The tango skill building


To me assessing the skill level of better tango dancers feels like looking up a building. May be you can see the difference in the make of the details a few floors above you, but you certainly can't see them 10 or 20 stories higher. On the other hand, you can clearly recognize every floor below you, since you've been there, you've walked it, and you've inspected it for a while. I have examined many floors in the 13.5 years of dancing tango only. I've tried out many things that didn't work out. I've taken classes with many teachers or refused to take classes, out of stupidity, ego, or because I knew better. I've bumped into many teachers who had a whole lot to give me, but either weren't saying the words that I was ready to hear at that moment, or were thinking about the dance in a too different way, or I couldn't connect what they were saying to what I was doing, and so I ended up not learning much from them. Nevertheless, I kept little boxes of knowledge from most of them, even though for many years those boxed were completely useless to me. But as I keep changing my dancing and discovering more things, I am finding myself understanding the knowledge from some of those boxes. I consider myself an autodidact for the most part, since for the above mentioned reasons I keep reinventing the wheel. I recognize only two of the many people with whom I studied as my mentors: Constanin Rueger - my first teacher, from whom I learned most of what I knew about tango for the first few years, and from whom I learned how to teach; and since last year - Horacio Godoy. May be, if in the interim I had found a teacher to suit my needs, I would have gotten all the information I need from her, and would have progressed much faster…,  but even so, I am happy things worked out the way they did, because, since I am a teacher, I had to think about every single aspect of what I do and examine every single floor of that building with a magnifying class, and that sometimes even more than once.

In this blog I want to talk about followers, even though the same applies for leads, but it will be a mess to switch back and forth talking about the two.

Back to our building. For a while, when one sees better dancers one immediately recognizes the external differences - she does more steps than me, her boleos are higher, she embellishes better. (After a 1.5 years of dancing I couldn't for the life of me see any further differences between myself and the best dancer in Berlin, who had been dancing for 11 years at that time.) Later, as one keeps moving up the building, one starts paying attention to the ease with which those elements get executed, how stable and smooth the movements are, and how everything seems to end just where it needs to be - precision. Much, much, much later, I started being able to see how a great follower would express the music with her body. How the way she steps or embellishes reflects what she hears in the music. Sometimes, seldom, I can even see the tension and relaxation in her body. If I pay a lot of attention I can see the subtleness or her movements: how small of a signal with provoke a reaction; how perfectly she would absorb the energy to express a soft note; how the duration of her boleo will be perfectly timed to hit a certain something in the music; and how her leg will hover in the air, if the music "holds its breath"...

And then there is the whole universe of subtlety that we don't see. Has it happen to you to watch a couple dance, and she's obviously a good dancer, but you don't see anything so special about the ways she moves, that might explain why the guy dances the 10th tandas with her, or why he seems mesmerized? May be it was due to my limited talent or lessons, that it took 13 years and Horacio Godoy for me to be able to understand… But what I learned from him was that I shouldn't be able to see what enchants the lead?!?! If it's visible, it's too much. What it is, is a subtlety in the way one uses their body and hears the music - the way one breathes…, the way one can isolate and engage different muscles…, the way one can pick a note or two to skip or throw into the dance…, the way one is responsible for their own movement and can make suggestions, while melting into the music and the partner… Now I know that the only way to know this subtlety is to experience it. And experience it, when one is ready for it. After 13 years of dancing tango, Horacio told me in a private: "You should know you are good, since I am not working on walking with you." Really??? That's how "good" I am?!? And yet, he was right. If he had had to work with me on the mechanics of walking, instead of the expression of walking, I would have never been able to tap into that pool of subtlety, because I wouldn't have been ready. If he hadn't felt that I have explored all the floors I talked about, he would have known that I can't relax and submerge myself into the world of subtlety… But now I'm here - eyes wide open for the invisible, I am ready to explore the next floor! And I'm so excited about the marvels that the higher floors, which I can't even see yet, will bring.