Once Upon A Time or How I got to Berlin…
Before my exodus to Germany, I had made the decision to jump back into teaching tango again after my vanlife project had been completed. My plan was to go from city to city in the United States, sharing the REVOLUTIONARY idea of the 5 Social Figures of Argentine Tango in two related seminars – ‘A Simple Tango Construct’ and its component idea ‘A Simple Musical Construct’. If you’re interested in the seminars and workflow, you can see them here > https://tangotopics.com/seminars-workshops/. The goal was to shift the narrative around tango, reconstruct it in a way that surpasses its pre-pandemic form, and position it for ongoing growth. These seminars served as a vehicle to support this transformation.
The Structure of the Plan Was: You come in on a Friday Night to a special 2-Hour Social Tango Seminar (Walking, Embrace, Reminders, and Suggestions about Floorcraft) and then a night of dancing after the seminar. The next day > Saturday – A Brunch Practicalonga — Starts at 10 a.m. and goes to 2 p.m. From 2 to 5 is the 1st session (A Simple Tango Construct). Then from 6 to 9 – Dinner (Meal Included). And then 9 to 1, Social Dancing. Sunday? 10 to 2 Brunch Dancing. 2 to 5 the Musical Construct Seminar. Then a dinner break (Meal Included) and social dancing afterwards. This is a full weekend of dancing and ‘re-education’. All meals and drinks are included. The dancing parts are free, the seminars are not.
The Meat of the Plan was to recondition the experienced and advancing dancer to give them a set of clear tools that allowed them to create an experience that set them on the pathway to transcendence.
I believe there is always room for growth and learning, which is why I encourage dancers to continually explore and deepen their understanding of tango. As dancers grow and change, they find their way into the tango community, but sometimes their dancing skills, choices, and techniques may remain at a familiar level. This way of dancing influences the Milonga experience, which, in my opinion, can create an experience that is less than optimal. To clarify, my aim is not to promote perfection in dancing, but rather to foster a dynamic environment that encourages opportunities for alignment in dance. It’s easy to misconstrue my focus as being on perfect execution, but the real goal is to create a setting where dancers can naturally find alignment through clean, clear, and efficient movement.
It is my opinion that many dancers reach a stage where they feel confident in their dance, but they don’t explore opportunities to further enhance their skills which has a direct bearing on the experience they are generating with their partners, and on the whole the milonga. This often happens for a wide variety or reasons, but mostly when they stop asking for feedback and they believe they’ve “arrived” which creates a pause in active learning on multiple levels. It is my belief that continued practice, with constructive feedback thru detailed observation from qualified sources can lead to even richer dance experiences.
Put another way some dancers learn just enough to get around the floor so as not to feel foolish so that they fit in. This results in reaching a stage where they feel accomplished which halts active learning and constructive feedback. They believe they can dance. And for the most part, they can. As a result they believe they are doing ‘okay’. However, Tango is the Un-Ending-Onion. Meaning there is always another layer to peel away. In this case there are greater and greater levels of refinement that are not being explored and incorporated into their dancing abilities. To further compound the confluence they believe that a weekend workshop from visiting instructors from ‘The Promised Land’ will up their ante and give them, no pun intended, a leg up. It won’t. But they don’t know that yet.
Consequently, when they stop attending classes, and/or seeking private lessons, they’re missing crucial opportunities for growth. To truly advance, dancers should cultivate the habit of revisiting their foundation constantly ripping it up to get at deeper levels of clarity without pushing, pulling, squeezing, or using their arms, but instead invoking the axiom of “less is more”, and then asking for feedback in the appropriate spaces (American Style Practicas) and engaging in detailed, qualified but constructive discussions from qualified sources, which can significantly benefit both themselves and their partners going forward.
To be fair it should be noted that at some point you will top out from the learning environment that you’re in. You will have tapped someone else’s knowledge base. Which means that you’ll have to seek other learning opportunities, which sadly may not be available or that you’ll have to spend more money on travel to get to other qualified sources. That may not be possible due to your job, time, and of course, money. So let’s be sensible here. Hence another reason why these seminars were developed and put in place.
Side Bar: Asking for feedback means going deeper than “how was my embrace?” It means asking a detailed series of qualifying questions about finger positions and pressures; hand positions and pressures; arm weight, arm positions and placement; head position, placement, and pressures; walking and vocabulary stability while in motion; and one’s posture. Like for instance where in a turn are they stepping away and why? Is the execution of a piece of vocabulary, and how it felt, desirable? Are they pushing, pulling, using their arms, or feeling pressured to move or be moved? Is there lethargy from either party, if so where? It also means not using the tried and untrue statements about ‘axis’ (see the video I posted a while back on that), or ‘connection’, or the fallacy of ‘energy’. Instead asking for detailed feedback that goes beyond those words that have become meaningless for some people. There’s more here than a surface confirmation of your own beliefs that you’re doing well or assuming that what one is doing is desirable! But most people never want to go that deep for a wide variety of reasons. Most notably because it’s a ‘hobby’ for them. And yet for a ‘hobbyist’ they’re at every milonga and American style practica, every week, dancing with the same people expecting different results!
It should be noted that there is a reason people continue to come back to dancing each week which speaks to that last point above. My belief, in the past and still today, is that the reason people keep returning is due to an event that more than likely occurred very early on and has happened once or twice since. The belief is that said event is random, uncontrolled, happenstance, and more importantly > kismet! And it’s out of their hands! It’s not, by the way. The event? It’s something I referenced a while back in ‘The Pathway of Transcendence’ post. It’s when two dancers ‘align’ for just an instant, feeling as though, without saying a word, that you are ‘together’ as one. You align in such a way to make you believe you’re reading each other’s thoughts. This experience is like a drug. It’s intoxicating and powerful. At the same time, after the event, a belief develops that if you just keep dancing with that same person, the stars will align once again, haphazardly, and that you’ll have more moments of alignment that last a bit longer. This belief is further reinforced by the romanticization of the dance through language like “vibes,” “feeling,” “emotion,” and my personal favorite, “connection.” It is because of this experience that I developed the seminars to help people begin to see another way to get to the pathway.
Moving on > My goal with these seminars was to show that this stuff isn’t rocket science and it is NOT random. There is a clearly defined path and a quantifiable experience that can be replicated consistently! It’s not a formula per se, but a series of ideas that when stacked on top of each other they create the Pathway of Transcendence. I designed these things, and battle-tested them over years, to help someone rediscover and reawaken their desire to ask questions; to go beyond their understanding of social tango; to invite differences in their thinking about what they’re doing and why; and lastly to challenge them to think outside the box of what they’re doing. But most importantly, to reignite the fire that seems to have dimmed a bit, and to get them where they want to go!
I refuse to use the word ‘magic’ or some nebulous romantic word here because it’s not about instilling some tango projection or fantasy of performance-based tango masquerading as ‘Social Tango’. No. These are seminars to open the dancer to the possibilities that appear to have been forgotten, IN MY OPINION.
I’ll give you an example of possibilities. It’s a really simple one and you get it for free: 9 times out of 10, as a Lead, you will use the Follower’s Molinete to the Lead’s Giro without thinking about it. E.g. The Turn. The issue ? The Lead defaults to the same direction of rotation over and over and over again > Rotating their LEFT and the Follower’s Right. Here’s a thought > Consider going in the opposite direction, to Lead Right and Follower Left! Or extending the idea a bit > try not completing the turn in either direction but instead invoke a change of direction after the first turn is done on the second step! OR and here’s the fun part (for me) exploring all the possibilities that are available to the Lead if they change directions! Asking “What’s possible from here, what am I missing ?” Trying new approaches and techniques can open up exciting possibilities and lead to moments of wonderful synergy on the dance floor. Most people NEVER do this. They accept that there is only one way to do something. You might say, “Miles? Nobody does that! You only need the one way and that way works just fine for me!” True. That does work, but it also creates, in my opinion, stagnation. That’s the ‘doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results’ part.
Circling back, the idea of a weekend of free dancing and donation seminars which included food, and lots of advice through exercises and expression was a way to help leave the tango world a bit better than I found it. Or at least that was my thinking. On my hiatus from teaching, I saw that tango had suffered in certain geographical places. After the pandemic, people left tango and never came back. Tango started to rebound slowly and differently. What I saw was there was a desire out there to build Tango back differently, with a focus on two things. 1.) Start teaching loads of beginners for the next few years, or there won’t be a tango to dance. 2.) Change the way people are dancing to help to create cleaner dancers that respect the ronda, the music, and the culture that we’re all dancing to with a clear pathway towards the thing they seek the most!
The plan, at the time, was to visit a swath of cities in the US specifically and to try to help with this process. However, that all changed when Kamala lost the election … and well … it became clear that no one wanted to do this. I had three lined up, but that was not enough to start the ball rolling. And then the whole racism thing happened in Nashville, and here I am in Berlin.
So now I have a different plan!
