You must have had a poor selection! Yes, many 'touring' do, but the better ones understand the difference.
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JournalInTime
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I think it's just fine for a performer to say, "Tango isn't about the tricks and the look and the flash, but about embracing a partner and respecting them, the other dancers, and the music, often in small spaces." I see no hypocrisy there. That's because "show tango" (with tricks and visuals) and "social tango" (with connection and respect) aren't really the same tango. They're just close enough to merit a space at the same festival, say, but a person would have to be very, very cynical to interpret the difference as one of "Do as I say, not as I do."
JournalInTime
Forum Master
No, we've had some very good ones, too. I just have a bitter taste left over from two specific workshops out of dozens.
Didn’t get how you got into tango from above clip but I remember from your other posts.
She is covering a lot of ground in short time (worth half a dozen threads). How many dancers will be able to process what she is saying? Very few.
She spent less than a couple of minutes on the embrace - being in the embrace or not (her description). That alone would need a full 45 minutes to an hour of class (group or private).
They are a staple in WCS. Many followers wear them. Someone called them tango booties but I seen WCS followers been wearing those for more than a decade.
TTanguero
Forum Master
The 'I was just wandering through life when BAM! and the next thing I know I'm dancing' part.
For sure – I'd guess that each person in that room will take out their own small part of it.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
That's how I'd read it, too. I come from an academic background where there are colloquia that drag on forever and present thousands of ideas during that time. The presentations aren't lessons, even if they are given by professors, and nobody takes away more than one small part of what was discussed (one time, after four days, I had one equation and that was the lot). I see the same dynamic at work here. This isn't a dance class, but a verbal presentation.
Granted, it'll only be useful to people whose learning style is verbal and theoretical. I definitely grasp that some people have more visual or somatic learning styles, and need to see demonstrations and practice to learn – and also that some people need one idea per class, not an "info dump." I'm just partial to high-density verbal presentations because they suit my learning style.
She's worth a thread in its own (wasn't there one about 'controversial' dancers). And how quickly she got into tango teaching from learning tango (basically dropped into it whilst studying medicine IIRC). There's some info in English here, but I think there's more in Spanish.
Yes, anatomically this is one of the key differences.
Also individual bodies are different. Some people will have longer arms compared to their height or have longer torsos than average for the peer group. These dynamics affect partner dancing. People perhaps unconsciously adapt to their dance partner. Or may be fail to adapt with particular partners.
Same here. Having seen people in dance classes, for most will not absorb anything useful.
When I say useful, it won’t spark a curiosity or lit a bulb “ohh I need to go find more about this or learn more about this”. If they are listening, it is like information was passively received. Most of it forgotten by time they have left the class.
I beg to differ on learning style. Yes, people have different learning style. Esp when learning a partner dance how you learn the best matters. Teacher may not be best for you if their teaching style doesn’t match your learning style. There is always that search for good fit.
However if we keep aside how people learn, there is another related but different concept. It is about their own willingness to learn something or recognize they need to learn a, b, and c. The embrace part is a good example. Of those in the class hearing that instructor, how many will be triggered “ohh I need to learn or practice the embrace properly”. Learning and practicing proper functional embrace also requires feedback. You can’t practice it by yourself at home. In practicas who gives feedback is very important. Recognizing right feedback from defective feedback needs experience. All these factors are in bigger play when someone is between beginner and intermediate phase of learning. I chuckle when men whose own skills are lacking will be giving advice to newer followers during the practica. I can’t hear what they are saying but watching them from a distance I can see they are often not giving right feedback or teaching incorrectly.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
The big controversies:
1. Her approach is scientific, informed by medicine, and not emotional. Her medical background probably explains her lecturing while teaching, too. All of which is fine by me! I'm an ex-scientist who works with a coach who's a yoga and Pilates expert on "sustainable tango" (tango that respects the body and lets you dance into old age), and I learned everything worth learning in my life from lectures and theory, not demos.
2. She said words to the effect of "The idea that the woman follows, and submits to and receives the music from the man, is rubbish." Which is fine by me, as I believe that nobody should submit, both dancers have the right to propose movements, and both dancers should interpret the music as they hear it. I cannot imagine anything more boring than leaving space in the dance and having my partner just wait for a lead, or leading something and having my partner not interpret it in accordance with the music as they feel it.
Traditionalists who regard the "tango is the dance of love, man-woman, dominance-submission" view of the dance as romantic and even the One True Way – and who think that "naturalistic dancing" is better than the scientific, academic kind – are more numerous, and they really, really dislike her approach. Me, I find those people intolerable. I think dancing originates from the mind and that partner dance only works well if there are two minds fully engaged.
But one can do tricks with connection, and it is not uncommon for there to be enough space to do so. Social dancing has no fixed definition of dance parameters. The social aspect comes from an environment where one can interact with more people than just a fixed partner. The dance can be about whatever the partners agree it is.
Not by much, if at all:
Leg length sex difference
Who has proportionally longer legs, men or women? Intuitively people assume that women's legs are proportionally longer but that is mostly a misconception. As seen in the graph attached to this article the crotch height (inseam) to body height ratio is almost identical between men and women...misconceptions.fandom.com
It's very close to the same. It's just that long legs are emphasized by women's fashion, so people tend to assume that corresponds to proportionally longer legs.
I hardly follow fashion or popular culture. After I started dancing I intuitively felt that women had slightly longer legs for the same height. May be it is the heels that lifts their legs. I never thought about it scientifically. Leading a man and woman of similar ht/wt, I do feel the difference of the lower body. May be it needs deeper study on why there is that difference. I read long back (before my dancing days) that how the difference in lower body anatomy between the men and women affect their walking respective movements.
JournalInTime
Forum Master
Neither do I. I just work with a coach who studied anatomy and who has a library of books on it. There are a lot of myths about humans . . . one is that women have longer legs than men, in proportion to their body. If there's a difference, it's marginal, and there are studies that say that men have proportionally longer legs than women. The unscientific perception tends to be slanted in favor of women when they're dressed to dance or as models, in favor of men when looking at sports, but the measurements suggest that's mostly intuition and not science.
opendoor
Forum Master
During my active tango period, I always had several pairs with different heel heights in my bag to adapt to followers. Today, I dance in flats and only with followers, which are 166 cm tall.