Natural learning

On Choice Anon asked:

Basically, the question is how one starts to learn tango?

I also went through confusion and frustration of tango classes, tried many of them, but realization and clear sense of direction came only after carefully reading and rereading "Tango and Chaos in Buenos Aires".

Well, anyway, what is your take on how one can start learning tango without wasted effort, money and time on disinformation given in classes?

It is a many-faceted question.  I realised that one of the things I learned - and it took a while - pre-empts the question "how does one learn to dance tango".  It is when not to waste time persuading the wrong kinds of people to dance or to avoid the harm of dance class. 

Only some people will learn to dance well - and those are not many.  I think this is not so much because of an inbuilt physical inability to dance because most babies, toddlers and young children will respond, spontaneously to music.  In those who won't learn anything beyond a mechanistic dance, it is more to do with an acquired habit of mind.  Of course, many people learn that sort of monotonous, pushing and shoving, dance of the automata, dance of the cogs and are happy with it; they don't even realise they are doing it or that there is anything else.  It depends what kind of dancing tango you want to learn or, rather, what type of dance you are aware of.

And, in some communities people do learn naturally and socially; beginners learning from experienced dancers.  Just last week a young Argentinian dancer, talking to me about his family told me:

  

- In those days, no-one took lessons.  

It was practically verbatim, what I remember one of the milongueros saying in the Practimilonguero videos.

- So how did people learn?

- From the family.  For example, my great aunt learnt from her parents

- Where?

- At home, in gatherings, parties with friends and families.

- Not in the milongas?

- No.

I already knew this.  Men, at any rate, only went to the milonga when they had already learned how to dance in the neighbourhood with other guys.

But since the industrialisation of tango in the 1990s, people, especially in Europe and, perhaps even more so in America, have been channelled into dance class more than they are brought to the milonga by their friends and family. There weren't any milongas in those continents, in the beginning.  They learn from self-styled professionals, show-dancers visiting from Argentina, rather than from friends and family.

"Forget most people" sounds brutal, I know. The point was made to me years ago, perhaps less bluntly, by the person who brought me to understand more explicitly, things of which I already had an inkling.  Perhaps when I say "forget most people" I mischaracterise what I thought I learned, because my friend was generous and often seemed optimistic, but I had, nevertheless, the unmistakable sense that many people's choices and ways of seeing things had been limited by dint of going to dance class.  There was also the related thought that the people who choose to go to dance class are self-selecting. 

If you don't know anything about tango, you are not going to be aware of the milongas. So just walking into a milonga isn't going to occur to you. And not many would have the nouse or the nerve to walk, as tyros, into somewhere where there is already an established tribe. But how would someone start who wants to learn to dance tango, yet knows nothing about it nor no-one who dances? The obvious answer in Europe, these days, is class. I, too, was that person. I was bored with ceilidh dancing and someone suggested tango. How would we learn? Go to a class, what else? 

I think the idea about people who choose to go to dance class being self-selecting was, rather, that those who are attracted by being told what to do in a class by a teacher, talking to them are never going to make great dancers, or it will take a very long time.  Tango is an improvised dance, not one where you follow sequences.  Improvisation is freedom, exploration, autonomy, the antithesis of someone else controlling and directing you.  Improvisation is not just in dance. It's part of play, it's part of DIY to watch my Spanish mechanic friend.  He calls it "magiver", something I eventually figured out was a reference to "MacGyver", the guy from the 1980s TV series with the unconventional problem solving skills.  It goes too for learning any new skill.  A good analogy for adults is language learning, or just the subtle art of conversation in your own language.  

The old milongueros talk about the importance of having your own dance, not copying someone else's.  Being directed is about thinking and talking.  Dancing is about listening to something else:  the music and the partner and it is about feeling.  The only reason I justify mentioning it is because it is the learning process that is in question here, more than dancing.

Even now my enthusiasm for people to start dancing or to quit class does a number on my experience and I am not immune from failing to remember that most people think class and want class.  I am not immune from trying to say that there is another way. But class people, unless they feel a twinge that something is not right with class, are usually irretrievably lost. In any case, many go to class for other reasons than to learn to dance; reasons often to do with getting to know people, guys finding women for whom choice in dance partner is not important, notions of self-improvement through learning something new or "doing something new together as a couple". And after seeing 'Strictly' on TV. 

When not to waste your time?

It depends. If it is non-dancers, potential dancers:

What did you get up to at the weekend? 

Oh, I went away to dance.

Tango is a big part of your life, isn’t it?

And from there you start talking about it.  You can sometimes see these non-dancers appear seduced by the idea. But experience says the impulse has to come from the person. They have to ask - will you take me? Will you show me? Or respond positively if you offer. 

Occasionally, people I encounter outside the milonga, have asked me to ‘teach’ them.  They say 'teach', but to me this means that I just dance with them, which is enough. The strangest place I ever danced with non-dancers was in a garden where a woman's group met weekly.  It was fun and they enjoyed it.

Sometimes non-dancing guys ask me to teach them to dance.  They suggest I show them in some private place, without others watching. Their claim is they are shy or embarrassed.  But my instinct and experience are that the guy invariably has some non-dancing interest.  So now I say I’ll be delighted to dance with them - in a practica. Invariably their interest vanishes. Using dancing tango as some pretext.  is a form of manipulation. If they can’t cope with a quiet practica, where the interest in a beginner guy who can’t dance is practically zero, then there isn’t much hope for them.

What about the people who currently do lessons? Those I see in the milongas who still do dance classes are happy with them, want to do them, think they are beneficial and have usually invested too much time, money and energy into them to consider that there might be a better way. It is vanishingly rare that someone goes to lessons and dances well (for me). It is practically non-existent. A handful of times, in seven years - if that - I have met guys who did lessons within a couple of years of when I met them and who danced well.

I think it was Ricardo Vidort who said those who really dance are very few.  This blog had a subtitle for a while, stemming from that idea that only some people are ever going to get any of it.  The motto was,  Aut sensum, aut non:  "Either they feel it, or they don't."  The motto was inspired by that of Dennis Severs' house in London:  Aut Visum Aut Non! "Either they see it or they don't."  The motto arrived much later but the broader concept behind it  - that some people get things and other people never will - was an early lesson by which I just mean it was an idea that came up in conversation in what I eventually realised was a mentor/mentee relationship.  

At first, I balked at the idea behind the motto.  It smacked of elitism.  First I had to fess up consciously to the idea I already, from my own experience, more than suspected -  that dance class didn't work.  The next jump was accepting the notion that dance class was in fact harmful.   But soon enough it made sense.  Then I thought surely everyone would get it if only the message were clearly enough conveyed.    It took much longer to realise in fact that they won't, they don't want to and it is too antagonistic a notion for most people to handle.

You try to explain that dance class teachers are invariably in it for money or status and that they are controlling the learning experience in ways that suit them, in ways that are to do with making money and that don't, in fact, create good social dancers.  You try to say that class is about thinking and dance can never be that, but people just close their minds to it.  Or they see it, but it's too much effort to sustain that apparently difficult idea and they fall back into the rut of brainwashed thought and what everyone else is doing.  They just don't want to think too much and they want to fit in with the self-styled "community" of those same dance teachers.  Or the idea that they might have wasted hundreds, thousands of pounds on years of dance classes is too much to bear.  But this I had to find out for myself, long after the point was first mooted.  Experience, after all, is when you really learn.

 So, don’t waste time trying to persuade class-goers not to do dance class. The most you can do is plant a seed.  The growth of a seed is an autonomous thing, and slow, but still, miraculous.