The current taxonomy for tango: salon style tango (open embrace) vs. tango milonguero (close embrace) is not useful
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.