I mean i do that when watching the ronda too, they’re not mutually exclusive. But perhaps I’m dancing at the same time the maestros are and don’t have an opportunity to watch them (if they even dance). The only performances I mostly dont enjoy are the choreographed ones, imo choreographing tango sorta defeats one of the coolest things about it (the true lead/follow improv) and just turns it into another stage dance.
At the end of the pandemic, maybe a new start?
- Thread starter itwillhappen
- Start date
I had added unless someone comes from previous professional dance back ground. In general I would accept above premise but when it comes to teaching, I haven’t seen any evidence.
I seen extremely few talented dancers, with zero previous dance background, who get really good at social dancing in a year or two. They are outliers. And none of them tried to teach.
My comment was specifically about those who start teaching or instructing. I have yet to see a good enough instructors or teachers among those with less than 6 years of active dancing experience and no previous dance background. My sample size is about 15 or 16. If they are not active dancers and had no previous dance background, I doubt they will be any better.
There are many naturally talented dancers. Most talented people are poor at teaching. Their own natural talent makes is challenging for them to break down how they do something, analyze and synthesize it in a way that they can explain it to others. A lot of star and superstar athletes are known to make horrible coaches after they retire and try their hand at it. In fact the best coaches were hardly star players. Where as someone slightly less talented will be able to so because they were forced to learn rather than something that came to them very naturally. Same can be said of many experienced old milongueros who are good dancers but lack teaching skills. We see that so often with visiting instructors.
Teaching like anything else is a skill by itself. Some may be naturally good at it and others get good at it through practice. The same is true about any other that requires skills. The same is true for dancing. It is a skill. Performing is a different skill than social dancing.
The subset of those who are both naturally very good at teaching and naturally very good at dancing, taking to teaching in 5-6 years will be extreme rare. Given how exceptional it is to be natural at single skill, now the odds are further reduced with two unrelated skills bestowed within same person. The odds get further reduced that such an exceptional person actually dives into teaching at less than 5 years mark.
Therefore length of time in tango scene as an active dancer/participant is a good proxy for how much depth a person may have acquired to be able to teach others in a satisfactory way. Perhaps what you consider satisfactory is different from what I do. For me in any field, to be a satisfactory teacher your knowledge depth and understanding of the subject matter needs to be at least two magnitudes higher than the person you are teaching to.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
Also – though it's controversial to say so here – you can be an excellent tango teacher while being a merely mediocre tango dancer. What many gifted dancers need is not a more capable dancer to show them how things are done. It's someone who's talented at deconstructing dance puzzles on a more-or-less intellectual level to figure out what they need to do to solve their problem or refine their idea, and then to relate that to them so they can apply their own dancing talents to making it look and feel good.
The idea that all good tango teachers have to be good tango dancers is bizarre, to be honest. It doesn't work like that most anywhere else in life . . . Teachers unlock genius without being geniuses all the time. Their role isn't to do but to guide.
My personal experience is that the dancers I most want to dance like have arrived there intuitively, via their own muse, and cannot adequately convey the "how" of it. When I've gone to them for lessons, I've always been disappointed. Whereas some of my best lessons have come from middle-aged university professor types who happen to like tango, and who can describe it to me using decades of professorial experience.
ArbeeNYC
Forum Master
Ten hours represents a very big investment in tango for a beginner. There's a cost associated with that--financial as well as temporal.
ArbeeNYC
Forum Master
Not really controversial. Some very good teachers are very ordinary dancers.
Not all, of course. For example, Naveira is probably a very good teacher, he and Giselle Anne seem to have a system for teaching and his classes are well attended. Homer & Christine appear to be very systematic about how they teach, which may be a very good approach as long as the fundamentals are emphasized. Most of the high-end performers, well, you have to wonder about their teaching skills. The performances are largely ads for workshops and private classes.
Well, we know how addictive it can be. The financial barriers can be mitigated by subscription models (which have been quite successful over here), student discounts, inviting people to take the class one level lower to fill out numbers and get some practice. (in a large expensive city there's always some people with equally large financial resources too.)
ArbeeNYC
Forum Master
Some of the best tips and techniques I've gotten has come from fellow dancers who were generous enough to share their insights with me. It was simply a question, do this, then this, and you're there. It took about 10 minutes. We need more of that. Make sure to choose your fellow dancer carefully.
ArbeeNYC
Forum Master
True. I know people who simply started out by taking private lessons. I'm personally not in favor of that, but whatever works for you I guess. I could see putting in most of the time at prácticas and only taking one class or workshop a week with the same teacher.
They're mostly doing group classes. The deal is you pay a monthly fixed price and you can go to any of the classes the school offers during the week (which could be a lot) within your skill level, and also attend the school's milongas/practicas.
ArbeeNYC
Forum Master
That's quite generous. I used to sign up by the month but that was for one class with one (or two) teachers. We received a discount for the práctica (it was never free because it was a big one).
TTanguero
Forum Master
That was me. Group lessons and practicas followed, but to be honest the group classes were mostly useful for social reasons, and ideas to take to my next private. That remains the case today.
For me it was the opposite. I didn’t take my first serious private till after more than ten years of dancing. Then too 5 or 6 privates over course of three years. Either the instructor I liked was traveling or I was traveling. Now that I look back I took two AT privates right at the very beginning at a generic ballroom studio. Both were non tango ballroom instructors. I only walked backwards and forwards by myself for most of it.
My introduction to Tango was one or two lessons a week for six months, two hours each lesson I think. I had to drive an hour. The group class would have about 10 people or 5 couples. After that it was may be two dozen or so group lessons a year. An occasional year where I might have taken workshop series that was more immersive. My ramp up to milongas was very slow. First milonga must have been after five or six months.
First five years I had other interests and priorities. Which meant at best a dozen milongas a year and another dozen or so practicas and a dozen group lessons. I was a serviceable lead at the milongas in the first year. By second year I was comfortable leading intermediate level followers and occasionally got compliments mostly for good frame. Some were surprised I had been only dancing less than two years. It helped that that before learning Argentine Tango, I spent six months on private ballroom lessons. Twice a week. It was a boutique top ballroom studio. I realized that learning privates was not giving me any social dancing experience. I had zero interest in choreographed line of dance and competitions. It did give me lot of good foundation in fundamentals of partner dancing and technique. I disliked the rigid frame posture and pretentiousness of ballroom. It did nothing for musicality in dancing. Musicality concept I discovered in Tango and social dancing later. I quit ballroom privates just before taking first Tango lessons. That ballroom teacher still owes me five privates!
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JournalInTime
Forum Master
Tango learning falls on a spectrum. Anecdotally (only!):
Some dancers I know have never taken tango lessons – group or private – except perhaps the odd open, drop-in, or pre-milonga class. They learned from a hodgepodge of YouTube videos, home practice, and above all tips begged from experienced dancers at prácticas and milongas. Most of those who ended up able to dance tango already knew folkloric, Latin, swing, or other dance. By virtue of having no contacts from classes, those who survive are perforce hyper-social and thus popular despite their shortcomings.
Many friends started and ended their tango learning in group classes. They found the most affordable school, went through its level system, and at the end of that decided that they didn't want or need more lessons. From there they proceeded much like the previous group. They're often worse than the previous group, though – they're at the peak of "Mount Stupid" on the Dunning-Kruger curve. Still, they have social contacts from their classes, so they dance a lot.
Then there's me. I started tango in early 2013 and took my first private lesson before the end of the year. Since 2016, I've taken weekly private lessons exclusively. Group classes served three purposes: (1) to make social contacts at or around my level at the start, (2) to give me ideas for my private lessons, and (3) to let me serve as an accompanier on the way to possibly learning to teach. To be honest, when I left group classes I was in the "Valley of Despair" on the curve; private lessons are helping me climb out. This approach isn't great socially . . . I've been called everything from "anonymous" to "snob," and only other technical tango addicts can see the work I do in my lessons.
Finally, there's my friend who's an overachiever with money. He dislikes waiting for anything or anyone. He regularly up and decides to fly planes, become a karate black belt, ride horses, scuba dive, or whatever. He finds the best local teacher he can, pays whatever it costs, and goes as often as it takes to become proficient as close to overnight as possible. When he decided tango interested him, he skipped directly to the founder of a respected school and prepaid a year of private lessons with her. He does everything by the book but with zero creativity . . . 8/10 for technical merit but 2/10 for artistic impression. However, his money also bought him introductions to the right dancers.
Some dancers I know have never taken tango lessons – group or private – except perhaps the odd open, drop-in, or pre-milonga class. They learned from a hodgepodge of YouTube videos, home practice, and above all tips begged from experienced dancers at prácticas and milongas. Most of those who ended up able to dance tango already knew folkloric, Latin, swing, or other dance. By virtue of having no contacts from classes, those who survive are perforce hyper-social and thus popular despite their shortcomings.
Many friends started and ended their tango learning in group classes. They found the most affordable school, went through its level system, and at the end of that decided that they didn't want or need more lessons. From there they proceeded much like the previous group. They're often worse than the previous group, though – they're at the peak of "Mount Stupid" on the Dunning-Kruger curve. Still, they have social contacts from their classes, so they dance a lot.
Then there's me. I started tango in early 2013 and took my first private lesson before the end of the year. Since 2016, I've taken weekly private lessons exclusively. Group classes served three purposes: (1) to make social contacts at or around my level at the start, (2) to give me ideas for my private lessons, and (3) to let me serve as an accompanier on the way to possibly learning to teach. To be honest, when I left group classes I was in the "Valley of Despair" on the curve; private lessons are helping me climb out. This approach isn't great socially . . . I've been called everything from "anonymous" to "snob," and only other technical tango addicts can see the work I do in my lessons.
Finally, there's my friend who's an overachiever with money. He dislikes waiting for anything or anyone. He regularly up and decides to fly planes, become a karate black belt, ride horses, scuba dive, or whatever. He finds the best local teacher he can, pays whatever it costs, and goes as often as it takes to become proficient as close to overnight as possible. When he decided tango interested him, he skipped directly to the founder of a respected school and prepaid a year of private lessons with her. He does everything by the book but with zero creativity . . . 8/10 for technical merit but 2/10 for artistic impression. However, his money also bought him introductions to the right dancers.
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itwillhappen
Forum Master
We can't know what the future holds, but I wouldn't envision that as a male exclusion. Rather, men prefer to stay at home because tango is becoming more feminine and enriched with bodywork, contact improvisation or Ayurveda.
Here
an organizer can do without any role specification, I think because he can recruit enough participants from his very successful double-role events.
Revelation tango | Tango Dance Musicality Neotango Contango
tango dance neo tango contact tango musicalitywww.revelationtango.com
Here I just see a video from one of his double role events. Well, it takes a little getting used to, I'm not attracted to it yet, but I'm not in the target group either.
Another marathon that preferred to register double-rolers had a bank run because an older website also accepted registrations and their limit was not in place. Now they're puzzling over how to proceed.
pianistamediano
Forum Master
Hm. For being a double role event, I can only see two or three men following, and the majority of men are leading. I can't say I like the atmosphere either, it gives me a strange feeling, but I don't know if it's the dancers or the location that does it.