Great dancers are not great because of their technique, they are great because of their passion.”
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On social media: "There is always competition in tango so we have to keep our dance practice up if we want to dance and not belly ache about not getting dances."
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2026: The post after this intro is from 2015. There are hundreds of posts in draft, that for one reason or another didn't get published (yet). Prompted by a reel I saw recently, I was sure I had written one on "Technique" and found it languishing in draft. I have written extensively in various posts on why I don't think technique in tango is the meal people tend to make of it, but here I suppose was one of my earliest forays into the topic. My view hasn't really changed at all even while reels proliferate of the latest up-and-coming young thing, in beautiful shoes, practicing intricate barre work. For one of the funniest tango quotes I've heard on this subject see Doubt and Kindness.
Over the years, I have found reading other people on tango largely depressing and so I don't tend to do it. Nonetheless this reel caught my eye the other day. For when this link breaks, it's by Marco Aurelio El Tupungatino. Now, I didn't know this until a minute ago when I looked it up, but Tupungato is near Mendoza, in Argentina, far nearer Chile than Buenos Aires. Argentinians also tend to speak more sense about tango than people from other countries, even sometimes when they are teachers.
So this guy was exhorting women not to go to classes to learn steps, but to go straight to the milonga where they would become better dancers by dancing with guys who could dance. This is a view I share, but it is strangely unusual, particularly in a teacher.
I think the guy is a teacher. He talks about introducing the tango embrace to Hong Kong in another post and in another he is referred to by someone else as a "maestro" who will be giving tango dance tips. Curiouser and curiouser. If he's famous, well, I'm a social dancer and only tend to notice the people dancing socially on the social floor.
The point is also that this video has, at the time of writing 288 likes. I was flabbergasted., never having seen so many people agree in one place on this, at least previously, controversial point. Controversial that is to say, in Europe and among Argentinians who have been taken in by the tango industry. Eleven years ago, this view in the UK and Europe was very unpopular. I would write about in Facebook forums and was slammed over and over, in much the same way that El Tupungatino has received criticism in the comments. I also commented about it on other blogs until, along with friends, I got fed up with these kinds of comments being censored simply for not being in line with the author's own view.
I don't know whether the difference is time, or that he's male, or that he made a video, or is Argentinian, or a teacher or some combination of these, but I am very glad that people like the point.
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2015:
I like dancing with people I like, more than I care about their level of technique or attainment.
The technique that comes from stuffing your head full of things to remember in lessons is stressful when, in the milonga, you try to remember all the things you are supposed to be doing: "Stand up straight!", "Reach up with the chest!", "Open the throat area!" "Be grounded!" "Connect!" "Loosen your arm!", "Don’t collapse your arm!", "Reach back from the hip!", "Move fluidly!", "Engage the core!", "Relax!" I gave up. That's when I really did relax and then I started to learn to dance.
Contrary to popular belief, I haven’t found that it’s really about technique. Or perhaps I just don’t care to spend my time balancing on one leg in a workshop. I don’t think it’s important . I think dancing well is more an awareness of how it feels for the other person and how it is to feel them. How on earth would you go about teaching that? When did you ever go to a class that talked about feeling? Who would buy that? Why would you when you can just do it?
[2026 footnote, apropos "what goes on in classes": I bumped into someone I knew slightly, a friend of a friend, the other day, in a Cuban cafe in Portobello, Edinburgh's seaside littoral, some fifty miles from my home. Stranger still, it turned out this person had been unwittingly taking tango lessons with the Stalker, about whom enough has been written elsewhere. It turned out the new person didn't know the first thing about social dancing, literally, not a thing, which tells me they are learning steps. We discussed more about the fascinating subtleties and traditions of the milonga in a 10 minute conversation than she had in any of her so-called lessons. ]
So I think it’s about how it feels for the other person. As the girl that would be to be close, but not heavy, relaxed and not stiff, the kind of embrace which is natural yet allows for dance movement, an impulse to move together to music that you know. These are the things I think of as technique. And this comes simply from awareness, listening, in a word, and practice. From listening comes feeling.
These things are very hard to teach, largely because they rely on a natural desire to want to embrace another person, which is not the case in class situations. That is an artificial environment, where most embraces are contrived. And yet I remember a teacher telling me something which I thought was probably true at the time, although I had yet to understand it: that you can tell who will dance best simply from the way they embrace at the start.
Ricardo Vidort said something I find very sustaining:
"Today, people teach methodic ways and tango, the real one, does not have a method because it is a feeling. Technique and choreography? It’s only for performance. It is a tango that has been learned for hours and hours for show business."
Even when people agree that step and sequence based teaching is not so great, they still cling to the idea of technique. But it doesn't make you feel better to your partner. Good feel comes from plenty of dancing with people who can dance where you both listen to the music, each other and your own bodies.
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