what does "teacher-centred" mean?
Many other styles of dance have a very well-established foundation of accepted basic technique and style, and a student can walk into a class or lesson pretty much anywhere in the world (language difficulties aside) and find the same dance being taught with the same technique. No one teacher has any real influence, except in matters of choreography, styling and musicality. The dance exists independently of the teaching body, and one of the marks of the quality of the teacher is the extent to which they remain faithful to the fundamentals of the dance and pass them on.
There is a huge population of social dancers, most of whom have long given up receiving any regular instruction (it shows, but that's a different issue), and they dance, from one year to the next, in clubs, bars, hired halls and all sorts of other venues, in the styles they know (and at their own level) completely indifferent to the relatively small body of teachers, whose influence is, therefore, non-existent.
Tango seems different. There probably is an irreducable minimum of basic technique and style that defines the dance, but it defies definition (mostly because no one will agree - they could, but they won't), so in the absence of any standardisation (and I'm not talking about, less still
advocating standardising the way that we dance), tango is whatever the local teachers in any place say it is.
Some teach the 8CB and other figures, which they learned in the car park behind the theatre the night they went to see Tango Argentino, and they've been 'teaching' ever since, others have learned their craft via a more traditional route, and they would say (quite possibly correctly) that the other guy wasn't teaching tango at all. Either way, they seem to dominate the tango scene in a way that teachers don't dominate other scenes. I know that some large cities can support dance clubs where people go mainly to dance, rather than to receive instruction, but there are very few venues (not around me, anyway) where tango dancing is to be found as a social activity, separated from teaching activities. In my nearest big city, I know of no dancing not organised by teachers, and linked directly to their teaching activities. Milongas are few and far between - monthly generally, and if you want to dance even once a week, you will have to spend hours driving to other towns/cities, and if you want to dance every day, you will have to open your own club.
You could go to a class nearly every day, though, and most tango dancers seem to attend more classes than dances, no matter how long they have been dancing. That impression may be wrong, of course, and it may not hold good everywhere.
So my view is that tango (at least locally) is dominated by its teachers. If they stopped arranging milongas, would anyone else step in to the vacuum, or would the tango community just melt back into the wider dance community and carry on dancing salsa, modern jive and whatever else? If you actually enjoy
dancing, rather than writing about dancing, or buying dance shoes, or saving up for that trip the BsAs, then tango might not be the obvious choice. But that is another issue, and perhaps just a local one to me here.
It's like an obsession or something...
