The Two Minute Tango Project
First and foremost, I am NOT the sole of all tango wisdom. These are some things, a few ideas, that I’ve played with, and that I’ve picked up along the way. Some may be right on, some misguided, some clear, and some not. Secondly this is an experimental project, it is an idea born of many long conversations with lots of tango teachers, many social dancers, and many tango students. All of these things have shaped, formed, turned, cooled, heated, and changed my ideas in ways I hadn’t even considered. Thirdly, I am by no means stating these things as absolute fact, but rather ideas to be shared, thought about, talked about, and at the very least, compared and contrasted, and at the very most, used as a teaching rod for someone else. If it serves that purpose…I’ll be very pleased. That said…please, read on:
Many moons ago, as a I was beginning my tango journey, and still thinking that I had many roads to walk. I still do by the way, I’m not done yet, simply because I teach. Its beginning was on a beach in Freeport, TX, teaching a beginner follower the foundations of her side of the embrace. It was born out of the many months I spent training a series of students in Houston, and the many months since then of answering the same questions over and over and over again.
Me being the programmer/software developer/web architect that I have been for the last 12 years (as of this writing), I saw the need to streamline the process of educating the student, and really myself (remember that we teach that which we most need to learn or practice!), and so I set to work about creating that streamlining process. But as I started down the pathway, a problem arose; one of many to come: How to create a series of videos that talk about tango but don’t necessarily talk about the mind-numbing details of technique that can create distance between the material and the student. And still another problem arose while I was thinking about the first: At the same time create a sense of ease or facileness with the dance itself. Talk about your tall orders. Sheesh! What I was hearing from my private lessons with beginner and ‘intermediate’ students was that the dance was too hard, difficult, complicated…etc. That the music really didn’t turn them on at all (well the leaders anyway). And that there were too many steps to learn, remember, and then use. It all looked so difficult and daunting to them.
Out in the field, or in the Tango World, everyone and their grandmother was teaching tango and at the same time, not talking about the underlaying technique at all, but just showing the demonstration of a particular movement or feature, and its left to the student to figure out how it was done. Not all teachers are like that by the way, there are a few that actually teach the underlaying technique and then take that technique and exemplify it and show branches of the technique tree, showing you where and HOW you can apply that technique. By example: Go out to YouTube and watch any of the hundreds (if not thousands by now) of either performance, or didactic demo videos (just by example) and you see absolutely nothing about the underlaying technique, just the application of that technique within the confines of a dance. There’s nothing wrong with this idea because it generates interest in the teacher, and puts money in their pocket eventually. It does create a problem that we as dancers run into (literally) every night that we go out social dancing: Leaders that push, pull, and repeat, and followers that hang, hover, and compress holding on for dear life! What it boils down to really is its the economics of the situation. Its because if a teacher shows the underlaying technique involved they’re giving their bread and butter away for free, and why bother taking private lessons in the first place, right ? When you can simply go out to YouTube and pull up a video by your favorite teacher talking about technique and showing you when, where, and how. Right ?
Another place was born out of learning to teach the dance itself. As a student of the dance, I had to take every class that I went to 3 times. Once as a Lead, Twice as a follower, and still a Third as a teacher (actually several times from several different teachers). As a teacher I had to learn multiple perspectives on the same technique and language that other teachers used. Still another was learning different modalities to talk about the same idea and technique. Which is to say that not all students learn the same way, some are visual students, some are auditory, some are kinesthetic. So for each, you have to create different modalities to explain the same material.
And still another place was seeing that the dance itself was so foreign to many people, off-putting, beautiful but off-putting. Its that there’s that “old squeaky music” danced by “old people” syndrome going on. When as we know, its not that at all.
As I started and restarted, stopped, rethought, discussed, started again, and again, and again, I kept seeing more and more reasons why such a project just wouldn’t work. Not a singular reason why it would. What would be its end product ? How would it be shot ? How would it be used ? All of these things. And more over, was I the right guy to be talking about any of this stuff ? And even more over than any of that, would anyone be watching them ? My original goal with this project was to create a place where I could talk about the foundations of the dance, making it accessible, easy to get, and demystifying it at the same time. Over time, my goal became much much simpler: I just wanted to do it and see what would happen. I wasn’t interested in making any money, and I wasn’t interested in being famous, and I certainly wasn’t interested in any kind of notoriety. The last thing in the world I need right now is *MORE* notoriety. If anything I need less! One thing that refused to go away though in my thinking was I realized that most people can’t handle more than 1 clear idea at a time over a 30 minute period. As a teacher you present an idea, and then you spend 30 minutes re-explaining that same idea over and over and over again, until the student gets what’s really going on. What came out of that is that in that 30 minutes, you actually do only 2 to 5 minutes of actual teaching, and the rest is reinforcement of that idea. That’s just how some people learn. Its not meant as a put down, its just that some people learn differently than others. So a requirement for this project was that whatever I did, had to be short, quick, and to the point: Succinct!
And that’s where this idea for Two Minute Tango came from, to talk about tango but at the same time make it accessible, easy to understand, presented in an atmosphere where you can clearly and cleanly see that this technique leads to X, Y, and Z.
At some point in the near future, I’d like to open this project up to other people, and have them share their ideas with the project. However, there are some requirements that I’d like to have ironed out before hand…but I am headed in that direction.