The recipe for a good meal: (1) shop for ingredients, (2) cook the food, (3) eat and enjoy. The process is not complicated, but each step must be followed. Shopping ensures you have the ingredients for a flavorful meal. Skip shopping and your meal will be bland and incomplete. Cooking transforms the raw ingredients into actual food. Skip cooking and your fresh ingredients inevitably spoil. Eating gives the whole process pleasure and meaning. Skip eating and you starve.
The same process of shop, cook, eat produces progress in tango. Shopping is where you gather information; where you obtain the recipes and ingredients to grow as a dancer. Classes, workshops, and private lessons, studying tango videos, analyzing tango music, and learning from partners and colleagues all go into the shop category. Cooking is where you prepare yourself and your dance. Solo practice, partner practice, group practice, and conditioning[1] go into the cook category. Eating is where we get to appreciate and enjoy being a dancer. Milongas, house parties, tango marathons and festivals, watching performances or performing yourself, and tango concerts all go into the eat category.
A healthy balance between time spent shopping, cooking, and eating supports joy and progress in tango.[2] An imbalance between these components can lead to the pain and struggle that so many tango dancers experience. While the perfect balance for you depends on your preferences and experience, a near or complete lack of any one of the components will always lead to problems. Take a moment to write your response to the following:
- How are you currently feeling about your tango and your tango progress?
- How much of your tango time do you spend in the shop category, the cook category, and the eat category? You don’t have to be super accurate, general fractions will do.
If you answered question one negatively (you struggle with your tango progress) then look to question two. There is a good chance that not enough time in one of the categories is at the root of your symptoms. If you answered one positively, then still take note of your time allocation as a sign of a healthy balance (unless one component is missing, in which case this may be a bellwether of future challenges).
Here is another test to diagnose potential imbalances. Think of something you learned in the last month. Maybe a new step, technique, or musical idea. If you struggle to come up with one, then you are probably lacking in the shop category. Are you better at the concept now than when you first learned it? Can you do the step you learned in class better now than at the end of class? If you answer no, then you are likely lacking in the cook category. Some information must be cooked quickly or spoil, while other information needs to ripen and be prepared slowly, but most information needs to be cooked before digested. Finally, when in the last month did you set aside time to just enjoy dancing? If you struggle to remember a time, then you probably are not eating enough.
There are many tango food deserts that struggle to shop for quality, fresh information. Professional dancers often struggle to find time to eat. But what is by far most commonly missing is cooking. Think of what occurs at a festival. We pack class after class until our head explodes. We then feast, dancing the whole night away. But at no point do we stop and go over what we just learned. We don’t talk with our classmates about the moves, we don’t analyze and practice with each other. Maybe we try out what we learned at the milonga, but it often doesn’t work. After a few weeks it is as if we never took the classes to begin with. I believe the lack of cooking is partly due to the current tango culture, partly due to a lack of space, and partly due to economics.
Classes and milongas are social scenes, while practices are often a solitary or partner endeavor. It doesn’t have to be this way, and I would argue that deep friendships result from collaborative practice spaces. But the fact remains that until we create more collaborative practice spaces, then practice comes at the expense of social interactions. A lack of practice space also leads to a lack of practice. You can’t cook without a kitchen. Let us not kid ourselves about most practicas, where often very little practice occurs.[3] A good tango kitchen should be noisy, busy, and have lots of chopping up of movements and sequences to prepare them. If you find yourself at a practica dancing whole tandas without stopping and analyzing, then you are at the dining table, not in the kitchen.
There is a clear business model for classes and milongas, but not as much for practice spaces. Practice often works best with a smaller number of people than a milonga, and practice requires a different hierarchy structure than classes. In a class, the teacher has the information, and you pay them to give it to you. In a practice, you, your partner, and your fellow colleagues all have information to share so no money is exchanged. There are also many dancers who are not interested in improving. This is understandable, there are many priorities we need to balance in life, and practice is by no means a requirement to be part of the tango community. But this does mean that only a subset of dancers who will show up to the milonga would also show up to a practice space, further reducing the profitability of such a space. The economics dictate that we can rely on professionals to sell us ingredients, and organizers to provide spaces to eat, but it is up to the individual and community to create kitchens to cook in.
Those of us lucky enough to have our partners and our own tango kitchens go away on our own time and practice what we learn. We find the space to transform learning into doing and then can go out and enjoy. We progress faster, but of course we do; we had the space to. This same progress can happen for everyone, we just need to provide the space and intention for it. There is no reason we can’t have more practice and collaboration. There is no reason we can’t create in the community and at the festival a space for all of us to share and practice and improve our dance together. If we put more intention in cooking together, then we will all have better food to enjoy together.
[1] For many sports and arts, conditioning should probably get its own fourth category. I include it here in cooking in part to maintain a cleaner structure, and in part due to tango being primarily a social dance with relatively less physical requirements. While still important, the physical requirements of a high-level social tango dancer are less than say the physical requirements of a high level gymnast, boxer, rock climber, or ballet dancer. If you are interested in the performative side of tango, it may be useful to place a greater emphasis on conditioning to ensure you are preparing your body to accept the movements you want it to do.
[2] The quality of time spent is of course a critical component, but we will set that aside for the moment.
[3] There are of course exceptions to this statement. If you say “but our practica is different” then it probably is, but that is also probably because the organizer and participants are spending a lot of time and care in ensuring the space is conducive to practice.