Hi everyone, Fran here with your Tango Tip of the Week. Last week, we opened a discussion of the many responsibilities a leader needs to assume in dancing social Tango. Since many — if not most — people believe that learning to dance is primarily a process of memorizing steps, we decided to begin our enumeration of the leader’s
responsibilities with the challenge of building repertoire. For a review of what we talked about, feel free to reread last week’s Tango Tip.
Today, we’re going to focus on what I regard as the most important of the leader’s responsibilities; i.e., expertly employing the lead/follow mechanism. In order to accomplish anything at all in Tango beyond simply standing in one place,
a leader simply must be able to appropriately invite the six basic elements of movement — forward steps, backward steps, side steps, weight changes in place, pauses (stops), and pivots. Once the leader masters this crucial skill set, he/she thereby becomes able to guide his/her partner effortlessly through virtually any improvised or learned sequence in the dance — assuming, of course, that the follower is also adept at lead/follow.
Since we’ve described the lead/follow mechanism many times and in great detail within these pages, it is not my intention to re-examine it once again here. However, what I feel is important to address is why so many students and teachers seem to ignore lead/follow as an essential area of concentration in learning how to dance Tango.
Here are a few of the reasons I’ve been given for this lack of specific attention to lead/follow.
From students:
· I want to learn the steps, not get bogged down in details.
· I thought learning social dance was
supposed to be easy; lead/follow is too hard.
· Learning lead/follow is so boring.
· Everybody figures out their own way to lead and follow anyway.
· What’s lead/follow? My teacher doesn’t talk about it.
From teachers:
· Students learn how to incorporate lead/follow as they go along; it’s very obvious.
· If the student memorizes the steps, the lead/follow is automatic.
· If absolutely
necessary, I might talk about lead/follow during the private lesson rather than the class situation.
· If I focus too much on the details, I’ll lose all my students.
· What exactly do you mean by “lead/follow?”
When I was studying “ballroom” dance, the widely
accepted teaching process was to put the men on one side of the room and the women on the other. The teacher would demonstrate each part of a given figure, and then put the couples together. Almost everyone in the class would be able to execute the figure without any problem almost immediately. Both teacher and student left the class with a warm, fuzzy feeling of accomplishment.
The problem was that if you
tried the figure with someone who wasn’t in the class, it usually didn’t work. You quite naturally blamed yourself for just not being good enough as a student (obviously, you needed more lessons, right?).
The real problem, of course, was that the teacher didn’t show you how to lead and follow each element of the step — usually, I’m sorry to say, because that teacher never learned the crucial
importance of this aspect of teaching social dance. Nor did the teacher who taught the teacher.
And so the story goes. Choreography is all you need; lead/follow is irrelevant.
When we teach social Tango the way it’s taught in Argentina, most of us adopt the idea that Tango is improvisational rather than
choreographed, and that our students should therefore be focusing their concentration on one step at a time rather than on learned figures. As my Argentine teachers said to me again and again “There are no steps in Tango” — meaning, of course, no memorized sequences.
The problem is that even though most of us have moved past teaching set sequences as in typical ballroom dance pedagogy,
we’re still not teaching our students how to actually lead and/or follow. For example, one so-called teacher I know has his leaders initiate a follower’s back step by moving his leg into hers, and pushing it along the floor.
To me, this is unbelievable; but it clearly demonstrates that this teacher at least has no idea what lead/follow is.
Furthermore, when a student comes to us with a YouTube video of some hotshot executing a fancy sequence, and says, “Come on, just show me this one figure. I have to have it,” how many of us have the stones to say, “No, that’s not the way social Tango is supposed to be taught,” or some other self-righteous proclamation that the student clearly won’t accept?
The bottom line here is that until teachers bite the bullet and starting putting lead/follow front and center as a primary skill set — and until students accept the need to concentrate on lead/follow as a crucial part of their training (even thought it’s so boring) — nobody, I mean, nobody is going to learn how to dance social Tango.
This means you, my brother/sister/teacher/student.
Whew, I’m so glad I got that off my chest! Next week, more of the leader’s multiple responsibilities in dancing social Tango.
