The way people dance tango milonguero at Salon Canning Milonga Parakultural is improvised.
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.