Most new people one meets have already been damaged by classes. In women, this is more reversible than in men. There are a few teachers who are nice to dance with but I often sense a lack of true connection or that they are analysing the dance which is disconcerting. So, like most of us, the people I usually want to dance with are good, experienced dancers - women who are usually years away from classes; in men it usually means decades away from them. Or, I want to dance with those very few with less experience but who are high on seeking connection; or I want to dance with beginners, as yet uncorrupted.
Social dancers don’t tend to meet beginners unless they come to the milonga or do a taster class before a milonga. I avoid milongas with classes beforehand because the general dance quality is so poor but I do go to ones preceded by tasters.
People who come to tasters tend to scarper between the first and the fifteenth minute of the end. It's fairly rare even to find them staying to watch the beginning of a milonga. Most leave in the first five minutes after class, so if you want to dance with them, claim them to the social side, nurture them, you have to arrive early as there is only this short window.
To a beginner, the gap between the taster and social dancing looks huge but an experienced dancer can change that view. The best way to do a taster is to buddy up the new people with people who can actually dance but I have never seen or even heard of this done in practice. Maybe teachers don't want newbies get too much of a taste for dancing with experienced people. Why? Their hard-sought new customers might walk away from paying lessons and go to the practica or milonga instead. Thus beginners are kept away from experienced dancers. The talk is of things like "picking up bad habits". A potential resource is seen instead as a threat. Teaching is all about "I", what the teacher knows and what the teacher can tell you.
Recently, I danced with a beginner guy from a taster, in inverted roles. He seemed to enjoy it. He was good. I passed him on for his next dance to a guy who has danced for a perhaps a couple of years and can dance both roles. But instead of dancing with the new chap he spent most of the tanda in a corner of the ronda, haranguing the poor guy about how to dance. Understandably, the new man left after that. As he was going, I told him he had an aptitude for it. That can be enough to get them to come back. I said: Don’t listen to what people tell you about how to dance, especially if they are not fun to dance with. That includes this advice! He laughed. The only thing that counts is dancing with people who you feel are nice to dance with. But there are not many good dancing guys I could recommend him to talk to or learn from so all I could do was cross my fingers for him.
When you next see new people they have usually already been been ruined by the class they signed up to in the interim. They are puzzled why you don't really fancy dancing with them any more. Nearly all of them soon drop trying to learn to dance tango which is the tragedy of all this. Exploitation ruins those who might have become good social dancers.
The resolution to this would be practicas with the kind of music experienced dancers like to dance to, holding regular tasters for new people. But there is no decent practica in that city that I go to. I might have gone to the local monthly milonga and looked out for the new guy there but the DJ this month plays very little traditional music, so I won't go. Practicas generally are thin on the ground. To nurture beginners you need practicas and a sense of community - not top-down community but experienced people far from class, just dancing with new people, swapping roles to show how things feel.
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