Hi everybody, Fran here with your Tango Tip of the Week. One of the questions I hear from students regularly is: "Why is it so hard to learn Tango?" If they've had prior experience with learning another social dance, they find themselves comparing the relative ease with which they were able to at least learn the basic step -- while Tango feels difficult right from the beginning, and only seems to get more difficult as they go along.

With today's Tango Tip, I'd like to offer a few possible reasons why becoming even a passable Tango dancer can be a very steep, frustrating hill to climb. I'll approach what I want to talk about from two different perspectives. First, Tango is inherently difficult to learn; and second, in trying to learn Tango, our expectations of the learning process actually tend to work against us

Tango is inherently difficult to learn

Take a class in any American, European, or "Latin" social dance, and the first thing you'll learn (or at least memorize) is a basic step. As you may already know from your own experience, a basic step is a pattern of movement, which repeats itself again and again. As you learn this sequence, your partner also learns a complementary version of the same thing. When the teacher finally puts you together, it feels as if you're dancing like a pro -- pretty much within the first ten minutes of the lesson. From this auspicious beginning, learning to dance then becomes a process of memorizing one sequence after another, amassing a repertoire of what dance schools often refer to as the "bronze," the "silver," and finally the "gold" syllabus.

Let's now compare this with Tango. The first thing my Argentine-born teachers told me, when I began to study Tango seriously, was: "There are no steps in Tango!" No steps? Are you kidding? I watch people dancing, and it looks to me as if there are literally thousands of steps. How can the teacher say there are no steps? Then, to make matters worse, the teacher says, "Tango is a way to walk."

Hmmm. There are no steps in Tango, and it's a way to walk. Frankly, I have no idea what the teacher is talking about. As I watch the dance, I see very clearly that there's all this highly elaborate stuff going on. How can the teacher be making those elliptical pronouncements with a straight face? Right from the get-go, I'm completely confused; I'm frustrated; I'm paralyzed. All I want is a little basic step. Couldn't we have one of those? It would make me feel so much better.

Sorry, Charlie, no basic step for you.

Eventually, I have to face the hard fact that Tango is unlike any dance I've ever been exposed to. At this point, I either have to just give up -- and lots of people do -- or make a commitment that no matter what it takes, I'm going to find a way to get past the obvious fact that for many, many reasons Tango is inherently difficult to learn.

In trying to learn Tango, our expectations actually work against us

Social Tango is for the most part a dance based on developing the very, very sophisticated skill called lead/follow. What this means is that we don't memorize a lexicon of increasingly complex sequences, and then string them together in order to construct a dance. We lead/follow each individual moment -- each self-contained physical element -- of any multi-step sequence which a leader and a follower create and improvise together in the moment.

The concept of lead/follow is by and large totally unfamiliar to the vast majority of American dancers. It is rarely -- if ever -- taught in American dance schools, which opt instead for memorized figures that may be repeated many times during the lesson -- but somehow seem impossible to reproduce on the dance floor with a partner who happened not to have taken the class. "Gee, it worked so well before, but now...."

When I was first trying to learn Tango, it took me forever to realize that what my Argentine-born teachers actually meant by the notion that there are no steps in Tango, and at the same time that Tango is a way to walk. What they were attempting to express was the fact that everything we do is created in the moment by a leader in a completely improvised way, and followed by his partner one movement at a time. This is the manner in which Argentine social dancers interact with one another. To them, lead/follow is simply what they do as a matter of course. For this reason, they make the assumption that we understand this concept inherently -- and we don't. We try to shoehorn the movements they make happen through lead/follow into our inbred expectations of dancing as a question of memorizing everything we do.

To make a long story short, our expectations work against us -- as we insist even now on trying  to learn Tango by copying and memorizing figures from YouTube.

Ultimately, I strongly believe that the reason why we feel that Tango is so hard to learn is that we refuse to accept -- and therefore refuse to learn -- the singular mechanism that will miraculously open the door to social Tango proficiency: the art of lead/follow.

A student I've known for many years approached me recently with a personal epiphany. He said: "You know all that boring stuff you're always trying to get us to learn?"

"You mean lead/follow?"

"Yeah, turns out it's what makes Tango work."

No kidding.

The following folks helped set up, break down and clean up before and after the milonga. Without them, there would be no Firehouse Tango.

• Kerry Stoldt - Artichoke Bean Dip
  
• Camille - Pretzels
  
• Eva Roth - Mixed Salad
  

• Barbara Lombardi
• Mary Pagano
• Fred Meyer
• George Ngo
• Christine Russo
• Bill Krukovsky
• Camille
• Edna Negron
• Walter Milani
• Meryl Shapiro
• Al & Lilian
• Bob Brillo
  
• Carmen Baker
  
• Francis & Marie