Hi everybody, Fran here with your Tango Tip of the Week. Three of the questions I get asked again and again by students are these: “Why is dancing Tango so hard to learn?”  “Will I ever be able to dance Tango?” “How long will it take me to finally say that I can dance Tango?” All these questions, of course, are basically the same. They express most students’ sense of frustration over the fact that what they thought would be a relatively straightforward process — i.e., learning to dance social Tango — would turn out to be one of the most difficult challenges they’ve ever encountered.

First of all, let me confess that when I started to learn Tango back in 1986, I felt exactly the same way. At the time, I was already a professional dance teacher, so I figured I’d be able to pick up Tango in a couple of weeks — okay, maybe a month or so at worst.

No way, Jose.

My big mistake was thinking that Tango consisted of bunch of more or less complicated dance steps. I knew I could learn steps. I already had a million of them in my back pocket from all the other dances I had learned over the years. A few more would be a piece of cake, right?

Bring ‘em on!

When I started my Tango learning process, it was with people who were principles in the famous show “Tango Argentino.” These, of course, were performers. Performers love choreography — meaning memorized material. (In this regard, by the way, they’re very similar to most ballroom dance teachers throughout the U.S.A. right now.) When they teach, most rely on presenting dance figures as structures, which can be demonstrated, memorized, and imitated.

“Just watch me do this; then try it yourself.”

The problem was/is that social Tango has nothing whatever to do with choreography. It’s completely improvised. It’s all made up on the spot, in the moment. I remember taking a class in which the teacher actually ascribed numbers to the individual steps he was teaching to a group of us dance teachers. At one point, he paused as we were all holding an uncomfortable pose, and asked: “Was that step number 27 or was it 28?”

I knew at that exact second that I could never learn to dance Tango.

My breakthrough moment came a few years later, when social dancers from Argentina came to our shores (in droves, as it turned out) in search of fame and fortune. The best of them exclaimed: “There are no steps in Tango!”

What? By that time, I had already memorized maybe a hundred or so show-stopping sequences. I was practically a performer! Nope, sorry; there are no steps in Tango. Forget everything you learned, and start over.

Please don’t tell me that!!!! But they were right. Social Tango isn’t danced choreographically. It’s all — wait for it — LEAD/FOLLOW!!!!

Oh no, how could that be? At the time — to be completely honest — I really didn’t actually know what the words “lead/follow” meant. I had learned virtually all my ballroom material as bits and pieces of memorized choreography. The idea of me leading, and my partner following, was a brand new concept. Like the Argentine performers from “Tango Argentino,” all my teachers had worked from the same familiar playbook:

“Just watch me do this; then try it yourself.”

All right, so I discovered what I refer to as the lead/follow mechanism. I became a new person. I started teaching this complex skill set to my students. I proselytized. I cajoled. I tried (I’m still trying) to convince every social dancer on the planet (you included!) to give up the idea of memorizing choreographic material, and learn how to interact with a partner through what I’ve been lately calling the invitation/response cycle.

So far, my methodology seems to be working. My students don’t spend all their time running their partners ragged around the dance floor. My students don’t rely on YouTube for material. My students are comfortable dancing with one another. They create a sense of intimacy between themselves and their partners. And yes, they invariably receive lots of compliments from like-minded dancers — “Oh, you feel so good to dance with.”

Of course, I’m by no means the only social Tango teacher working in this way. There are others who’ve discovered that this is the right way to go. Bottom line: If you want to answer the questions posed at the beginning of this post, if you want to set yourself on the path to really learning how to dance social Tango just like they do in Buenos Aires, try to find yourself one of these teachers whose focus is not on flashy, crowd-pleasing choreography, but rather on the very satisfying — almost magical — process of lead/follow.

I assure you that down the road you’ll be very, very glad you did.