Hi everyone, Fran here with your Tango Tip of the Week. Today, I’d like to talk about dancing Tango at an advanced level. If I were to ask you what your criteria would be for advanced Tango, what would you say? I’ll bet most leaders would tell me that it all depends on how many steps you know, and how complicated they are. Followers might say it’s how
many adornos you can execute.
When people come into one of my fundamentals classes, many of them tell me they can’t wait for the day they can join my intermediate and advanced classes. Here’s what I tell my students. Here’s what I really want you to know about advanced Tango.
My late friend
Carlos Gavito (You might remember him as the star of the original version of Forever Tango) used to say, “Tango is a way to walk; a way of moving with a partner.” Carlos was, of course, referring to social Tango rather than Tango for performance. The implication of this somewhat deceptively simple assertion is that the very best dancers are those who are able to interact with one another in the most comfortable, most efficient way possible — not the ones who know (or
think they know) the most figures or embellishments.
Beginning student leaders almost invariably harbor the belief that if they can somehow learn to execute complicated, “stagy” figures and sequences (no matter how badly), they’ll be regarded as advanced dancers. All too many beginning student followers believe that if they display a vocabulary of flashy adornments, everyone will think of them as
advanced dancers. These students are wrong. They’re absolutely wasting their time and money, focusing entirely on the wrong things. Unfortunately, these students are aided and abetted all too often by “teachers,” who are happy to show them anything they want in return for you know what.
As most of you know, what I concentrate on in my classes and private lessons is how a leader leads, and how a follower
follows. This is embodied in a very complex skill set, which I call the “lead/follow mechanism.” In my judgment, this is the essential foundation of advanced social Tango. Leading and following are complementary techniques, which enable a well-versed dance couple to interact as if they are one person. The better the leader is at lead/follow, the more advance a dancer he is. The more adept the follower is at reading and executing a good lead, the more advanced she is as a
follower.
Steps, YouTube-derived figures and sequences, ostentatious adornments, firuletes and embellishments — I know, I know, these things that you crave like drugs — are not only irrelevant, they’re actually preventing you from becoming an advanced social Tango dancer.
Learn and diligently
practice how to lead, learn and diligently practice how to follow. It will take time, but I assure you, these crucial skills will insure that you are, in fact, the most advanced, most desirable dancer in any milonga, in any practica, in any venue whatever.
I guarantee it!
