This is my guest article on Gerhard Riedls German language tango blog Gerhards Tango Report.
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;
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;
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.
I have tried teaching close embrace tango and the results where just as disappointing as with the other teachers: tense, lumbering dancing that resembles nothing that 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.
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