Opendoor, how you can learn at the milonga, if you are able to use only first and second gear? There is one of the milonga rules, no teaching. There is nothing worse then "sabelotodo" guy stoping whole ronda because he needs to explain to some poor girl that this figure needs to be performed this way, and nothing else.
Leaders. How was your Tango journey?
- Thread starter Pharaoh
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opendoor
Forum Master
Yes and no. A beginner who waits for a dance invitation with identical body language will definitely not get any dance. Don't you know my mantra: learning tango is first and foremost social learning! Anyone who introduces themselves to the right people with the right facial expression will usually quickly be accepted as a new family member, regardless of their skills.
You have to start somewhere. Starting at an anonymous large milonga would of course be what unwise.
There is ofcourse a big drop out rate as with any other place. People who stop tango in the first few months or a year.
We have a lot of instructors and people attend classes that are convenient to them. Convenience usually means driving distance. It is very fragmented. Therefore it is very hard to say anything definitively. Local instructors also cycle through. Some have been there for a long time. But they have taken breaks for years and then resumed teaching. Some have slowed down teaching. Others move and start teaching. Then we have constant stream of visiting instructors. At any given moment there are on an average at least two visiting instructors. They have their own workshops and classes for short duration.
We also have active tango scenes further outside the metro area in the adjoining areas which are 2 to 2.5 hours of drive. Within the metro area I might be familiar only with 50% of the regular dancers. That’s because people will only go to certain milongas regularly (closer to where they live) that I do not go to.
I do not think there is any uniformity. Some classes patronized by the younger lot and some by older lot. The classes can have reputation on the demographics. Milongas are more heterogenous.
It is difficult to say what percentage consist of committed couples (married or otherwise) who dance. I think 15% would be maximum. I think about half of the dancers are in a relationship, which means their partners don’t dance. May be it is higher than that.
As I have mentioned the turnover can be high. Dancers move out of the area and new dancers move in to the area. Over three to four years period the regulars at milongas can change by 50% to 60%. The core of the scene that has lasted 10+ years is about 25% to 30%. One that has lasted 15+ years is may be 10%.
If there are people who only take classes but do not dance socially, they would be invisible. I will have to attend those classes to know. In the classes I drop in, which can be very random, most faces are familiar from the milongas.
My guess is that there is no best practice. The instructors probably push students to go out social dance. The peers in the classes push fellow students to social dance. Over 90% to 95% of the people in classes are there without a committed dance partner. Which means hardly any couples. May be lack of committed dance partner is what pushes them to start social dancing. I think it is primarily instructors now I think of. I don’t know all the instructors. But the most I know do encourage students to dance socially.
You can learn or develop through milongas.
I had a similar path but rather than concentrated in short span of time like his, mine was spread out through years. I am trying to recall my first five years. They are hard to recall because I was dancing so sporadically. May be one milonga every two months. Or may be once a month. Or there would be 4-5 milongas in a span of two months followed by no milongas for 4-5 months. I was barely taking any classes.
Difference is I had what you can describe as immersive learning for first two or three months. Attending a group class or two every week. Three to four months prior to that I was trained as a member of tango showcase (repeating fixed choreography). But that never prepared me to dance socially. First time I tried dancing socially I couldn’t move. I knew tango from choreography but I couldn’t put my own steps together to dance. Not a single step. It was very awkward. That’s why then I took those two or three months of regular weekly class. I might have tried to go to two or three milongas during those first two months. I took no privates for first dozen years. Total privates I have taken in tango are exactly seven till date.
After that it was asynchronous. Each year I might drop into max 6 to 8 classes. Go to 6-8 milongas. I think. It wasn’t very remarkable so I don’t remember. I don’t remember how many tandas I danced in a night. Probably not more than 4 or 5. I wasn’t into any figures because I was dancing and taking classes unevenly. What I do remember is not feeling uncomfortable on the pista when dancing. I never knew the people so I always had to invite those I didn’t know at all or hardly knew (which continues to this day). I am good at remembering faces and how someone dances. It doesn’t mean the lady would recall dancing with me two or four months back. I was the kind of guy that parachutes into the milonga randomly less than dozen times a year. For the first seven or eight years I had no one to go with to milongas with or meet there. I was a lone ranger.
I have been fairly anti-social in that respect. I don’t like ingratiating myself to a group of strangers. I am better at one on one interaction. That’s almost not possible when social dancing. Everyone wants to dance and no one has time for one on one interaction beyond a quick small talk.
How do you identify the “right” people? The “right” people can be the popular group or a clique made up of high level dancers or a group that brings their own wine and socializes more than dancing, or some attractive dancers. Better question is who were the “right” people to you?
What?? That’s all I ever known! Large being 60-70 people minimum.
opendoor
Forum Master
We all are different and I only can refer to my own journey. And I think I decided at which table and people I first sat myself already in fractions of a second.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
We have teachers like that around here (including one of my favorites!). Unfortunately, we also have quite few who wouldn't be caught dead at the milonga with people who are less than "advanced": Their duty to their students starts when classes start and ends when classes end.
That's close to true here, too.
There are a few people who have been dancing for a long time who either learned during the height of "tango nuevo" and never mastered the embrace, or who quit their lessons before learning more than the "practice embrace"; one guy in particular, after close to 30 years, still stands at arm's length to all of his partners. There's one school obsessed with movements that don't work well in the embrace, and at times their students seem to be dancing one big soltada. And the more competitive, eyes-on-the-Mundial types dance using that weird "embrace" that isn't an embrace, with zero weight sharing or apilado, and lots of opening to show off. But all put together, those groups are maybe 30% of our dancers.
So, call it 70% here.
If you get away from classes, teachers, studios, etc. and focus on milongas for a few years, you eventually stop running into these people. I sometimes help my coach teach less advanced dancers, sometimes help a local teacher when her regular teaching partner isn't around, am a member of a school run as a co-op, and am personal friends with enough tango teachers that I can host a cocktail party with just them; so, I orbit closer to the academic side of tango here. I therefore know lots of people who are pure academic dancers, not social dancers – and they aren't all beginners.
A couple of these people regularly ask me if I can accompany them in lessons or whatnot. My reaction is, "It has been years! Glad you're back to tango!" Their response is, "What do you mean, 'back'? I never left." Then we have the awkward conversation in which they talk about their 5 or 10 years of studio work while I ask why – despite dancing up to 5 times a week – I've never seen them at a milonga. The most recent such experience was . . . uh, twice this week.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
"A beginner lead is not going to get many dances" is definitely true here. Well, it's a bit nuanced: They can get one tanda – but if it becomes clear that they're a beginner, that follower won't dance with that leader again, and neither will that follower's follower friends. I had one particular follower mafia ignore me for 6-7 years after I first danced with one of them less than a year into my tango journey.
We have a big enough community here that, despite role imbalance (3 followers to 2 leaders most evenings, sometimes as bad as 2:1 or even 3:1), followers just don't need to dance with beginner leaders. As those role ratios show, we have far more followers than leaders starting tango, so the average leader has been around for a while. That means they're considerably more advanced than "beginner," and followers are often happy to stay seated and turn down the few beginner leaders present while they await a tanda or two with more advanced leaders.
By contrast, a total beginner female follower who hangs off her partners, spears feet with her heels, stares at her or her leader's feet, etc. can dance all night with even the best leaders if she's under 30, slim, attractive, and well-dressed. It's a bit of an elephant in the room. It's also why I make a point of not inviting followers in that category.
One thing I'll say about the "hippy mindfulness" school whose weirdly conceptual teaching and near-total indifference to physical technique put me off is that they are a positive exception to all of the above: At their events, everybody dances regardless of level or appearance. When their people dance elsewhere, they bring their values with them. The "dance is a feeling, not a skill" attitude seems to come with a "dance is inclusive" belief.
I just wish we had "dance is inclusive" dancers here who also believed in solid work on technique. Then we'd have more leaders stick around and a better role balance.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
Exactly. "Social dancing" describes the human conduct at an event. Level describes the technique. I've never seen any relationship between the two.
You can have truly social dancing at every skill level from "started yesterday" to "world class." You can have dancers at those levels or any level in between whose social attitude ranges from "Yuck, other humans!" to "My friends! My dear friends! We are here to hug and party!" Sure, there are advanced dancers who only dance among themselves, but if "themselves" is a group of 50-100 established dancers in the community, I'd say their dancing is eminently social. Likewise, there are social dancers who try to substitute charm and interpersonal skill for dance skill, but they form their own group that doesn't care about level.
Pointing out the dangerous sparks that sometimes fly when those two wires cross as a reason why tango isn't social is a fallacious argument. Every human social activity has peer groups, friendship circles, cliques, etc. While fully inclusive, "I don't care about your level, let's just dance!" dancing would be very social, and possibly good for tango (especially for leader retention), it isn't realistic. Setting aside the physical risks of dancing with someone whose bad technique can hurt you – and Maslow says health trumps social, even if social is a higher value – there's the fact that if you're in a large social group that dances well, you're not going to feel pressure to grow that group, beyond replacing someone who left once in a while.
I work in the world of tabletop games. Our games are literally social games – the French term is jeux de société. Some players are real experts at the math and strategy of the games, others are just there to hang out, and both types of gamers can coexist in a group. And I can confirm that most gaming groups are closed regardless of makeup, admitting new people only when someone departs. As I said, every human social activity.
pianistamediano
Forum Master
JournalInTime
Forum Master
Those guys are total wankers . . . I wish they would dry up and blow away.
My girlfriend has studied and danced tango for over 10 years. Her coach – with whom she works weekly – is one of the people who introduced tango in my city, and has been studying and dancing tango for well over 30 years, and teaching it for well over 20. As a result, my girlfriend has good technique, to the extent that at a workshop a while back, Claudia Codega told her, "You have good technique." Our coach claims that if she wanted to teach tango, she probably could.
Anyway, this past weekend, my girlfriend and I went to a milonga together. She's my main dance partner, so we do that a lot.
And some guy there – who has been dancing tango for all of 2-3 years, and who is 100% self-taught and proud of it – invited her to dance. This guy is a brusque dancer who uses his arms, stares at his feet, regularly puts his partner outside his frame, and clamps his partner tightly when not doing that. My girlfriend accepted because the event was lightly attended and I had a tanda with a friend.And this guy proceeded to stop dancing every few measures to critique my girlfriend's technique. Not just any technique, but technique in two particular areas where she has worked extra-hard to be clean and good – the technique that Claudia liked, in fact.
I was just floored that this foot-gazing, arm-leading, weirdly contorted leader did that. I didn't have words with him, because at a lightly attended event, that would've been unfair to the organizers. But I have been passing word of his bad behavior to followers, and my girlfriend has been doing the same.
People like that kill tango every time they step onto the pista.
Well. repeated unwanted criticism is a situation where ending the dance immediately in the middle of the song is appropriate, and skill levels aren't even relevant, since it is just rude.
No, this was not about the quality of dancing. What i meant is that social dancing as a part of social life does not exist anymore. I can't go on a date and do "dinner and dancing" as a reasonably standard option. I can't expect most social functions to have dancing. I can't expect that dancing is part of minimal social skills.
I am at the very tail end of social dancing - my school offered dance lessons as part of prep for the prom. At a few parties before and after the prom there was people doing partner dancing - it vanished quickly because it was mostly already an anachronism, and nobody else did any social dancing at parties. At weddings there was a reasonable expectation that there would be partner dancing, and that you would see cross-generational dancing social dancing for fun. When my grandparents generation was still around there was usually a bit of social dancing at family gettogethers, and everybody from my parents generation somewhat knew how to dance, but at my parents parties there was no social dancing anymore. Today partner dance is either a hobby, or it is extremely romantically coded - the only partner dances that still are part of social life are the first dance at weddings, and slowdancing as a form of pda.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
My girlfriend suffers from a major anxiety disorder, so she's nonconfrontational with strangers. The idea of walking off definitely occurred to her, but she decided not to do so on a half-empty floor. She wanted neither the emotional labor of doing it nor the social fallout of doing it in plain view of all (in a big crowd, she could've pulled it off mostly unseen).
And yeah, level is never relevant. Even the lord god king champion of tango worldwide shouldn't teach on the floor, even to a total beginner with everything to learn. It's simply against all the rules of polite conduct. This goes even for half-empty floors . . . just as you don't lead highly athletic or potentially dangerous movements to strangers whose physical capacities and health issues you do not know, you don't impose emotional or social burdens on strangers whose mental capacities and health issues you do not know. My girlfriend's experience is a perfect example of someone not respecting that second part of the rule.