I came across a YouTube channel of a woman tango teacher that is exactly the kind of mechanical movement for tango I’ve been talking about.
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.