Who is Miles ?
I am the creator of this site. I spent almost a decade compiling all this data for you to see. Originally Tango Topics in its primary form was to be a stepping stone to fulfilling one of my tango goals, and that was to flesh out this document for my Intensive Study students. Well that was ONE of its goals. As time went on and me being the CDO (‘OCD’ for non-OCD of you, IYKYK) type of person that I am, I went down rabbit hole after rabbit hole trying to fill-in the gaps of video and article data for my students for when I wasn’t around. That process became the site that you’re looking at. I created 100% of this stuff. It’s not AI created in any way, shape, or form. This is all organic. You won’t find this stuff anywhere else.

HUGE, RED, FLASHING WARNING: THERE ARE STRONG OPINIONS HERE

I will not bore you with my Tango Pedigree of who I studied with, except to say that if you want to read how I went Tango Crazy and spent 2 years living out of my car in order to finance my tango insanity, all while learning to lead and to follow (in heels) at the same time, then go read my book > Confessions of a Retired Tango Teacher. I spent 17 years, at the time of this writing, learning how to teach, what to teach, and the best way to teach it, training and retraining myself in order to display it, teach it, dance it, and then explaining tango to anyone that would listen. The ultimate goal was to create clarity over areas of confusion, consternation, or just out right fallacies on how the human body worked while dancing. My working premise while teaching was to show people what they asked for, all the while slipping in facts about Intention Based Dancing inside of Social Tango.

In 2011 I realized that video was the way to go to get my ideas out into the world. I would spend the next 8 years building out a series of sites which culminated in Tango Topics. I would also spend that time developing a range of tools, exercises, and methodologies that explained my ideas, and my process. Which eventually became known as ‘The Intensive Process‘. This is a 13 week training regime that is full tango immersion that includes not just the vocabulary (steps, patterns, and common figures), but the music, history, and codigos of the dance.

Over time I found people, 900+ people actually, that wanted to explore their dance thru the intensive process > so that they stopped pulling, pushing, squeezing, compressing, hanging, wobbling, wavering, wollowing, wandering, wiggling, or being inappropriate in any way, shape, or form. But rather created an experience with their dancing that Walked the Pathway of Transcendence. That word, ‘Transcendence’, is a bit of a misnomer because it evokes the ideas that Transcendence is the goal, and it’s not. The goal is something far greater.

My goal in teaching was to show people that they can get to the Pathway of Transcendence, that moment of ‘OMG’ that people seek repeatedly but rarely get to for a wide range of reasons. All WITHOUT crazy moves or repeating the same thing over and over again expecting different results and never getting there. My goal was to show people thru the Intensive Process the Pathway to Transcendence that led to The Doorway to What Lay Beyond and let them open it to their own perception of a different kind of reality. And if the next word in your thinking is a word that I detest (‘Connection‘), then you’re romanticising the dance, and is NOT the goal. Nor should it be. But that’s a discussion for a later time.

In 2020, when the pandemic struck, I was planning on retiring anyway because I was spent. Not burned out but just tired of explaining what I knew to be right and true, and tired of fighting fallacy with facts. No one wanted to hear my facts. They just wanted the moves and to do the cool, crazy stuff. People wanted Peformance Tango wrapped up to look like Social Tango, when it was nothing like that. I taught the ideas and ideals of Social Tango vs. Performance Tango, or Intention Based Dancing vs. Resistance Based Dancing but I just couldn’t do it anymore. So I shut down the site, and retired from teaching.

Fast forward to 2024, after completing my Amelia Stories Project (part 1, there are 10 stories I want to tell), I felt it was time to relaunch Tango Topics because I felt like I had something left to say because the ideas and concepts on this site were still relevant and nothing had changed in the intervening years. So I decided to put it back online and we’ll see what happens.

Will I teach again ? No. Not publicly and not the way I was before I retired. Maybe an intensive here and there but not on the scale that I was before. I will spend my time dancing and if someone wants to ask me a question now and again, I can now direct them to this site to answer it.

I hope you enjoy what’s here. Yes there is a paywall for some of this stuff. But for the concepts and what not, just register, it’s free. You can at least ‘whet your whistle‘ as they say before you have to pay for the real bulk of the site. And paying for that stuff is only fair, and it’s a pittance really when you stop and you think about it. An hour with a tango teacher these days is at minimum $75 to $125 dollars US depending on where you are. And that’s only an hour with no reminders, no follow up, and no concerted plan of what to work on when and how. This site takes the place of all of that, and goes one step further. The way I teach is to put it mildly > detailed truth! I used to say that ‘TWO MILLIMETERS is the goal’. And it is. Two Millimeters is the difference between ‘OH MY GOD THAT WAS AHHHH-MAZING’ and ‘What the FFffffff@ck’! My goal is to show you those 2 Millimeters and to turn your dance into the desirable realm.

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Thanks for reading.