Klaus Wendel wrote a critique of Somatic Milonguero on his blog, entitled Learning Without Lessons? A Practical Test of the Learning Model in Tom Tabachynsky’s Somatic Milonguero. Following is his points as I could summarise them and my responses.
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
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.
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.
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.
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