Hi everybody, Fran here with your Tango Tip of the Week. How many people do you know who can lay claim to being the “Mashed Potato Champion of the Someplace Else Bar in Roosevelt, Long Island?” Royalty, my friends, nothing short of royalty. Okay, to be absolutely honest, my actual reign of terpsichorean glory only lasted a couple of weeks, but hey.

Today, I’m going to continue unveiling my personnel pilgrimage toward achieving total social dance mastery as I trip the light fantastic from Lindy to Mashed Potato to Mambo, Foxtrot, Peabody, and beyond. Without delving too deeply into extraneous detail, I began my odyssey by steeping myself in the available dance culture of day. (And at that time — the 1950s — there was plenty of it.) I had the opportunity to spend lots of quality time at the Roseland Ballroom, at the New York Palladium, and at so many of the popular dance venues in the New York area. At each of these legendary locations I did the one crucial thing that was necessary to discover the secrets of dance expertise.

I sat and watched.

I spent countless hours at Roseland, scoping out the best of the best as they glided effortless around the “track” (which was what the Roseland dance floor was called back then). I stood mesmerized behind the railing at the Palladium, marveling with envious attention as the “Mamboniks” tore up the dance floor night after fabulous night. Eventually, I tentatively tried to imitate what I was seeing in these and the other dance clubs by inflicting myself on potential partners. In the beginning — truth to tell — I was pretty terrible; but over the course of time (along with lots of trial and error, if you must know), I gradually managed to get better.

What’s important to grasp here is that during those years, there was a very robust dance culture in New York — not only in the city, but also in the boroughs and suburbs. Everybody loved dancing. It was absolutely the thing to do!

Today, of course, everything is different. In the first place, the world of social dance has shrunk down to next to nothing — not only here in New York, but in what was once the capital of Argentine Tango, yes, I mean Buenos Aires! If you ask someone on the street in BA where the Tango venues are, they reply: “What Tango venues? What are you talking about?” The social dance community has shriveled over time to less than one tenth of one per cent of the population. This is shameful, but it’s the way things are.

The down side for people who want to learn how to dance here in this country is that there’s really no place left to go where one can just sit, watch, absorb, and emulate. What we’re left with throughout the U.S.A. are dance schools and dance teachers. I remember vividly being told at the New York Palladium not to waste my time watching the dance teachers and their students. “These people aren’t dancing Mambo,” a skilled practitioner assured me. “They’re just regurgitating a bunch of choreographed flashy steps.” This was true then, and, regrettably, it’s true more than ever right now.

As things stand today, we longer have a thriving dance culture here in this country. Our once-precious social dance culture has been all but completely lost — all but totally replaced by a largely inflexible, uncreative dance school/dance teacher-driven paradigm of “regurgitating a bunch of choreographed flashy steps.”

This pains me tremendously. There’s simply nowhere left to go to simply sit and watch.

The good news is that in Argentina the dance culture is still alive — although, to be sure, it has greatly diminished since its heyday in what is often referred to as la epoca de oro, the golden age. And there’s no doubt that the purity of the social Tango traditions are slowly but surely being systematically eroded by the bane of commercial considerations

Nonetheless, the advice I always give my students is that if they’re serious about learning to dance Tango, they absolutely must, must, must make a trip to Buenos Aires as soon as possible. They must visit every milonga (dance venue) they can find, and they must spend their time sitting and watching.

Don’t dance. Don’t take lessons. Do what I did way back when: Sit and watch. There’s simply no better way to learn, and you have the chance to do it right now. Buy your ticket today!