not disappear when the teacher disappears

The community also teaches through imitation. Beginners observe experienced dancers, adopt ways of moving, receive advice, notice what is admired, and learn what is socially accepted or rejected.

Response:

This looks like Wendel is setting up a strawman argument. The question in Somatic Milonguero is whether the dancing at downtown milongas is the product of teaching or adaptation. Adaptation does not mean zero imitation, it means a flexible attitude, so that imitation can be an input into an adaptive process. Studio based teaching is the opposite of that: practicing for muscle memory and correction with zero individual expression or adaptation. Teachers do not teach adaptation and correction is incompatible with adaptation.

8. The community provides reality, but it does not provide a guarantee of quality

The community often transmits the visible product of earlier improvisation without transmitting the situation from which it arose. In that sense, informal cultural learning can reproduce exactly the problem Tabachynsky criticizes in conventional teaching: learners copy the result while losing the process that gave the result its meaning. …

In this sense, well-designed teaching may actually be more context-oriented than simple imitation within the community.

Response:

What Wendel is describing here is this idea that people improvise and develop interesting choreography on the convivial dancing floor, and then teachers take that and formalise that into a syllabus. This is exactly what I point out in Chapter 1 of Somatic Milonguero. Also, Wendel accepts my distinction between process and product.

But the point of my distinction is that if you change the process you also change the product. But Wendel thinks that you can get the same product through a different process. In particular, you can take the product of an improvisation process, turn that product into the process, and then still get the same thing. And that doesn’t work.

Wendel believes that it works because all teachers believe that that works. But the premise of the book is that it doesn’t work, because the book starts out with a problem of tango classero. If teachers could produce what the milonga produces then tango classero would not be a real problem. And so anyone who buys the book accepts that what the teachers are producing is not what you see at the milongas. And so the question that my book addresses is to explain how do you get to the dancing at the milongas?

Also, teachers like Wendel believe — or imply — that the natural dancing of the milongas is inferior in quality to what they are teaching, and only their teaching can guarantee quality. But my book assumes the opposite, and I provide several reasons why the product of the teachers is of lower quality. So in what sense can they guarantee higher quality? My own experience was that despite many workshops, the quality of my own dancing improved when I dumped all the teacher material. I also see other people unable to get out of the classero box.

Finally, what does “simple imitation within the community” mean? Looks like another strawman. The community is not merely about imitation, much less about ‘simple imitation’.

9. The milonga is not a protected experimental environment

When a beginner experiments and fails there, the consequences do not affect only the learner. Poor timing may disturb the partner’s balance, an awkward change of direction may obstruct another couple, and an oversized movement may cause a collision. … This creates a paradox: The milonga partly requires the very adaptability that it is supposed to produce.

Response:

Again , Wendel’s question here was addressed in Tango Unplugged which I sent him and he never acknowledged this. So really Wendel is arguing with a different book which actually addresses these questions directly. For some reason Wendel believes that I should address all of these issues in a single book. I should talk about the movement, the music, and everything else in a single book. I don’t know why he believes that. In Tango Unplugged, I propose practice milonga. This would be the opposite of the current system of the practica. Then, after a few of those sessions, the dancers can dance on the inside ronda of the milonga, once they’re able to get through a full tanda without falling over. That’s it.

10. Teaching can be more efficient and the alternative is still teaching

Does learning without formal lessons ultimately require more effort rather than less? And does it still make sense to speak of “learning without lessons” if the functions of the teacher are merely distributed among many experienced dancers and members of the community?

Response:

No, the lessons as currently taught make the whole process much more inefficient than it needs to be and tends to lead to eventual failure because the basics are unsuitable to dancing at the milonga. On the second point, I don’t say that the experienced dancers should be doing the teaching. I am saying that dancing is doing the teaching. I don’t consider dancing with less experienced women to be teaching. Again, this is explored in some depth in Tango Unplugged.

Conclusions

1. On infrastructure: Some of Wendel’s points are reasonable but they address issues that are outside of the scope of Somatic Milonguero, and he needs to address my position on these issues as I explain them in the second edition of Tango Unplugged. In particular, the infrastructure issues that he raises are directly addressed in that book.

2. On the efficacy of teaching: we’ve had some three decades of the current teaching system, and it’s no good for Wendel to simply assert that teaching can guarantee quality when everyone can see that it obviously and visibly provides the opposite of quality and therefore does not guarantee it. By contrast, downtown milongas are packed full of very good dancers and women consistently report tango milonguero dancers to be preferable.

3. On theory vs. practice: If Wendel believes that he has a syllabus and a method that can guarantee quality, he needs to put it down on ‘paper’, explain it in terms that we can understand, provide some evidence that it actually works, and explain how he proposes to get other teachers to adopt it. Even if his system worked, it would be of no use if hardly anyone knows about it, or understands and applies it in their teaching.

PS. The second edition of Tango Unplugged, expanded to well over double in length, with new chapters on organising and promoting milongas, will be coming out in a week or two. If you have already purchased a copy you’ll be able to download the new edition at no extra charge. If you want to be notified when the new edition comes out make sure to subscribe below.

PPS. I’ve just published a guide, How to Hear a Milonga which you can pick up completely free of charge, with a link to a questionnaire to evaluate your milonga experience.

You can buy me a coffee or become a paid subscriber. Also, follow me on Facebook and on YouTube.

Marketing advice for selling books is that you should see what people are saying so that you can better address questions people might have.

So I got AI to do an online search and found that there are a couple of tango blogs in Germany talking about my book and my blog.

One of them, Klaus Wendel, seemed to be critical of teaching and made some positive comments about my blog.

So I sent Klaus an email asking if he would like to write a review of Somatic Milonguero.

What followed was a total disaster.

Wendel wrote to me suggesting that he knows about somatics and that he has background in tango milonguero.

Before agreeing to review my book he sent me a bunch of lengthy wall-of-text emails discussing his own background and teaching philosophy.

Long story short, he neither understands somatics nor has a background in tango milonguero.

Instead, his ‘review’ was essentially a teacher of salon style tango arguing that teaching is still needed.

Apparently he has developed a teaching technique which does not involve teaching steps and figures.

He concluded that my proposition that you can only learn tango milonguero by dancing at milongas is false, or at least that it is ‘not proven’, and also that teaching using his own system ‘can help’.

The problem with his entire argument is that he neither teaches nor dances tango milonguero.

He did not mention this at any point in the entire conversation.

Despite my fairly clear definition of tango milonguero in the first chapter of the book, he seems completely unable to comprehend that tango milonguero is not the same as what he is dancing and teaching.

So his teaching technique is irrelevant because my book is not about salon style tango.

What I’ve learned from this interaction is that salon style teaching is sustained by people who are completely clueless and delusional.

Despite dancing and teaching since the 90s, Wendel appears to have never stepped foot at a downtown milonga — like Milonga Parakultural — where close embrace tango is danced.

His quibbles about my book were difficult to explain until I decided to search him on Youtube and looked at his actual dancing.

It turns out that Wendel is a run-of-the-mill salon style dancer doing choreographed salon style performances:

In all the detailed wall-of-text expositions of his pedagogical principles he completely forgot to mention the one crucial piece of information: he neither dances nor teaches tango milonguero.

Instead, he wrote that he had met Pedro ‘Tete’ Rusconi in the 90s, and had subsequently developed a way of teaching Tete’s milonguero technique.

According to Wendel, Tete was unable to communicate what he was dancing to dancers of a modern dance company — it was a “pedagogical disaster” — but Wendel came to the rescue and was able to communicate Tete’s technique.

It is left to one’s imagination how someone who dances salon style tango, with no hint of milonguero, was able to teach Tete’s technique better than Tete himself.

Leave it to a salon style teacher to figure out how to teach tango.

So this was apparently the basis for his critique of my book: that he has discovered an improvisational technique for teaching tango milonguero, as danced by Tete, to instruct modern dancers who instantly became expert milongueros, without ever having to set foot at a milonga.

Since Wendel has an improvisational method for teaching, it is now up to me to prove that the dancers at Salon Canning did not learn what they are dancing in lessons.

He never explains how the dancers of Salon Canning or El Beso were able to get hold of him to apply his improvisational and adaptive training to them.

I mean, the whole thing makes absolutely no sense.

Problem is, this is the normal thing.

What I’ve learned from this interaction — as well as numerous similar sorts of interactions — is that talking and arguing with these people is a complete waste of time.

Instead, you have to make every effort to screen them out.

Before I ask for feedback or reviews, my screening policy will be to

1. request videos of their dancing,

2. ask if they are teaching and if so, what specifically, and

3. whether they’ve actually ever danced at a downtown milonga like Parakultural, etc.

Another problem is that a lot of the teachers of tango milonguero are basically salon style dancers who are teaching close embrace dancing, while everything else they teach is salon style: tango walk, cruzada, separation, etc.

But by far the biggest problem is that these people are far more interested in teaching than in dancing.

So telling them to teach less will fall on deaf ears or invite passive aggressiveness.

They read my stuff asking: how do I run a year’s worth of weekly lessons using this?

Also, I came to the conclusion that a lot of these people inhabit their own world that they have defined into existence in the 90s, and they are completely unable to think outside of their bubble.

Tango milonguero as a distinct form with its own movement and culture barely registers on their radar.

They’ve completely bought into Naveira’s One Tango Philosophy, apparently.

If they occasionally contact with their partner at the chest, that’s tango milonguero to them.

Unfortunately the majority of teachers will continue to cater to that interest, and our social media feeds will continue to be flooded with the salon style slop for the foreseeable future.

PS. The second edition of Tango Unplugged, expanded to well over double in length, with new chapters on organising and promoting milongas, will be coming out in a week or two. If you have already purchased a copy you’ll be able to download the new edition at no extra charge. If you want to be notified when the new edition comes out make sure to subscribe below.

PPS. I’ve just published a guide, How to Hear a Milonga which you can pick up completely free of charge, with a link to a questionnaire to evaluate your milonga experience.

You can buy me a coffee or become a paid subscriber. Also, follow me on Facebook and on YouTube.

When I first walked into Milonga Parakultural at Salón Canning, the floor was packed shoulder to shoulder. Intimidating. By the end of my stay I was addicted — and I’d run out of everything I’d been taught.

None of the wide steps worked. None of the flung legs. The teachers I found in Buenos Aires all taught the same big, open movement I’d learned at home. Then I’d watch the same teacher at Canning dancing nothing like what he’d yelled at me to do in class. What they teach is not what they dance.

So I worked it out myself. Smaller. Tighter. Do less, make every movement count. By the end I could move through that floor, protect my partner, lead a near-beginner, and come off the tanda feeling something. So could she.

That set off years of research, because it raised an obvious question. If the teaching doesn’t produce the dancing, what does? And if the “authentic” steps aren’t what the milongueros actually do, where did they come from?

I went to the sources. Almost nothing we’re told about tango holds up.

The story that tango was a marginal slum dance until Paris made it respectable — contradicted by accounts of it being danced at a provincial governor’s table two thousand kilometres from Buenos Aires.

The idea that the paso básico, the cruzada and the tango walk are “traditional” — no evidence. They look like constructions: ordinary movements stylised for studios and stages.

Even the celebrated “styles” of tango milonguero turn out to be individual teachers’ interpretations of what they think they saw, sold as the authentic article.

Then the harder question — what is actually going on. Here somatics is far more honest than the teaching.

Paxton’s work describes what good milonga dancing actually is — efficient, adaptive, improvised movement that emerges from the situation rather than being imposed on it.

Current research in the psychology of learning explains the rest. Krashen on why drilling and correction don’t produce competence. Schumann on acculturation. Langer on why “the one correct way” makes people worse, not better.

Put it together and the conclusion is hard to avoid. Convivial social tango can’t be taught as fixed technique. It’s improvised. You learn it by doing it, adaptively, with a lot of different partners, in context. A crowded floor isn’t the obstacle. It’s the teacher.

Somatic Milonguero is the whole case — the history, the somatics, the learning theory, with citations to primary historical research and academic sources — plus movement material you can use, adapted from Paxton’s Material for the Spine.

Read the preview and buy the book here

A few blunt words for anyone who’s done the lessons, bought the shoes, and still feels like a fraud on the dancing floor.

Here’s a thing nobody at the milonga will say out loud.

You’ve done the beginner course, the improvers course, the workshops. Maybe a festival or two. You own the shoes. And some part of you has noticed you’re not actually getting better at the thing you came for — dancing with another person, to the music, in a way that feels good for both of you.

You’re getting better at classes. That’s a different thing.

And every time you notice the gap, there’s a reason waiting. More workshops. Your axis is off. The right maestro. Go deeper on the fundamentals. The goalposts slide out of reach again, and the course never quite ends. Funny how that works.

It’s not a coincidence. It’s the business model.

Outside Buenos Aires, the tango scene is run by teachers — the milongas, the Facebook groups, the lessons, the shoes, the dresses, the festivals, an endless river of products that have nothing to do with dancing with someone you’ve just met. Tango slop, top to bottom. The incentive underneath it is to keep you in the loop: never finished, never good enough, always one workshop away.

Then you stop buying the tango product, around the eighteen-month mark, and the teachers quietly lose interest and move on to a fresh batch of beginners. Experienced dancers get treated as a nuisance — or at best, practice partners for the current cohort of students.

Here’s what I came to believe, after nearly 30 years of watching it. The problem isn’t that you had bad teachers. The problem is the whole teaching system itself.

People learned tango for a century without any of it — by turning up and dancing, with a variety of partners. Watch the old milongueros in Buenos Aires talk about tango and they never mention their teachers. They didn’t have any. They had a floor, the music, and each other. What comes out of that is convivial social dancing — the real thing, the thing at a packed night at Salón Canning that the whole global industry is supposedly imitating, and isn’t.

You don’t need the teachers. That’s what my book is about.

It won’t teach you how to dance tango. No steps, no technique, no system — that’s deliberate, because the argument is that the method is the problem.

So if you’re after tips, or your next teacher — this isn’t your book. Save your money. But if you’ve already suspected the whole apparatus is a racket, that the lessons were never going to get you there, that you’ve been sold guarantees by people with something to sell — this will explain why and what you can do about it.

It’s $25 on my store. There’s an exclusive ten-minute movement video tucked in at the end, for readers.

Buy Tango Unplugged Here

However, the 1940’s was already relatively late in the development of tango music.

Some people actually regard the 1910-20’s as the real golden era of tango.

In order to understand what we’re listening to today we need to understand the major shift in the style of performance of tango orchestras in Argentina between the 1920’s and the 1930’s.

Starting around 1935, the approach to performance has changed from the earlier golden era.

These latter recordings are considered to be more suitable for dancing because of their greater energy.

However, this energy, which is due to the increased size of the orchestras, and the approach to performance aimed at creating a bigger sound also seems to render these recordings less approachable for listening.

It may be argued that these tangos are for dancing and not for listening, so why bother discussing that.

However, it’s not clear that music for dancing is not suitable for listening.

Yet we find that there is relatively little listening to tango going on among tango students outside of the classes, practicas and milongas.

Also, in my own case, I have found that the 1940’s recordings are not easy to listen to

For a long time I’ve been wondering why that is.

There might a few reasons for this.

One reason may be the sound quality.

It’s widely recognised that music which is compressed through processing by the record company or being played on lo-fi sound equipment, lacks dynamic range and resolution.

And we need dynamic range and resolution to find the music interesting to listen to for longer periods of time.

Another reason might have to do with the changing practices in the performance of orchestral music over the course of the 20th century.

Musicologists have made note of the fact that early recordings of classical music from the late 19th and early 20th century sound significantly different from more recent ones.

Setting aside the quality of the recording equipment, it is fairly clear that the way in which the music was performed was quite different.

The earlier performances were marked by the following:

• Tempo: a more flexible tempo that often changes throughout the piece;

• Melody: the rhythm of the melody is often altered and there is a freer less literal interpretation of the notes as written

• Melody vs. accompaniment: greater independence of the melody played by the soloist from the accompaniment by the orchestra; the melody and the accompaniment are often not well synchronised, with the melody arriving before or after the beat of the accompaniment

• Portamenti and glissandi: an extensive use of portament and glissandi (sliding between notes) by strings and singers, adding expression to the music

• Vibrato: more varied or absent vibrato

• Dynamics: In tango arrangements there is also a greater use of dynamic range, ie., the change from loud to soft

• Soloing: In tango music there is also a greater use of solos and duos, eg., by the piano, the bandoneons or violins.

In general, the recordings became faster and less varied, more focused on being tight, fast and having a bigger and more uniform sound.

In tango this was accompanied by an increase in orchestra size from sextets to octets.

Consequently, tango recording in the 20’s sound more like small ensemble jazz, played by musicians who considered themselves relative equals and who honed their individual character.

Starting in the 1930’s they moved toward the character of a symphonic orchestra fronted by a conductor.

In attempting to explain the change in the performance practices of orchestras musicologists have pointed to the emergence of the recording technology itself (see Robert Philip, Early Recordings and Musical Style, 1992).

The things that work in a live performance do not translate as well in a recording.

The argument made is that recording technology changed the way in which musicians started to approach musical performance.

This would well explain the marked differences in the recordings of tango orchestras between the 1920’s and the 30’s onwards.

However, Argentinian musicologist Enrique Binda points to additional factors.

In his article “Artesanos versus obreros” (2019) he argues that prior to 1930 tango orchestras were still sort of a family business in which there was a significant amount of contribution from each musician who was an artisan.

It would be equivalent to a jazz ensemble such as the Miles Davis quintet, or a rock group.

Binda argues that after 1930 the orchestras became bigger and the importance of the leader, arranger and composer became elevated.

The role of the individual musicians was now merely to execute the plan laid out by the leader and arranger.

Fidelity to the plan was more important than individual expression and engagement.

There was less involvement by the musicians in the composition of the music and they were mainly skilled at reproduction.

It might be added that the style of performance changed also in that the orchestras aimed for a bigger and more energetic sound by reducing the space allowed to individual instruments and instead playing in a more symphonic way, producing a sort of ‘wall of sound’ effect.

By contrast, the 1920s orchestras exhibit greater variation in the interplay between instruments, more opening up of space, and less overlap between them, so that the music exhibits greater variety, individual contribution and improvisation.

What does that mean for us today?

It does not mean that EdO music is not good music, and that we shouldn’t dance to it.

It also does not mean that the 1920s music is not dancing music.

It does, however, put into a different light D’Arienzo’s putative claim that he brought back dancing music, and also the idea that there is a strong distinction between tango for dancing vs. for listening.

Many people talk about connection, and the idea that tango is about feeling.

It is not always clear what we should be connecting to or what we should be feeling.

If we recognise that music is the language of emotion then the question is what is the vehicle of emotion in music and here the answer is that in Western music the vehicle of emotion or feeling is the melody, or more exactly the movement created through the main melody and the accompanying melodies in the low and middle ‘voices’.

In Western music the system of tones enables the creation of the sense of forward movement.

We understand music in terms of spatial metaphors.

Music moves forward, it moves fast or slow, it moves up or down, it starts from a certain place and returns to a place, it is big or small.

Moreover, harmony means that there are several musical lines interacting to give the overall effect.

While an orchestra with a larger number of instruments can create a bigger effect, with more energy and a stronger rhythm, playing fast in a tight formation, this can have some disadvantages.

First, it will be more difficult to understand what is going on because individual melodic lines will be less distinct.

A ‘wall of sound’ effect reduces our ability to follow the melody, which is what we need to connect to the movement of the music.

Second, it will mean that there will be less contribution of the individual musicians and interaction between the instruments, to create interesting and emotionally compelling melodies.

It provides us with a sense of forward movement but there is less to see along the way to sustain interest.

There is less variation, embellishement, individual contribution and improvisation.

It’s a more homogenised sort of sound.

To see this you can compare the same composition, for example, El Flete recorded by Orquesta Tipica Victor in 1930, and by D’Arienzo’s orchestra only six years later.

This difference is not confined only to the more rhythmic style of tango music.

For example, Pugliese’s orchestra is considered to be in the more romantic and melodic style. I

So it’s interesting to compare Pugliese’s 1948 to De Caro’s 1928 recording of Boedo.

Although Pugliese’s performance sounds great and has variety and interest, it’s still more limited in range than De Caro’s.

Why is this important?

Should we be dancing to the 1920s tangos?

Whether or not we want to dance to the earlier recordings, my argument is that the bigger sound of the EdO recordings tends to reduce their ‘listenability’ and that this represents a real problem and a barrier to learning and connecting to tango.

In order to dance we need to listen, and if we only ever listen when we are dancing then that means that the music is probably not engaging us emotionally.

To engage emotionally to music we need an emotionally engaging performance, and we also need a reproduction that provides us with a clear enough image of the music coming out of the speakers in the listening room.

If the performance is rhythmic and energetic but lacks melodic interest and variety then we will stop listening to it and it becomes a mere musical background to our movement.

Also, the 1920’s recordings do require a better listening set-up and won’t sound very good in resonant studio spaces played from lo-fi audio systems.

The resonant space and the electronics of the audio equipment will introduce subtle forms of distortion and we lose interest and emotional engagement.

A basic understanding of audio set up and room acoustics can go a long way and will be rewarding in terms of providing for emotional engagement and connection.

Additional resources: Historical Recordings from the Beginning of the 20th Century

The first is the idea that tango is a uniquely Argentine folk music — a self-contained ethnic tradition without antecedents or external influences.

This is straightforwardly false, in the sense that tango as an identifiable musical genre emerged around 1890 out of the collision of several existing genres: the Cuban habanera, European dance forms imported by waves of immigration (esp. Mazurka), and the Afro-Argentine candombe and milonga of the Río de la Plata.

The earliest tangos were called música criolla Argentina — Argentine Creole music — precisely because the form was understood as a fusion rather than as something endemic and untouched.

The second misunderstanding is the idea that ‘traditional’ tango is dance music, played by large orchestras in the 1930s and 1940s, with a heavy rhythmic emphasis and a defined social function on the dance floor.

When you look at major compositions of the 1920s and 1930s — Juan Carlos Cobián’s Nostalgias, Los Mareados and Flores Negras, the work of Enrique Delfino, the De Caro school more broadly — what you find is not European salon music with a Latin rhythm pasted on top.

You find harmonic writing that uses extended chords, secondary dominants, chromatic voice leading and pre-dominant chains in ways that are unmistakably drawn from the jazz harmonic vocabulary.

The natural question is how that vocabulary reached Buenos Aires so early in the genre’s development.

The Argentine composers who built this side of the tradition — Cobián above all, but also figures like De Caro, Delfino, and Osvaldo Fresedo — were classically trained musicians who travelled to the United States, particularly to New York, and absorbed jazz harmony directly from the source.

They returned to Buenos Aires with a dual fluency in classical and jazz harmonic practice, and they applied that fluency to the tango compositions that became the foundation of what is now called tango romanza.

In the 1930s a reaction set in against this concert-oriented strain of tango, led by figures like Juan D’Arienzo, who pushed the form back toward its function as dance music with a heavily rhythmic, staccato style — with his pianist Rodolfo Biagi’s orchestra pushing the staccato percussive style of playing to the extreme (and D’Arienzo himself following in suit).

This was the orillero line: rhythm-first, dance-floor-oriented, comparatively spare in harmony.

But the romance tradition did not disappear in the 1940s; it continued underneath the dance-orchestra surface in the work of Aníbal Troilo, Ángel D’Agostino, and Osvaldo Pugliese who retained the harmonic sophistication of the 1920s while working within the larger ensemble formats of the 1940s.

Troilo’s line continued forward into Astor Piazzolla, who studied with Troilo, absorbed his harmonic approach, and pushed it further by adding explicit jazz and classical-music elements to produce nuevo tango.

The continuous thread runs from the tango romanza of the 1920s, through Troilo’s harmonic refinement of the 1940s, into Piazzolla’s full fusion in the 1950s and beyond — and the entire arc could reasonably be called tango jazz, because the harmonic vocabulary at every stage is recognisably the jazz harmonic toolkit applied to tango forms.

What follows is the biographical detail behind that arc — the specific Argentine musicians who lived and worked in New York during the 1920s and 1930s, the connections between them, and the institutional channels through which jazz harmony reached tango.

The tangueros in New York

Juan Carlos Cobián (1896–1953)

Juan Carlos Cobián was an Argentine pianist and composer, and one of the central figures of the guardia nueva — the “new guard” generation of tango musicians that emerged in the early 1920s.

Within that generation, Cobián led what was called the evolucionista tendency, pushing tango away from its dance-music origins and toward concert music.

After establishing himself in Buenos Aires, Cobián travelled to New York in the late 1920s and lived there for several years, working professionally in both tango and jazz.

He returned to Buenos Aires in 1928, then went back to the United States around 1937 and remained there for another five years before returning home in 1943.

The total time he spent in the US was therefore close to a decade, all of it spent moving between the two genres on a working basis.

Cobián’s most famous compositions — Nostalgias, Los Mareados, Nunca Tuvo Novio, La Casita de Mis Viejos, Flores Negras — are exactly the harmonically rich, romantic tangos that defined tango romanza and that benefit most from analysis using jazz-harmonic concepts.

Carlos Gardel (c. 1890–1935)

Carlos Gardel was the defining tango singer of his era, and from late 1933 until his death in mid-1935 he lived in New York, recording his last twenty-two titles there and starring in four films for Paramount Pictures shot at the Astoria Studios in Queens.

The films — Cuesta abajo, El tango en Broadway, El día que me quieras, and Tango Bar — were aimed at the Latin American market but were produced inside the American film industry, with American studio resources and an Argentine creative team based in New York.

Among the songs Gardel recorded for these films was Rubias de New York, a foxtrot rather than a tango, written by Gardel himself with lyrics by Alfredo Le Pera.

That a tango composer of Gardel’s stature was producing an American dance-band number for an Argentine film made in New York is itself a useful illustration of how integrated the two musical worlds had become for the Argentine community there.

Terig Tucci (1897–1973)

Terig Tucci is less well known than Cobián or Gardel, but he was probably the most important figure for the actual mechanics of cross-pollination between tango and the American music industry.

Tucci was an Argentine composer, orchestrator, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist who left Buenos Aires for New York in 1923 and remained there for the rest of his career.

From 1930 to 1941 he played in the NBC Orchestra, and in 1932 RCA Victor appointed him executive producer of its Latin American music unit — a position he held until his retirement in 1964.

In 1934 he became orchestrator and musical director for Carlos Gardel’s Paramount Pictures films, transcribing Gardel’s compositions into staff notation and writing the orchestral arrangements that accompanied him on screen.

Tucci therefore sat at the precise point where Argentine tango compositions were being rendered into orchestral scores using American big-band orchestrational resources, which made him one of the first people to physically combine the two vocabularies on a working scoring desk.

He published a memoir of his work with Gardel, Gardel en Nueva York, in 1969.

Astor Piazzolla (1921–1992)

Astor Piazzolla lived in New York from 1925 to 1936, between the ages of four and fifteen, and the New York he grew up in was the same New York that Cobián, Gardel, and Tucci were working in.

He acquired his first bandoneon there, took bandoneon lessons from Terig Tucci himself, and as a fourteen-year-old played a small role as a newspaper vendor in Gardel’s El día que me quieras in 1935.

The harmonic and orchestral world that Piazzolla absorbed before the age of fifteen was therefore the world that Tucci had built around Gardel’s recordings and that Cobián had been operating in during his own New York residencies.

When Piazzolla later studied with Aníbal Troilo and then with Nadia Boulanger in Paris, he was building on a foundation that already included direct exposure to the jazz-tango exchange of 1930s New York.

The two-way exchange in Buenos Aires

The traffic was not only one-directional.

By the 1920s, Buenos Aires had its own jazz scene, and tango orchestras competed directly with jazz bands for the dance-floor audience.

Many of the leading tango orchestras of the period — including those of Francisco Canaro, Juan de Dios Filiberto, Francisco Lomuto, Osvaldo Fresedo, Juan Carlos Cobián, Julio De Caro, Edgardo Donato, and the Victor Typical Orchestra — incorporated tango-foxtrot and jazz sets into their working repertoire.

So the same musicians who were writing harmonically ambitious tangos were also playing jazz on a regular basis, often within the same evening’s performance, which meant that the harmonic vocabulary was alive in their hands as practical working material rather than as something absorbed at a distance from records.

The lineage

The line that runs from this early period through to the present is reasonably clean.

Cobián and his contemporaries write the foundational tango romanza repertoire of the 1920s and 1930s, drawing directly on the jazz harmonic vocabulary they absorbed in New York.

Aníbal Troilo carries that harmonic sophistication forward through the Golden Age dance-orchestra era, retaining the chord vocabulary while accommodating the larger ensemble formats of the 1940s.

Astor Piazzolla, who studied with Troilo and grew up in the New York environment that Tucci helped build, takes the synthesis further into explicit fusion in the 1950s and beyond.

The arrangements I’ve published in Romantic Tango Guitar Volume 1, based on the work of Aníbal Arias, sit squarely within this lineage.

Arias was working with the same harmonic vocabulary, applied to solo guitar, and his arrangements of Cobián’s Nostalgias and Los Mareados — and of De Caro’s Flores Negras — are direct descendants of the line that started with the Argentine musicians who travelled to New York a century ago.

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It’s more useful to categorise tango as natural vs. mechanical.

To learn mechanical tango you need mechanical movements learned by demonstration and rote repetition, and technique correction with a lot of explanation.

To learn natural tango you need some basic natural movements learned through repetition and mental imagery, and ‘adaptive’ learning through exploration and improvisation.

Different mental images of the body: separation vs. integration

Concepts such as ‘separation’ and ‘axis’ are mechanical concepts that are based in the image of the body as a machine made up of distinct parts that can be manipulated and adjusted through training by repetition.

On the other hand, the mental image of the body as an integrated whole comes from Eastern martial arts practices such as Tai Chi or Aikido.

These practices view movement as originating at the centre of the pelvis outwards through the spine and shoulders.

Programming and deprogramming

Tango lessons, as with all dancing lessons beyond a few basic movements, teach mechanical movement.

Progressing beyond the rudimentary ‘basics’ is actually regressing.

This is true for salon style tango and tango milonguero teaching.

To learn natural dancing, if you’re an ‘intermediate’ to ‘advanced’ dancer, necessitates deprogramming from everything that you’ve learned about tango.

That includes the steps, figures, technique but also all the ‘culture-washing’ history and culture information that you received from the teachers. It’s all 100% marketing.

Mechanical dancing needs a lot of ‘technique’

The reason it’s necessary to have ‘technique correction’ workshops that ‘improve your axis’ is that the mechanical movements that you’ve learned are unnatural and inherently ‘difficult’.

The reason that studio tango is difficult is that it’s based on performance technique that is designed for stage dancing and is essentially a sort of gymnastics, yoga, classical ballet, etc.

It’s not natural to stand on one leg with your spine perfectly erect while swinging the other leg around, and it has nothing to do with social dancing or natural movement.

Learning tango milonguero is neither easy nor difficult.

The difficult aspect is not ‘keeping your axis’ etc. but being comfortable with uncertainty and being open to possibility.

The rigid mindset is seeking certainty in a linear syllabus, fake ‘levels of skill’, and false sense of achievement.

Overcoming these ideas is the difficult part.

Correctness vs. optionality

Tango milonguero is improvised.

It’s not possible to be taught improvisation by learning fixed movement routines.

Improvisation means that the dancer generates their own movements, or uses other people’s movement ideas in an adaptive way.

When a sequence of movements is copied, learned by rote repetition, and corrected by the teacher, then any adaptation or ‘optionality’ is removed.

The student gets the idea that there is a single correct way of executing that movement according to an external standard.

This is the opposite of improvisation and creativity which is incompatible with a fixed external standard.

Deprogramming

In order to learn tango milonguero, an ‘intermediate’ or ‘advanced’ dancer needs needs deprogramming of mechanical movements and rigid ideas about correctness.

A teaching program for tango milonguero aims at deprogramming from the rigid and mechanical mentality of the studio teaching system.

It needs to support a natural mental image of the integrated body, and an adaptive attitude to learning movement by way of exploration and improvisation.

She literally uses the word mechanics in her teaching.

Her videos on “Essential Body Mechanics” tells us exactly what this mechanical model means.

Let’s listen to her for a bit and see what she says in her intro to Essential Body Mechanics:

“Hi, everyone. Thanks for joining. I’m Judith Ahearn. And welcome to Essential Biomechanics. Today, I want to take a few minutes to introduce to you what essential biomechanics is all about, how it works, and how it can help your dance as well as your everyday life.

So what I want to start with is by telling you about how essential biomechanics came to be. I began developing essential biomechanics about 20 years ago when I was teaching a lot of yoga. And I developed it as a way of creating a system of understanding the body’s mechanics in order to improve people’s ability to do some of the poses and make them more safe for the body.

Now with time, this became an approach to help people overcome injuries, create more flexibility in the body, and improve their mechanics for other things. Now somewhere along the way, I began to study tango. And in addition to tango, I began to experiment with other forms of movement such as gyrotonics, and other forms of dance, like ballet, contact improv, blues, and fusion.

And what I noticed is that the same mechanics that I discovered in my teaching of yoga were present in all of these other forms. And as I applied them to these different movement forms, I was able to improve my own technique and help my students to improve their mobility as well.

Now when it comes to tango, today, we’re going to really talk about how essential body mechanics helps in your tango technique. When it comes to tango, essential biomechanics is really helpful in creating several things. One, in particular, it really helps with finding balance, and that is really the number one complaint that I hear from my students, whether followers or leaders. A lot of people complain about losing their axis.

And so essential body mechanics really addresses that head on and conditions the body into creating appropriate mechanical alignments in the body in order for you to keep your balance. The other way that it helps is that it allows you to gradually overcome learning plateaus.

Now tango can be very frustrating because of the closeness of the embrace. The mechanics have to be really precise. And when they’re not, it becomes really frustrating. And people complain a lot about studying tango for a long time and not being able to progress to the next level. Going to classes and taking classes with master teachers who are teaching very advanced material and complicated vocabulary. And even though the student understands how to do the movement, when they try to do it themselves or when they try to do it with a partner, it doesn’t work.

Unfortunately, this leads a lot of times to a misunderstanding and thinking that it’s a problem with the person’s abilities. They might say, ‘Oh, I don’t have the talent of a dancer. I’m really bad at this. My body is not good.’ They might think that they’re somehow defective. But really, it has to do with these mechanical principles that might be somehow impaired due to incorrect alignment.”

Just think about how ridiculous what she’s saying is.

People go to these mechanical lessons, and then they need to learn more mechanics.

Because apparently they can’t keep their balance.

We have to ask ourselves: how did these Argentinians who dance close embrace tango ever manage to overcome these problems without all this technical mechanical training?

Truly, it’s a mystery.

The Model Creates the Problems It Claims to Solve

This is the general problem with the standard education model: the model creates problems, and then you need more of the same to solve those problems. It’s never ending.

She’s not a ballet dancer—her background isn’t ballet. Her background is in yoga, which is the same thing.

Yoga is a completely unnatural and mechanical practice where you stand on one leg and then you do unnatural stretches.

So it’s a completely mechanical model of the body.

And so it’s only to be expected that this woman thinks of the body as a machine.

She thinks in terms of balance and that kind of stuff.

Balance is a problem in tango, apparently. Well, how about we say that balance is a problem if you learn tango in this mechanical way?

Let’s have a look at how she teaches tango using her mechanical model.

Dissociation and the Mechanical Body

Part 1 is called “Pelvic Dissociation.”

Dissociation is the basic sort of thing in this mechanical model of the body, where you’re supposed to swing your hips and use the muscles at the center of the body to hold your upper body parallel to your partner as you swing your hips around.

So she’s sitting on a chair, and you’re supposed to feel the muscles, blah blah blah. How Argentinians have ever been able to discover this without all this technical yoga stuff?

And then she has a video on a yoga sequence for dissociation. So she has this mechanical yoga training for dissociation.

In the second dissociation video, she extends the leg back. Now you’ve got to understand that when you’re doing these kinds of completely unnatural movements—you’re separating your upper body from your lower body, extending your leg—of course you have to use your body in a mechanical way.

And you have to be trained like a ballet dancer or a yoga teacher to be able to stand on one leg and have everything be precise.

And what this is is a recipe for making tango really difficult and really hard work. On this model, tango is really difficult, requires a lot of training, and a lot of hard work. And then people complain that they don’t feel that they can do it, that it’s all too hard.

Alignment, Axis, and Endless Explanation

Then there’s all this stuff about alignment. You have to train your body. You see, this is the yogic mindset, which is the same as in ballet and all the other dance forms—you have to fit your body into this completely unnatural, artificial stuff. You’ve got to shape your body into this.

Then there’s this idea of “axis.” I don’t know exactly what she means by axis, but it basically means you have to keep your own balance—which for women in high heels is pretty much impossible.

And she has tons of videos. Endless explanation. And then of course, when she has videos with herself dancing, she’s leading other women.

The Female Dancing Teacher Schema

You see, this is the female dancing teacher’s schema. And women fall for this, and it’s just an endless thing.

And part of it is that women love these lessons.

They love these yoga lessons.

And then they go, “Okay, let’s make tango into, like, yoga.”

So it’s women—it’s basically highly feminized, technical, and it really has nothing to do with tango.

The best way to describe it is that it’s the appropriation of tango into the yoga body culture, which is very mechanical.

One thing that is clear is that this woman is not interested in dancing at milongas.

She’s interested in teaching and performing.

And this is the typical thing.

These people are not interested in social dancing.

They’re interested in teaching yoga classes.

But yoga has become kind of boring and there are too many people teaching it.

So let’s turn tango into kind of yoga.

Have loads of women take my lessons, and then women will be leading other women in these empty milongas where there’s tons of space so they can go through all their kind of tango-yoga fusion stuff without elbowing each other.

But the fact that all of this is mechanical dancing is beyond doubt.

But what does that actually mean?

Does improvisation mean you go crazy and do whatever?

And how do you learn to improvise?

The Standard Approach Doesn’t Work

The standard idea among dance teachers is to teach fixed patterns, and then students are supposed to improvise by mixing them in various ways.

But what you actually see when people dance the stuff they learned in tango lessons is that they just run through the steps from class without much creativity.

It’s very standardized and programmed.

And that’s exactly what you’d expect.

When you go to classes and learn programmed movements the result will be people dancing what they learned.

There’s very little improvisation, adaptation, creativity, or generating your own movement vocabulary.

Now, tango milonguero doesn’t really have steps.

And yet teachers who advertise themselves as teaching tango milonguero still teach steps.

They may teach fewer steps than salon style tango teachers, but they still teach steps, technique and decorations.

So you end up with a kind of tango milonguero that’s also very programmed and not really improvised.

What Steve Paxton tells us about improvisation

So what does improvisation actually mean?

When you look at dance improvisation in modern dance, eg., in Contact Improvisation (CI), the big figure is Steve Paxton.

He created CI, and he argues that you can’t really teach improvisation.

He says that as soon as you teach any structure—any sequence of movements—people will think that’s the improvisation, and they’ll just learn it by rote repetition.

This is the problem with the whole concept of practica in tango: people basically just rote learn and rehearse these movements for muscle memory.

Steve Paxton says you can’t really learn improvisation that way.

What he does instead is teach a handful of basic forms that provide the basis for creativity.

He teaches basic forms that release muscular tension and promote integrated movement.

This provides the basis for people to go out and explore movements in an adaptive way.

It’s this exploration and adaptation that generates movement.

People generate their own movement in a creative way while also learning improvisational movement skills.

Improvisation and adaptive movement are a special kind of skill that cannot be learned by learning preset choreography.

You have to learn adaptive skills — ability to discover movement by exploration — by doing it, that is, by exploring.

You might get started by learning certain patterns.

But if you continue learning more and more patterns, you’re not learning improvisation.

You’re learning rehearsed choreography.

The problem with correctness

You can’t learn improvisation by taking lots of lessons, particularly when there’s an idea of correctness.

The main problem with dancing lessons — or any lessons where you learn something and then have the teacher correct you — is this: when the teacher teaches a pattern and there’s a correct way of executing it, or a correct technique, that is no longer improvisational or adaptive.

You’re trying to do something correctly, which the one way excluding other possible ways of executing the movement.

The idea of correctness is not compatible with the idea of creativity, adaptiveness, and hence, of improvisation.

Analysing movement

Here’s what teachers do: they take what natural dancers do at traditional milongas and analyse it in terms of certain movements.

Then they turn that into classroom material.

They make it look ‘better’ by making it more technical—they use performance dance techniques to make the movements bigger and more symmetrical.

Then they say that’s the correct way of doing it.

Automatically, the natural dancing becomes ‘less than,’ because natural dancing will look less symmetrical, less clean, more rough—it will have less visual appeal. It will automatically look less correct.

Which is completely upside down, because originally the movements came from natural dancing.

But now natural dancing takes a backseat to the teacher’s version of it—which is not natural, which is the studio version, the choreographed version.

That’s what gets taught, and people think they’re doing really nice dancing.

And it does look great—in the mirror, on camera.

But it’s not natural.

And it’s not social dancing any more.

These people don’t do well at milongas.

You get these milongas where everyone is basically performing, running through routines.

That’s pretty much always the product of the studio dance teaching system.

None of that is natural or creative or improvised.

Tango milonguero cannot be taught that way.

People who teach tango milonguero in that way are taking away an essential element—improvisation and creativity.

It becomes a semi-choreographed technical form.

How do you actually learn improvisational skills?

So how do you learn these adaptive, creative, improvisational movement skills?

First, understand this: Ii’s not always bad to learn some choreography.

But it’s important to understand that when you’re learning choreography—particularly where there’s correct technique—that is no longer improvisation.

That’s programmed movement, a kind of choreography.

It doesn’t have to be that the whole dance is choreographed.

But even if you’re learning and practicing five steps in a sequence, that becomes a choreography.

If you have the idea of correctness you will develop a very rigid mindset.

That’s really the issue: correctness leads to mental and physical rigidity.

You see people judging other people’s dancing.

Even in tango milonguero, when dancers become teachers, they have this idea of what is the correct way of dancing tango milonguero.

And that always becomes a judgment about how people look—their posture, or something the observer sees and judges from that external, third-person point of view.

But that is completely the opposite of what you need in dance improvisation.

Dancing for yourself and your partner

Dance improvisation is primarily for personal use and creativity.

You want to dance for yourself and your partner.

You want to be interesting for your partner; you want your partner to be interesting to you.

For example, if I’m dancing in an improvisational way, I don’t dance just for myself because I’m dancing with a woman.

But I’m trying to be interesting.

I don’t want to be rigid.

I want to be interesting and surprising, and have some individuality in my dancing.

Similarly, if I’m dancing with a woman and she dances in a very programmed way, that’s boring for me.

I know she’s just rehearsing something she learned in a workshop, and that’s not interesting.

She’s not really listening to me and responding to me and maybe surprising me.

You’re dancing for yourself and for your partner.

In tango, you’re dancing with your partner; same with contact improvisation.

In none of these contexts is it about aesthetic ideas of symmetry which come from classical ballet and ballroom dancing.

Now this is imposed on tango milonguero, where you’re supposed to have a particular posture.

When people start talking about posture, they’re talking about ideas like symmetry — dancing in a way that has a particular kind of visual appeal to particular kinds of people.

It’s basically the same aesthetic taste as salon style tango.

They’re imposing the values of salon style tango on tango milonguero.

A different sensibility

Someone with a background in improvisational dance, or contact improvisation, or who has an intuitive understanding of natural improvised dancing, doesn’t look for symmetry.

They don’t find symmetry interesting.

You have a different sort of sensibility.

People are imposing the values of standard salon style tango on tango milonguero, and it doesn’t work.

The idea of adaptive movement, of improvisation, is that you generate your own movement material in an adaptive way, and this makes it creative and interesting.

The essential component of that is being comfortable with uncertainty and being open to possibility.

In studio lessons with mirrors you’re constantly seeing yourself, so you’re judging yourself in terms of how you look—in terms of symmetry and posture.

That instantly creates a rigid mental attitude because you have an artificial standard of what posture should look like.

This generates tons of cognitive dissonance because you can see that a lot of the milongueros don’t have great posture.

But people still think, “Wow, they’re amazing dancers.”

But then when a non-milonguero dances, suddenly posture is important.

They put you down in terms of this idea of posture, what you look like dancing with a woman, etc.

They become judgmental in ways that are completely antithetical to the improvisational mindset.

Opening to uncertainty

You have to be open to possibility.

You have to be comfortable with uncertainty.

That is the difficult part.

Dancing teachers pander to the fear of uncertainty and create this illusion of certainty and of linear progress, by creating a completely artificial linear system of lessons that are progressive and graded by level.

All of this is completely artificial and contrary to human psychology and how the brain works.

It’s now well established that learning is nonlinear.

A lot of what Paxton says is actually informed by neuroscience and what we know about learning: that it’s emergent and nonlinear.

This is the same whether you’re talking about language learning or learning to dance.

Skills emerge in a nonlinear way, and they’re naturally acquired in natural contexts.

Studio lessons teach movement in a very decontextualized way.

The natural context of social dancing is a social dancing event.

The studio situation supposedly provides sheltered, linear learning.

But it’s so decontextualised, so outside any natural context, that it doesn’t really apply when you actually go to a milonga.

None of that really works because you don’t have a partner assigned to you by the teacher, and you can’t perform the routines these teachers teach in a natural social context.

So what you get is people basically dancing with their regular practice partner and doing ridiculous show routines at the milonga.

It’s completely absurd—it becomes a freak show.

They look wrong in that context because they’re basically performing.

It’s really annoying, but it’s purely the product of the studio teaching system.

Because they cling to the idea of correctness, predictability and symmetry (posture, technique, etc.), and they’ve never been told that for the milonga they need to learn these other skills of adaptive, improvisational attitude, and responding to the situation in a flexible way.

Those are different skills.

They believe that what they’re doing is ‘correct’ because it looks great.

Left vs. right brain

In a way, you could say this approach is very left-brained.

The left brain hemisphere processes in a way that is very rigid. The right brain hemisphere is responsive to context.

These people have an overdeveloped left-brained attitude and have failed to develop the right-brained attitude.

That’s because teachers pander to the rigid attitude of the left hemisphere of the brain.

Paxton is really well grounded in neuroscience and our understanding of how the human brain works and how learning works.

This rigid type of dancing can very well be explained by the artificial linear system of dancing studios which teaches a particular rigid way of thinking about dancing, and these people find it impossible to think outside that box.

The fundamental problem

The fundamental point here is this: this rigid mindset also includes the teachers of tango milonguero.

These people supposedly teach this ‘authentic’ style of tango, but they teach it in exactly the same way as teachers of salon style tango.

You end up with the same rigid stuff where people do ‘estilo apilado’, with leaning and chest lead/follow, but it just becomes another structure and another rigid choreography. '

It’s still judged against ideas of symmetry and posture in the same way as in salon style tango.

Because the problem is that it’s not iimprovisational.

They’re not teaching this flexible, improvisational, adaptive attitude.

They’re pandering to the desire for certainty, for correctness.

People then end up practicing in a mechanical and rigid way.

And that is not tango milonguero.

That is the opposite of tango milonguero.

You don’t need lessons

The key thing is this: you don’t have to learn tango milonguero in a class.

Now, there’s no argument that you do need some basic programmed movements if you want to learn to dance tango.

But you don’t need that many steps, in particular, you don’t need months or years of practice.

After a few sessions, you’d probably have a few patterns you can use to get through a dance.

Then, in the natural context of a milonga, you’d usually have a limited amount of space to dance with your partner, and everyone would be dancing in the line of dance—the ronda.

You’d do your little programmed routine in place, in your limited space, and then move to the next point in the ronda.

Over time, you’d start trying to expand your vocabulary of movements, simply because of boredom.

You’d get bored.

Your partner would get bored.

So you’d naturally start playfully improvising new movements to spice up your repertoire.

In that adaptive, improvisational manner, you would develop a wider variety of movement skills for dancing tango.

You’d also look at other people at the milonga.

You’d see that the woman puts her arm on top of the man’s shoulder and the man usually holds the woman all the way across the back.

There’s a particular kind of embrace that people use at those kinds of milongas.

And basically, they go around on the spot and then move to the next spot in the ronda.

This whole idea that in Argentina people started practicing tango when they were children, that men would practice with other men—all of these things seem to be some kind of faux history.

It seems that the idea that tango is difficult and needs a lot of technique, correction and loads of practice in a practica, are promoted by teachers who want to sell a lot of lessons and technique workshops.

You don’t really need any of that for tango milonguero.

Mental images, not movements

What Paxton does is teach a handful of forms, and these are not really movement patterns.

What they are is mental images.

In somatics and in somatic movement education, there’s the concept of ideokinesis. The idea is that movement is controlled by mental images, and there are certain mental images that help make movement more integrated.

One idea is that you want to move from the center.

You can imagine a point at the center of your pelvis and then experiment and improvise with that mental image.

You’ll usually find that helps make the movement more integrated.

Paxton also has certain exercises that help release muscular tension and integrate the action of the hands, the shoulder, the spine, and the pelvis. Certain movements help release muscular tension in those muscles and help make the movement more integrated. He uses a concept he got from Eastern practices like Tai Chi and Aikido that promote more integrated movement.

Now, these don’t look like tango milonguero, but they can be very helpful. By learning to use these mental images, you’re not learning particular movements, and they don’t teach you tango milonguero. You still have to develop and be comfortable with uncertainty and optionality. You have to be comfortable with the idea that you’re going to learn in an adaptive and improvisational way. You’re going to have to generate your own movement.

But these basic forms developed by Steve Paxton in his program called Material for the Spine support that process. They don’t replace the need to be comfortable with uncertainty, with generating your own movement, with learning in an improvisational way. But they support it. They provide a kind of basis for improvisation. That was the purpose of Paxton’s program.

They’re very simple exercises that you can do regularly. They take 5 to 10 minutes. Over time, you will develop a more integrated mental image of your body that will support improvisation in partner dancing.

Supporting Improvisation, Not Teaching Steps

The point here is that you can’t really learn improvisation by learning particular movements, but improvisational skills can be supported by developing certain mental images using certain simple exercises. This is ideokinesis—it helps with muscular release and more integrated movement.

This is generally the somatic education framework or paradigm: somatic movement education doesn’t teach specific movements. It teaches more integrated functioning. Your movement becomes more integrated. It doesn’t teach you how to walk. But if you’re going to walk, it will help you walk in a more integrated, natural way. It will help with muscular release, and it will help with more integrated neuromuscular functioning. That is the purpose of somatic learning, and this is what Steve Paxton teaches in Material for the Spine. This can be very helpful for tango or any partner dancing for that matter.

The Problem with Adding Somatics to Studio Teaching

The problem is when people believe that they can teach tango—or tango milonguero—in the standard way then slap the somatic stuff on top of that to sort of add creativity to the whole thing. Maybe they think somatics will help people develop better, more symmetrical posture. I’m not exactly sure what the idea is, but it’s obviously based in lack of understanding of what somatics is and what it aims to achieve.

Maybe they think, “Okay, I can’t force people to have a better posture. So let’s use somatics to help people get better posture.” They still have the mirror and the idea that you want to look a certain way, but if they do some somatics, then somehow that will improve people’s posture. They’re still aiming for posture improvement, it seems. But somehow they think you can take the mechanical programmed studio teaching and use somatics for that.

This idea is completely upside down. Because somatics requires you to be more sensitive to your body, to be more attentive to inner sensations, and to move in accordance with the natural tendencies of your body in a more improvised, natural, diverse, and adaptive way. This completely contradicts the studio model where you have a mirror where you can see yourself and you’re judging yourself by how you look, and then you’re told there’s a correct technique.

Again, as before with the milongueros with poor posture, you’re going to end up with tons of cognitive dissonance because you’re teaching things that are mutually incompatible.

I can’t emphasize enough that the dancing studio model is fundamentally incompatible with the somatic model. Dancing teachers are always looking for more stuff to teach, and they think, “Well, here’s another thing I can teach that will somehow make the dancing more natural.” So they’ve just taught people all these patterns and techniques and corrected them, and now they’re going to teach them to be more sensitive to their body and more adaptive and diverse—and do this in a studio with wall-to-wall mirrors where people can see themselves and judge themselves. That’s just a recipe for cognitive dissonance.

The Body Psychotherapy Confusion

But there’s another idea about somatics that leads to confusion. The term ‘somatics’ has also become associated with body psychotherapy. This includes practices like Gabrielle Roth’s 5 Rhythms and Biodanza, and traces back to Wilhelm Reich, a German student of Sigmund Freud who created and started body psychotherapy.

The thing is, it’s completely different from the somatic movement education that traces back to Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method, and then Paxton’s Material for the Spine and CI. Those are in that lineage, and they don’t deal with emotional issues. They deal with movement skills, whereas body psychotherapy deals with emotional issues.

So then tango milonguero and somatics get lumped together as some kind of emotional therapy. People think, “Okay, if it’s somatic, that means it has to do with feelings and emotions.” So teachers can then promote themselves as providing emotional therapy of some sort. “Tango is emotional therapy.” Maybe that works, maybe it doesn’t. The point is that what Steve Paxton teaches and what somatic movement education teaches is not emotional therapy. It’s a way of developing movement skills in a natural way.

Both Attitudes Are Incompatible with Tango Milonguero

You can see how both of these attitudes fit into the scheme of the studio dancing teacher, where they think they can provide additional value to the student by using somatic concepts. The problem is, none of that is compatible with tango milonguero and the idea of developing movement skills in an improvisational way.

Slapping somatics onto standard studio teaching so that people can learn creativity after they’ve been taught the ‘correct’ technique, and then also get emotional therapy—and doing all of that in front of a wall-to-wall mirror with programmed movements that are completely unnatural and that are corrected—none of that works. All of that creates cognitive dissonance.

Somatics and Paxton’s material only helps if you get rid of the idea of studio dance teaching and develop the understanding that you have to learn tango in its natural context, which is the milonga, and you have to learn it in an adaptive, improvisational, flexible way. You have to develop a flexible mental attitude, not slap somatics onto a rigid, inflexible, programmed mental attitude.

This question assumes the classroom model of teaching/learning—in the case of dance, the studio model. You know how it works: a teacher demonstrates, students copy, then practice through repetition (first individually, then with a partner), and finally the teacher goes around making corrections. It’s the demonstrate-drill-correct model, and it’s completely unnatural.

This model emerged in the 20th century, and now people are searching for alternatives because it has been genuinely harmful to human development. This applies to schooling generally, including learning to dance.

The Somatic Approach is Different

In my recent article Tango and Eastern Martial Arts, I mentioned that my focus is going to be primarily on movement learning and teaching, using the concept of ki or chi that I get from Steve Paxton. So it might look like I’m assuming that the standard Western teaching model is suitable—but I’m not.

The somatic approach doesn’t actually teach particular movements. The assumption in somatics is that we learn movement naturally. If people have trouble moving, it’s not that they need to “learn” movement—it’s that they failed to fully develop their movement skills, or perhaps they had them and forgot them.

The problem isn’t learning specific movements. It’s restarting or recovering the process of moving freely and in diverse ways.

Why Movement Freezes

People fail to naturally develop movement skills (or their movement freezes up) because they don’t move enough in everyday life. They don’t walk enough. They sit constantly—in cars, in offices, in schools. When they do walk, it’s on flat surfaces, not the complex terrain of a hiking trail where you’d move in varied and adaptive ways.

Traditional dance teaching just adds more of this unnatural pattern. You’re teaching movement that’s mechanical, which causes people to further forget their natural movement.

“Experienced” Students Have a Harder Problem

If you have experienced students, the problem is they’re experienced in the wrong thing. They’re experienced in mechanical movement. They need to forget all of that. Beginners are actually better off than so-called “experienced” students.

This includes you as a teacher. If you want to help people move naturally, you have to forget the idea that you’ll teach mechanical movements first and then somehow stick the somatic approach on top of that as a sort of bandaid. They’re mutually incompatible, and teaching them in this way will lead to cognitive dissonance in the dancer.

A Different Goal

The goal of this approach is completely different. Yes, it teaches some movements, but only very few basic ‘pedagogical movements’ to rediscover what is natural movement. Once beginners learn these movements, they will naturally learn tango.

The Problem with Performance-Focused Teaching

A major problem with the standard teaching approach is its focus on output—performance. Students see the instructor, imitate them, and start dancing.

In my book, I argue for an input pedagogy. That means spending most of your time getting input: looking and listening.

In Buenos Aires, you can get a lot of incidental exposure to tango—listening to the music (which your brain needs time to process) and watching people dance. If you’re a beginner, other than the somatic movement exercises, most of your time should be spent observing other people.

The problem in the West is that if you’re watching other dancers, you’re often watching the wrong stuff—mechanical dancing. You’re better off watching videos of milongas in Buenos Aires. You want to see natural dancing.

What Beginners Should Actually Do

When beginners want to dance, they should start off with the ‘slow dance.’ This is something anyone can do: basically swaying side to side, then doing that a few times with a partner, moving together and turning gently.

The teacher plays fairly slow, easy-to-follow tango music. After a while, they might add something simple—a couple of steps forward, or a cross. But this will emerge naturally because it’s already embedded in the somatic exercises. When you do those exercises, you’re learning to turn and cross.

I’m not completely against teaching any programmed tango steps, but I wouldn’t teach any of the standard things like the ‘tango walk’, the ‘paso basico’, ‘cruzada’ or ‘voleo’. These are all completely counterproductive and if you learned them you probably want to unlearn most of that for tango milonguero.

Instead, I’d stick to movements that complement the somatic exercises, that are naturally emergent ‘crossing’ (not the standard ‘cruzada’ with the heel leading) movements in front and behind in various configurations. These are the same movements that you see in other vernacular dances like salsa or bachata.

Anything beyond that is counterproductive. Complex patterns will naturally emerge and don’t need to be directly taught. Students will see other people doing something and will try it themselves. They don’t need to stand in a line and follow a teacher for hundreds of lessons.

The Practice Milonga Model

The model I’ve developed is what I call the practice milonga, which could also be a pre-milonga, ie., a milonga for learners before the milonga proper. I don’t want to call it either a practica or ‘practilonga’. These are completely counterproductive.

The current practica/practilonga model says that before you dance at a milonga, you need to practice the steps and figures you learned in the lessons. It’s focused on practicing these mechanical steps. Then people are supposed to learn so-called ‘floor skills’ at the actual milonga—because they have these big movements, but now they need to learn to navigate the floor. And they never do. These people never really learn floor skills as long as they continue doing these big movements, and you get these freakish milongas with dancers doing performances swinging their legs around and elbowing each other. They have to abandon those movements to be able dance at a milonga with any effectiveness without swinging and elbowing.

My concept of the practice milonga is that you have all the elements of the milonga—you use cabeceo, you practice moving in the line of dance—but you don’t practice steps.

Students do the ‘slow dance’, then they move forward in the line of dance, then they go back to doing their slow dance. Their movement vocabulary with a partner will naturally emerge. At the beginning, it’s difficult to get through a whole piece of music just doing slow dance—it can be boring. So you don’t have the rule that you must dance a whole tanda. The rules are fairly flexible in this kind of practice milonga.

The idea is that you can do the slow dance, and then just sit down once you get bored with that. There’s no pressure on students to be doing a lot of movement (which is output). And there’s no pressure to dance either.

Removing the Pressure to Dance

The problem with the whole tango teaching scheme is that the teachers start pressuring you to dance. There’s this constant pressure to dance, and you have to get rid of that.

The point of my practice milonga concept is no pressure to dance. But if you do dance, you do it in the line of dance, you try to use the cabeceo—you try to do it within the rules. However, there’s no pressure to finish the tanda because at the beginning, people might find it challenging. A full four-song tanda is a lot of work, especially for people who are relatively inexperienced.

Basically, the practice milonga is just a very easy milonga with no pressure.

Creating a Comfortable Environment

You should play good quality music so that even if you’re sitting, you’re comfortable. This is why glass surfaces are a problem: if you’re not dancing, being inside a dancing studio with wall-to-wall mirrors or any space with highly reflective surfaces (eg., modernist cafes with large glass walls and tile floors) is acoustically uncomfortable (jarring). I have articles on acoustics on my Substack and everyone should read them.

You want to provide good quality, relaxing sound. If you can do it in a cafe, people could even buy their own wine or something like that. The dancing is not really the focus—but there’s good quality music, and when people feel like dancing, that’s when they dance.

It’s too academic and scattered.

Also, I want to move away from focusing on history and culture, and instead focus purely on movement.

My idea was to load it with even more information by adding stuff on tango music and DJing.

Big mistake.

The main issue really, at least to start off with, is the movement.

Why?

Movement is something that is learned naturally.

Dancing movement is something that is spontaneous and natural.

It can be adapted to specific styles of music (waltz, samba, tango) and social contexts (carnival, partner social dancing, etc.).

But at the basis it’s the same body and the same movement.

Not everyone develops their movement skills fully because of civilisation.

Especially, walking on flat hard surfaces and sitting for hours in the classroom.

This is not the natural environment in which our movement evolved.

Civilization means that we fail to fully develop all the neural connections.

We become stiff.

Then the Western objective scientific rationality makes things even worse.

We started to conceive of the body mechanically and 3 dimensionally.

We developed dances like the classical ballet that use the body in a way that looks amazing but is completely unnatural.

Then social partner dancing took on that schema in the 20th century to arrive at the grotesque ‘sports dance’ idea.

When tango was ready for global commercialization the whole conceptual scheme of the dancing studios with wall to wall mirrors was in place to reconstruct it.

You break down the movements, make them athletic and mechanical, and teach them by rote and repetition.

If people find it difficult you tell them that it’s a difficult dance and needs a lot of technique workshops.

The alternative conception of the body and of movement is found in Eastern martial arts practices like Tai Chi or Aikido.

These practices conceive of the body and movement in terms of a kind of energy called Ki or Chi.

This energy organizes movement in a particular way.

It begins at the centre of the pelvis and emanates out through the spine, shoulder, the underarm and the hands.

Steve Paxton, a renowned teacher of movement improvisation in the US, argues that you can feel this energy in the handshake.

You feel it just before grasping the other person’s hand.

This action organizes the body (the spine and the pelvis) in a particular way around this point of contact between the hands.

The push-pull is actually at the underside of the hand and the pinky finger.

This part of the hand actually connects through the underarm and the shoulder toward the centre at the pelvis.

It’s a very connected and integrated position.

This mechanism is not the disjointed, ‘mechanical’, image of the body that you find in contemporary Western culture.

Western culture conceives of the body in terms of conjoined units that can be trained in separation from each other.

This is the conception underlying the ‘steps’ ‘figures’ and ‘technique’ scheme.

Arms begin at the shoulders, and legs begin at the hips.

You need to learn ‘separation’.

Etc etc.

The nearest equivalent of the Eastern conception is something like the Brazilian Capoeira, esp. Capoeira Angola.

But it’s also implicit in the convivial ‘tango milonguero’ dancing at places like Salon Canning Milonga Parakultural.

The problem is, when tango teachers try to analyze it for the purposes of teaching they go to the Western mechanical model.

They talk about ‘axis’ and ‘leaning’ as if we’re doing physics.

There are endless debates whether you should have your own axis or not.

These debates will be endless because they are framed in the wrong understanding of the body and movement.

The concept of Ki or Chi is part of the training in practices like Tai Chi and Aikido.

This concept is not ‘mystical’.

It just doesn’t fit into the Western objective scientific view of the human anatomy and movement.

But there’s absolutely no reason why it cannot form the basis for movement training for tango.

While my interest is tango milonguero, these are universal systems of the body that do not differentiate between dances or movement practices.

Either you’re using your body in a way that is natural or not.

Still, I don’t expect that the performers and teachers will find it interesting as it doesn’t really serve their commercial agenda.

There’s much money to be made, and attention harvested, providing eye catching floor shows, and selling ‘technique correction’ workshops.

The concept of Ki or Chi is fundamental to the training in Contact Improvisation (CI), which was created by Paxton to transfer this knowledge to Western movement practices.

It’s unfortunate that the teachers of CI often do not know that this, and don’t transfer this knowledge to their students.

My argument is that until the concept of Ki or Chi becomes part of tango teaching, in particular the teaching of tango milonguero, the practice cannot progress beyond its current state of commercialism, commodification and general dissatisfaction.

Acoustic Experience

Acoustic experience goes beyond just auditory perception.

While auditory perception typically refers to the direct perception of sound—how we hear and interpret it in the brain —acoustic experience can encompass a broader sensory and spatial engagement with sound as it interacts with an environment including:

1. Spatial Awareness: acoustic experience can include how sound interacts with physical spaces, like how echo or reverb occurs in a particular room. This interaction shapes the perception of sound but isn’t solely limited to hearing.

2. Vibrations and Tactile Feedback: Sound can produce vibrations that are felt physically, such as bass in music or the rumble of thunder. This tactile aspect is part of the acoustic experience but isn’t directly auditory.

3. Environmental Interaction: Acoustic experiences can involve how sound waves move through different materials, objects, and spaces, shaping the overall sensory encounter with sound, whether or not it is consciously heard.

So, while auditory perception is a central component of acoustic experience, the latter encompasses the full sensory interaction with sound and its environment, making it broader in scope.

Glass surfaces and room acoustics

Glass is generally considered bad for room acoustics for several reasons, mainly due to its reflective and rigid nature.

Here are the key issues glass presents in room acoustics:

1. High Reflectivity

Glass Reflects Sound Waves

Glass surfaces reflect sound waves instead of absorbing them.

When sound hits a glass surface, most of it bounces back into the room, creating echoes and reverberation.

This can cause sounds to overlap, making speech and music sound muddy or unclear.

Flutter Echo

Parallel glass surfaces (like two opposite glass walls) can cause a phenomenon called “flutter echo,” where sound bounces rapidly back and forth between the two surfaces.

This creates a harsh, repeating sound that can be very distracting.

2. Lack of Absorption

Glass is not porous or soft, so it doesn’t absorb sound.

This leads to an imbalance, where high frequencies (treble) are reflected more, and low frequencies (bass) are either reflected or pass through.

The result is often a room that sounds overly bright, harsh, or tinny.

3. Vibrations and Resonance

Glass is a stiff material, but it can still vibrate at certain frequencies.

These vibrations can contribute to unwanted resonances, which distort the original sound.

If the glass panes are thin or large, they may “rattle” or resonate with specific low-frequency sounds, introducing additional noise into the environment.

4. Uneven Frequency Response

Different frequencies are affected differently by glass.

High frequencies are usually reflected, while lower frequencies may pass through or cause the glass to resonate.

This uneven treatment of frequencies results in an unbalanced sound, where certain parts of the audio spectrum are emphasised or diminished unnaturally.

Solutions

To mitigate the negative impact of glass on room acoustics, people often use acoustic treatments such as curtains, carpets, diffusers, or absorptive panels placed strategically to minimise reflections.

Modern architecture and room acoustics

Modern architecture is often characterised by large rooms and materials with smooth surfaces, such as plastic, glass or concrete. 

As a result, room acoustics and speech intelligibility are severely compromised.

Rooms with low absorption sound “echoey” and are perceived acoustically as uncomfortable.

Good average reverberation times for speech are around 1 second, while for symphonic music they are about 2 seconds.

The reverberation time should be adjusted to the intended main use of the space.

Initial reflections are those sound vibrations that hit a wall first and are reflected back to the ear.

They can cause cancellation or overemphasis in a particular frequency range, i.e. interference.

Initial reflections occur on walls as well as on ceilings and floors.

Source: https://www.baswa.com/en/what-are-room-acoustics

Source

Mo, R., Wu, B., & Horner, A. (2015). The effects of reverberation on the emotional characteristics of musical instruments. Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 63(12), 966–979. https://doi.org/10.17743/jaes.2015.0082

Findings

The paper investigates how reverberation influences the emotional characteristics of musical instruments. Key findings include:

• Reverberation Enhances Emotional Perception: Increased reverberation generally amplifies emotional qualities such as warmth, depth, and intensity in musical sounds.

• Instrument-Specific Effects: Different instruments react uniquely to reverberation. For instance, string instruments may gain a sense of richness, while percussive sounds might become more diffused.

• Impact on Listener Perception: Reverberation can significantly alter how listeners interpret emotions in music, making certain tones sound more expressive or immersive.

• Optimal Reverberation Levels: Excessive reverberation can cause muddiness and reduce clarity, while moderate levels enhance expressiveness without loss of detail.

Recommendations

• Adjust Reverberation Based on Instrument Type: Musicians and sound engineers should fine-tune reverberation settings based on the instrument’s natural timbre and emotional intent.

• Balance Between Clarity and Expressiveness: Avoid excessive reverberation that might blur notes, especially in fast-paced or highly rhythmic music.

• Consider Listener Context: Different spaces (concert halls, recordings, live performances) require varying levels of reverberation for optimal emotional impact.

• Use Reverberation as an Expressive Tool: Instead of applying uniform reverberation, tailor its use to enhance the emotional storytelling of a piece.

Parametric reverberation

Parametric reverberation refers to a method of controlling and designing reverberation effects using adjustable parameters, rather than relying on natural room acoustics or pre-set reverb effects. This allows sound engineers and researchers to systematically modify aspects of reverberation to study its impact on perception and musical expression.

Key parameters that can be adjusted in parametric reverberation include:

• Reverberation time (RT60): How long it takes for sound to decay by 60 dB.

• Early reflections: The initial echoes that shape the perception of space.

• Density and diffusion: How sound waves interact and spread in a virtual space.

• Pre-delay: The time before the reverberation starts after the original sound.

In this study, parametric reverberation was used to systematically alter the reverberation characteristics of musical instruments and observe their impact on perceived emotional qualities.

Live Music: A Sensory and Emotional Experience

There’s something magical about a live performance. Whether it’s an intimate jazz trio in a small venue or a grand symphony orchestra in a concert hall, live music has a way of drawing us in. Scientists have found that live performances create stronger emotional and physiological responses than recordings. A study by Shoda, Adachi, and Umeda (2014) measured heart rate and skin conductance levels in listeners and found that people reacted much more intensely to live performances compared to recorded ones. The interaction between musicians and the audience creates a real-time energy that recordings simply can’t replicate.

Beyond emotion, live music also immerses us in the natural acoustics of a space. When musicians perform acoustically, the sound interacts with the environment—reverberating off walls, filling the room with warmth, and creating an organic, three-dimensional experience. Ullen et al. (2021) discovered that the reverberation time of a performance space significantly influences how we perceive musical emotion. The longer the reverberation, the more we perceive the music as warm, deep, and enveloping—qualities that are often flattened or artificially manipulated in recordings.

Recorded Music: The Convenience That Changes How We Listen

Of course, most of us consume music through recordings. It’s convenient, accessible, and allows us to enjoy music anytime, anywhere. But does this change how we engage with it? Research suggests that it does. Schutz and Vaisberg (2014) found that listeners tend to judge musical expressivity differently depending on whether they hear a live or recorded performance. Live performances often feel more dynamic, with slight tempo variations and expressive nuances that aren’t always captured in studio recordings. On the other hand, recordings, especially modern digital ones, are often polished to perfection—every note in tune, every rhythm perfectly aligned, every imperfection smoothed out.

This technological perfection has led to a shift in listener expectations. As Nicholas Prior (2018) discusses in Popular Music, Digital Technology, and Society, digital processing techniques like auto-tuning and dynamic compression have conditioned us to expect a certain “flawlessness” in music. While this can be aesthetically pleasing, it can also make live performances—where mistakes and human variability naturally occur—feel less “perfect” by comparison. The spontaneity and raw emotion of live music are sometimes lost in a culture that values precision over authenticity.

The Importance of Experiencing Both

So, does this mean one format is better than the other? Not at all. Instead, understanding how both live and recorded music shape our listening experience can help us become more conscious and engaged listeners. Recorded music allows us to access a vast range of artists, styles, and historical recordings that we wouldn’t otherwise experience. It also preserves performances for generations to come. But if we only listen to music through recordings, we may miss out on the full depth of sound, space, and human connection that live music offers.

Attending live performances, especially those featuring acoustic instruments, helps us reconnect with music in a deeper way. It trains our ears to appreciate subtle details, dynamic range, and the interaction between musicians and their surroundings. It also reminds us that music is, at its core, a shared, human experience—not just something played through our headphones.

Final Thoughts

If you primarily listen to recorded music, consider making an effort to experience more live performances. Whether it’s a classical concert, a folk music session, or a small jazz gig, hearing music in its natural, unfiltered form can deepen your appreciation and change the way you listen. And if you’re someone who loves live music but rarely listens to recordings, remember that recordings provide a valuable way to study, revisit, and discover artists across time and space.

In the end, balancing both live and recorded experiences can enrich our relationship with music. So next time you hit play on your favorite song, think about how different it might sound in a live setting—and, if you get the chance, go experience it for yourself.

References

• Chanan, M. (1995). Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects on Music. Verso.

• Prior, N. (2018). Popular Music, Digital Technology, and Society. SAGE Publications.

• Schutz, M., & Vaisberg, J. (2014). Music expressivity and perception across live and recorded performances. Psychology of Music, 42(3), 317–333.

• Shoda, H., Adachi, M., & Umeda, T. (2014). Emotional responses to live versus recorded music: Evidence from psychophysiological measurements. Music Perception, 31(3), 215–223.

• Ullen, F., Madison, G., & Sörqvist, P. (2021). Reverberation time and musical emotion in recorded and live settings. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 150(4), 2256-2270.

These lessons might not be held in a dancing studio, but the system of teaching is conditioned by the culture of the dancing studio which has a mirror and so creates a bias toward the visual aesthetics of dancing.

Other than the visual aesthetics of a movement (how it looks), the other justification for learning a movement is claimed ‘authenticity’.

So latino teachers, whether from Argentina or some other South American country profess to have ‘cultural knowledge’ about the authentic way to dance tango.

These are ‘authoritative interpretations’ of tango dancing culture that are being taught.

If you object to this or that movement being taught, the question is, what is the basis for your criticism?

If you use the argument that some movement is natural or not natural, this will fall flat because naturalness is too abstract, and perhaps also too reductive.

Certainly, whether the movement of the tango dancers in Buenos Aires is natural or not, considerations of naturalness are probably not how they arrived at this movement.

So pointing to naturalness is not likely to lead the tango student any closer to understanding how to approach learning to dance tango, in particular, which particular movements would be appropriate or preferable.

So it seems that they have no choice but to fall back on what the teachers are telling them.

The analogy for their predicament is like the students of a language teacher of Spanish who defines the ability to speak Spanish in terms of performance on their test of Spanish vocabulary and grammar.

This is actually the reality of many students of English in South Korea, who are stuck reciting rigid formulas that they rote learned in their classes.

So you find with tiresome regularity stale milonga scenes with latino dancing teachers pumping out the same tired cliches to another batch of wide eyed students.

If the students decide to go to Buenos Aires themselves, they’re either going there to find the authentic thing or they’re merely searching for teaching material for their own classes.

Either way, they’ll find that the stuff that Argentinians actually do is not suitable for classroom material.

If they want to dance the real thing they’ll probably drop out of the milonga scene in their home country, scales having fallen from their eyes as to the fakeness of it all.

If they decide to get into teaching, they’ll have follow the latino teacher’s strategy of cynically pumping out lies to their students.

It seems that the strategy of appealing to naturalness is probably too limited and ineffectual, even if it’s not wrong.

The other strategy is to draw attention to the history of tango as a way of providing a context for the understanding and interpretation of tango culture.

The reasoning behind this strategy is that the movement will naturally follow a contextual understanding

That is, the movement is really just a form of naturally emergent interpretation, and from a psychological point of view, this is how Argentinians themselves arrive at the movement that you see at milongas in Buenos Aires.

So the question is, what is the historical understanding that leads to the naturally emergent movement/interpretation, and how does that differ from the sort of understanding that leads to what we see on the global tango scene?

A major problem is that if you try to explain tango milonguero you’re instantly losing.

It’s not just that the latino and studio teachers have control over the physical and digital territory.

It’s also that, all the formal classifications of approaches to dancing tango are based on people who are performers and teachers of these ‘styles’.

Tango milonguero is thus associated with certain famous personalities who have a personal style and who are seen either performing or teaching this style.

Only a person familiar with convivial social dancing at Buenos Aires milongas will be able to discern which aspects of the teaching or performance are essential to the style, and which aspects are mere superficial aspects or individual expression.

Trying to imitate these dancers will invariably lead to learning by rote and superficial imitation rather than an individual expression.

Keys to the lock.

It seems that there are certain elements that are key to understanding the tango milonguero approach.

In approaching tango movement, the focus should be on (a) natural ‘integrated’ turning from the centre, and (b) optionality or adaptation.

This is what Steve Paxton teaches in his Material for the Spine.

In terms of music, on the other hand, the preference is for emotionally evocative early ‘tango romanza’ recordings rather than ‘tango orillero’ pieces.

Unlike the tango orillero, tango romanza is heavily influenced by romanticist approaches in classical music.

I feel that this type of music and this type of ‘natural’ movement form a natural fit.

By contrast, the latino and studio teachers will always prefer a focus on the rote learning of stepping patterns with emphasis on visual appeal, an unnatural hip swing with ‘separation’, and energetic and rhythmic tango orillero type music that has less emotional content and more energy.

With a syllabus of tango romanza, together with a relatively natural, minimalist and adaptive approach movement, tango milonguero type dancing will emerge naturally.

By contrast, milongas connected to latino and studio teachers will always be characterised by high energy ‘tango orillero’ type music, emphasis on steps, energetic hip swings and emphasis on movement with visual appeal.

Corporatism is a political and economic system in which various sectors of society, such as business, labor, and other interest groups, are integrated into the government to participate in policymaking and regulation. Instead of relying on individual or free-market interactions, corporatism emphasizes collaboration and structured relationships among groups to ensure that policies reflect the interests of society’s different sectors. While corporatism aims for harmony and reduced conflict among competing groups, critics argue it can lead to inefficiency, reduced individual autonomy, and entrenchment of elite interests.

Third spaces are social environments distinct from home (first space) and work (second space) where people can gather, connect, and build community. These spaces include places like coffee shops, parks, libraries, and community centers, where the focus is on social interaction and fostering a sense of belonging. Third spaces are often informal, inclusive, and neutral settings that encourage casual conversation and connections among people from diverse backgrounds. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg, who popularized the concept, emphasized that third spaces play a crucial role in promoting civic engagement, reducing isolation, and strengthening community bonds by providing a relaxed venue for socializing outside of structured, purpose-driven settings. (Source: ChatGPT)

Last night I attended a branch meeting of the New South Wales Libertarian Party to see who these people are. I wasn’t surprised that most of them were basically ex-Liberal Party (the Australian version of British Tories or American GOP) boomers with a background in finance, and everyone was clueless as to what libertarianism actually is. All these people wanted was to get rid of Nimbyism in order to be able to build high rises in what are currently single home burbs.

Now, I don’t have a real problem with medium density urbanism. The problem is that I know exactly what they will build, because you see it everywhere: soulless modernist concrete and glass apartment blocks and big box shopping malls. That is now the cookie cutter modern urban planning.

There was guy from an Argentinian background telling us about his recent trip to Argentina and Milei’s libertarian reforms. Of course I mentioned that I’m interested in tango.

I mentioned that I think tango has a certain political significance for libertarians because it represents a sort of ‘third space’ where people can freely interact which allows for building social capital in a way that is outside of the control of the corporate state. I think that the corporate state has a vested interest commodifying these third spaces and turning them into little more than vacuous consumerism devoid of any real cultural value.

I noticed for example that in communist China all cultural activity is sort of ‘approved astroturf culture’. They build these mass cities full of high rises and then they’ll reserve a large block for a ‘creativity space’ full of ‘creaivity companies’, like some sort of interior design stuff, modernist hipster cafes and art galleries.

All of this seemed pretty cool and hip but after a while I noticed that all of this stuff is completely top-down astroturf and fake state funded pseudo-culture.

It became pretty obvious that none of these cafes or galleries are actual money making businesses and for the most part they stood empty despite large footage filled with arty furniture, fake antiques and retro deco.

The people staffing these establishments did not look like they have any real interest in this stuff as they had a blue collar look about them. It was all obviously nothing more than a background for the obligatory social media selfie for the corporate office workers on their weekend outing.

Arty cafe at OCT Loft Creative Culture Park in Shenzhen, China

This is what the centrally planned corporate communism looks like: fake state approved astroturf pseudo-culture. After a while I realised that it’s the same thing with tango in China. I was running some lessons and then one of the women asked us to do a performance at her company.

This actually reminded me of how my first tango teacher go me to perform tango at a singles event in Sydney. The whole thing struck me as really shallow and culturally disinterested. It’s basically the same shallow cynical corporate commodified culture, no different whether it’s corporate communist China or corporate capitalist Australia.

So in the conversation with the Argentinian guy I mentioned that I think that these corporatist governments have a vested interest in commodifying cultural activities like tango, as either therapy or corporate stuff like ‘corporate yoga’, because they want to control so-called third spaces.

When you look at shopping malls, these are essentially turning shopping into a completely boring alienating sterile experience that discourages human interaction. I don’t know but personally I don’t find myself mingling with people at a shopping mall than I do at an outdoor produce market.

And that’s exactly how the corporatist state like it. They pay lip service to ‘community’ all the while they will plonk a big box shopping mall in the middle of your neighbourhood on the grounds that it provides economic growth or whatever.

It’s fairly obvious that the general trend in modern globalised corporate governments is to control third spaces by way of consumerism and state largesse.

Tango is one of those activities that provides for social interaction among strangers in a convivial atmosphere and so the corporate state will view it with suspicion and caution. It’s culturally enriching and so reduces the propensity to engage in pointless conspicuous consumption thus having a negative impact on the all-important GDP number. The bureaucrats ideally want you to commute between home and work, and then if you do anything else it needs to involve consuming meaningless stuff.

If you want ‘culture’, ie., convivial cultural activity, then they want you to apply for state funding so that they will direct it toward therapeutic approved astroturf pseudo-cultural arty stuff that makes them look good and does not inspire you in the direction of building autonomous social capital external to the corporate state slave colony.

The term “cargo cult” describes a phenomenon observed among indigenous Melanesian populations, particularly after encountering Western goods, technology, and practices. During WWII, these islanders saw military forces arriving with abundant supplies, or “cargo,” which they believed to be gifts from the gods. When the war ended and the cargo flow stopped, some communities ritualistically mimicked the activities of soldiers—building imitation airstrips, radios, or control towers—hoping to attract more supplies.

The cargo cult is a misunderstanding of how the ‘cargo’ is produced. The cultists see the end product but don’t understand the process through which the product arrived. This can apparently also happen in developed countries, as when a government minister in South Africa stated that farmers are not needed to produce food because supermarket chains provide it. Presumably he believes that the way to provide more food all that is needed is to build more supermarkets.

When you look at dancing classes the students are laser focused on the demonstrations and explanation of the teachers and really want to ‘get it’. What you’re seeing is a cargo cult. It’s really no different from the obsession among many Japanese students of English with studying grammar. They study it as if through a microscope failing to see the whole thing. They believe, it seems, that learning English requires memorising the grammar book.

I recently went to a practica and saw the end of a tango lesson in which the students were laser focused on the explanation and correction, at the end of which they packed up and left, or if they stayed it was to practice their lesson routines. They assume that going through this ritual will get them to tango, and it never does.

In all their studying and practicing they never dance, just as the Japanese students of English grammar never actually use English for any real communicative purpose, even to watch an English language program. You try to have a conversation with the Japanese and they just go through the motions of practicing conversation, and you try to dance with these tango students and they go through the motions of practicing their workshop material.

Just as English speakers have little tolerance for boring conversation, so tango dancers have little tolerance for practicing tango with these students. Just as the idea of using the language instead of always studying it often doesn’t enter the grammar student’s consciousness, so the idea of just dancing seems not to enter the consciousness of the tango student.

What is lacking is the understanding of where dancing and dance culture comes from, which is music. The Western nations have been so effective at destroying their own cultural heritage over the past 100 years and replacing it with sports and exercises of various kinds, typically against the rhythmic background of modern music, that dancing has essentially became a sport. It’s become attached to some mechanical and completely unnatural movements essentially no different from what you do in a gym stepping class.

The idea of dancing technique is particularly cultish. Since the steps are unnatural and not easily executed with a partner, there’s need for a lot of explanation of technique as the necessary ritual to attain naturalness and enjoyment. Despite regular prayer and sacrifice neither naturalness nor enjoyment arrive. The students persist nonetheless, 18 months on average, by which time the Voodoo priests get a new batch of cult followers to exploit.

The concept of the dancing studio is completely a cargo cult idea. A room with a mirror and a source of music was required for stage dances, so the wall-to-wall mirror came to predominate as the marker of a dancing space. The problem is that a large glass surface completely destroys the acoustic experience (more on this here) or any naturalness in the sense of visual/acoustic space, and draws attention away from inner sensations that provide necessary feedback for partner dancing. There is nothing natural, organic or conducive to satisfactory social dancing in any of this.

Another one is the confusion of natural sound with the equipment of the DJ. Natural sound originates in instruments and resonates through the space to create a pleasant acoustic experience that motivates social dancing. However, most music has been produced in the last few decades through some sort of a DJ-ing gear and so producing tango music became associated with equipment designed for the reproduction of modern electronic music artificially produced using computer software.

Electronic music has virtually nothing in common with classical music like tango played for the most part on acoustic instruments. But when we see people staring at DJ-ing software on their laptop and manipulating EQ knobs on the mixer board we assume that we must be getting great tango music. Total cargo cult.

Natural dancing, in its basic form, is a movement that is most immediately associated with the slow dance, which is an embracing couple swaying rhythmically side to side and around. Whether it’s waltz, salsa, milonga or tango, it’s all slow dance expanded in various ways. You can’t dance naturally without this kind of movement as the basis of social partner dancing.

The movement of all studio ballroom dancing classes is unnatural insofar as the teachers prohibit, discourage or ignore this basic movement. On the other hand, once this movement is picked up you can learn all the ways of extending it in pretty much a handful of lessons (which is probably why the don’t teach it, not good for business).

The difference between tango and other dancing like milonga or salsa is that the latter mostly involve this movement back and forth whereas the tango cadence suggests a continual flow several steps before ‘returning’. Without the natural sense of swaying and turning, the dancing is feels disorienting and mechanical, with no natural beginning, ending or flow.

Other than that, it’s all about the music. But if you treat the music as mere rhythmic background emanating out of someone’s DJ gear, without giving it any more attention than that, and if you fail to start out with the pendular and rotational movement of the slow dance, then you’re basically participating in a cargo cult, or if you teach that way then you’re the leader of a cargo cult, which might be where you want to be. I feel that tango attracts aspiring cult leaders as ‘teachers’ and so what we get is a global tango cargo cult.