Jackie and I were super fortunate to be invited to Yale University to give a series of workshops. As part of the event we gave a lecture on concepts of how to make your tango practice more productive and how to grow as a tango dancer. The workshops were held October 15th, 2023. Hope you enjoy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MCHSTpIR2wI
When I discovered dance in college, I got hooked. And when I say hooked, I mean the training five different styles at the same time, skipping class to go practice, and breaking into the gym after hours to train a bit more at night kind of hooked. What I lacked in knowledge and experience, I tried to make up for in volume. I figured that the more time I put in, the better I would get. While my heart was willing to keep up this level of commitment, my knee apparently was not. After surgery to stitch back together my meniscus, I spent several weeks on crutches and several months doing physical therapy. As unpleasant as the injury was, the process of recovery gave me time to rethink how my body works and started me on a journey of reevaluating how I practice and train. The question I kept asking myself was “How should I practice so that I can continue to progress without injury?” I want to share a concept I learned along this journey and show some ways in which it can help you learn tango faster with better technique and less chance of injury.
We emphasize the “physical” part of physical activities, but really it is the brain we are training. We practice a skill to ‘build muscle memory’, but muscles don’t keep memories. We go to the gym to ‘build our body’, but strength comes as much from better firing of our neurons as it does from muscle mass. We talk about ‘stretching our legs’, but flexibility comes from our brain feeling more comfortable in end-range positions, so practicing your splits is really stretching your mind. Practice is primarily about providing a stimulus to our brain to create a desired adaptation.
When it comes to movement, our brain has its work cut out for it. It must select a pattern of movement, and then coordinate our muscles to fire with the correct sequence and intensity, while at the same time processing a barrage of internal and external sensations to determine any needed course corrections. As if this were not enough, our brain must determine where our body is in space and how it is moving. And it has to know which sensations are important and interpret what these sensation mean. Training our brain means practicing to: (1) remember more efficient and effective movement patterns and forget less efficient movement patterns, (2) improve timing and coordination of movement patterns, and (3) improve proprioception and reaction.
Junk volume is often worse than having never practiced at all, because you will have to unlearn the incorrect pattern to progress. Instead of practicing an incorrect movement a thousand times, practice the correct pattern ten times. Of course, we need to learn what correct movement pattens are, and we obviously can’t perform with the sophistication of a professional dancer when we are just starting out. So how do we spend less time repeating inefficient movements and spend more time learning more efficient movements? This is where creating what Dr Aaron Horschig calls a “sensory-rich environment”[1] comes into play.
A sensory-rich environment is when we provide a clear sensation to our brain of when it is on the right track or off-track. Our brain needs feedback to understand whether it is doing a movement correctly. This feedback can come from an instructor, but it can also come from well-placed props or well-chosen exercises.
So how can we apply the concept of creating a sensory-rich environment to our tango? Identify a movement you want to work on and then determine what constitutes the “correct” or “effective” pattern you want to aim for. It can be helpful to identify which body parts you want to move and which you want to remain stable. Now, find a prop or signal that will give you feedback when you are doing the movement correctly or incorrectly. Elastic bands, mirrors, and a helpful partner are especially useful here. After you practice with the prop to get feedback on what the correct movement feels like, try the movement without the prop to test your newfound awareness. Here are a few examples that I have found especially useful for myself and our students.
A common mistake when twisting (such as in ochos or with leading the turn) is to move our arms independent from each other. My partner Jackie likes to call this “the Bowflex,” where the distance between the elbows increases. To fix this, put an elastic band around your elbows and practice your twist (you can practice solo or with a partner in open embrace). The band lets you feel exactly when you want to move your arms apart and allows you to quickly eliminate this mistake from your dancing.
Another common mistake when pivoting is to let the hips twist along with the upper body. In tango, we want to be able to move our upper body while maintaining still hips. The challenge is that it can be hard to feel when our hips are moving. Place the back of a chair so that it is contacting the side of your hip and then practice rotating the upper body (a shelf or door handle can work as well). If you move your hips along with your upper body, then you immediately feel it in the change of contact with the chair.
We sometimes forget to push from the standing leg when walking backwards. This can lead to our lower back arching and to feeling heavy to our partner. To fix this, have a partner hold a band around your lower back as you step backwards. This provides two fixes in one: driving against the band teaches you to push with your standing leg and the sensation of the band cues you to not arch the lower back.
Crossing our feet can be tricky to do well. That is because there are many ways to cross our feet, but not all of them are equally elegant. One way is to move our foot at the ankle, which allows us to cross but sickles our foot. Another way is to turn at the hips to make space, which works but often results in excessive movement. The preferred way to cross is to use your adductors (inner thigh muscles) to pull your leg across and then allow your foot to slot into the cross. The challenge is that it can be difficult to feel your adductors and feel the proper movement. To solve this, put a band on the inside of the leg you are going to cross and have a partner hold either end (or tie to something stable). The band gives you something to pull against, which teaches you to activate your adductors. Pull straight against the band and keep your whole foot on the floor. You can practice crossing both in front and in back in this way. In no time at all you will feel how to do a clean, compact cross.
These are but a few examples. Now that you know the principles, you can create your own sensory-rich environment. Focus on training your brain, and injury-free progress will follow.
[1] https://youtu.be/TRmayQcweUc?t=410
Milo of Croton was an ancient Greek wrestler with a novel approach to training. As the legend goes, to train for the Olympic games, Milo took a small calf and carried it to the top of a hill near his house each morning. As the calf grew bigger, Milo grew stronger to meet the greater challenge. By the end of the process, Milo had unlocked beast mode and could carry the fully grown bull up the hill. With his newfound strength, Milo went on to win gold at the Olympics. Let us apply some of this ancient Greek wisdom to our own tango journey.
What are the components of Milo’s training protocol which lead to his success? Milo sets a goal—win the Olympic gold in wrestling. To achieve his goal, he gathers his resources—a hill near his home. He chooses a training frequency—once per day. And finally, he chooses a difficulty—weight of bull. Milo uses a process called progressive overload, where you incrementally increase the difficulty of a task to build a staircase from where you are to where you want to be (see here for additional discussion on this idea). The same process of progressive training can be applied to our tango.
We first decide where we want to go before we can get there. I suggest you take a moment to write down a couple of goals you want to work towards. Goals can be specific or abstract, and it can be good to have a combination of both. Here are some examples of goals I have had: develop a comfortable embrace, do well at a competition, finish a choreography for an upcoming performance, expand my vocabulary of steps, develop better posture, make clearer from the outside the musicality I hear inside, make my lead clearer from inside the couple and harder to see from outside the couple.
Having the right resources is critical to your progress. A tree grows when it has the right mix of soil, water, and sunlight. Our dancing is no different. Progress is the result of having the resources we need, and stagnation is simply a symptom of missing resources. The most crucial resources to tango growth are: (1) teacher, (2) partner, (3) practice space, (4) colleagues to collaborate with. Take a moment to check if you have each of these resources available. The fastest growth tends to happen when we have all four. But there are many ways to adapt if we are missing one component, we just need to be strategic. Say you don’t have a partner, probably the most common missing component for tango dancers. Instead of putting your progress on hold until the perfect partner magically falls into your embrace, be proactive. You can get with a group of friends to work together and work through concepts and drills together. It may be easier to find two or three people to work with occasionally than one person to exclusively partner with. This way you can fill the space of a partner in aggregate. There are many ways to effectively work with limited resources if you take stock of what you have and what you need.
How much do we need to dance to get better? Obviously if we have too low of a frequency then we won’t improve, but do we have to train every day like Milo? Tango dancers tell stories about their marathon practice sessions, and tend to exaggerate the training schedules of professionals, (e.g., “I hear they practice seven hours every day.” ) What we need to remember, though, is that not all tango time is the same (see here for more discussion of this idea). I have seen dancers go to the milonga every night and a marathon every weekend, but only actually practice an hour or two each month. You don’t need much time to get a lot of growth, you just need to be consistent and set aside time for actual practice.
Shifting the analogy for a moment, practice sessions are like houses in Monopoly. Any number of houses are better than none, and more houses pay more dividends, but the benefit of each additional home is not the same. The third home always gives the most incremental benefits. Similarly, any number of practice sessions is better than none, and more practice tends to give more benefits, but three practice sessions per week tends to give you the most benefits per hour spent. Less than three per week and your body starts to forget what it learned between sessions. More than three is nice, but additional sessions tend to have lower incremental benefits. So, see if you can sustain three before trying to add more. Each session does not have to be that long. Your schedule could be as simple as meeting with a partner once for 90 minutes on day 1, doing solo exercises for 30 minutes on day 2, and committing to focused practice for the first hour of a practica on day 3. You would then have gotten your three days a week of practice in just three hours.
Difficulty is a variable we progressively increase (see here for ways to change difficulty). Bringing the analogy back to Milo, try and pick up a bull right away and you’ll get crushed, keep lifting the calf forever and you won’t grow. So, what is the right level of difficulty, and how do we find it? Effort and accuracy are both functions of difficulty and are our guides to dialing in the right level of difficulty. Effort is the mental and physical exertion we feel, and accuracy is our success rate and precision. Effort increases with difficulty and accuracy decreases with difficulty.
High accuracy with low effort means the difficulty is too low. We call this this hanging out in the green zone, where everything is safe, and learning doesn’t happen. Low accuracy and high effort means the difficulty is too high. We call this the red zone, where you are overwhelmed, and you develop bad habits. The area of high effort to maintain high accuracy is the gold zone, the sweet spot of optimal difficulty where progress occurs. When you practice, you always want to find your gold zone. You know you have found it when what you are practicing feels challenging yet doable.
| Difficulty | Effort | Accuracy |
| Too Easy – Green Zone | -Feel bored -Task feels automatic | -Miss because not paying attention -Always get it right |
| Lower End of Gold Zone | -Comfortably focused -Like a fun, interesting game | -Usually correct -Occasional error |
| Upper End of Gold Zone | -Fully concentrated -Hard challenge | -Both successes and failures -Struggle to get it right -Know cause of misses |
| Too Hard – Red Zone | -Overwhelmed -Drinking from a fire hose -Feeling of confusion | -Miss and don’t know why -Feels like luck when you get it right |
As you progress, your green zone expands, and the gold and red zones shift. You then need to progressively increase the difficulty to stay in the gold zone. You need a bigger bull to keep the same challenge. You have to keep challenging yourself. Training is about being able to do tomorrow what you can’t do today. If you just keep repeating what you could do yesterday, then you are not really training and should not expect to improve.
The life cycle of the stereotypical tango dancer starts in the red zone, feeling overwhelmed with all the information. The ones who stick around then find a moment of the gold zone where progression happens quickly. (This usually occurs a little earlier for followers, but tends to last a little longer for leaders, which is why we often say followers learn faster early on, but learning is harder for more advanced followers). Eventually the dancer gets to a place where their dance feels comfortable to them, and they start to hang out in the green zone. At this point they no longer have a stimulus to promote progress, and their dance remains constant, if not slowly declining, for however long they continue in tango. If not addressed, then the gold zone also starts to shrink, locking in their current state. Usually this is due to a combination of frustration—”I’ve been dancing for 20 years, why can’t I do this?”—and arrogance—”I’ve been dancing for 20 years, and I’ve never needed that.”
Though common, this process is completely avoidable. We can find continuous and joyous growth for as long as we dance. Find some goals worth working towards. Marshall your resources and plan around your constraints. Set aside some time each week to practice. Find the joy in challenging yourself and pushing yourself to be able to do something tomorrow that you can’t do today. Little by little, and step by step, you will find your dance transform in a truly positive way.
In part I, we discussed some possible choices we can make to improve our walk. Next, we need to get our mind and body to do what we want it to do. Now that we picked our target, we need the accuracy to hit it. If we were throwing darts, then we would have the immediate feedback of where the dart lands to begin zeroing in on the bullseye. To improve our tango walk, we need a way to get similar feedback; to see where our metaphorical darts land. If we use feedback in a manner which is healthy and effective, then our tango will quickly improve.
Here is a procedure for approaching feedback I find effective. I’ll call it the four Cs of feedback:
We first choose a specific element to work on. We then capture what we are doing. We next use this information to correct mistakes we notice. Finally, we compare ourselves after the correction with what we did before. For example, say I choose to work on my balance during my walk[1]. We film ourselves walking to capture how our walk looks. After slowing down the film, I see I wobble when I move my weight too far to the outside of the foot. I correct by practicing slowly transferring between feet while keeping my center of balance towards the second toe instead of the pinky toe. Finally, we film ourselves again and compare balance before and after the correction to see if I improved.
Choose the focus before giving yourself or anyone else feedback. This narrows down the corrections to a manageable level. The most common challenge with feedback is that we are too critical about too many things. We think that we can criticize ourselves to improvement, but the truth is that when we are negative towards ourselves, all it accomplishes is this: we no longer seek out feedback. Not getting corrections is easy,meeting unrealistic standards for ourselves is hard. If getting feedback is a negative experience, then you won’t do it; if it is a positive experience then you will do it.
An analogy I think of is that feedback is like learning to box. Your partner throws punches at you so you can practice blocking and dodging, which is helpful and positive. But it would be hurtful and negative if they kicked you because kicking is not part of boxing, so you are not focused on it. The kick itself is not the problem and may be completely appropriate if you were learning kickboxing. The problem is that they struck you with something that was not part of your focus. Similarly, it would be hurtful and negative if someone randomly punched you while walking down the street, because this is not a time when you are focused on practice. When you give feedback, whether it is to yourself or anyone else, always keep in mind the focus of the practice and whether it is a practice space. Throwing punches in the gym is helpful, throwing kicks on the street is hurtful.
To capture what we are doing, an external eye is critical. Internal sensations are essential as well, but we often don’t feel what we don’t have awareness of. External information and corrections train our mind to understand the internal sensations it is receiving, so we need a way to see from the outside what is going on. This can be done with a mirror, with feedback from our partner, by getting corrections from a teacher, or by filming ourselves. I highly recommend filming yourself and slowing down the film. This is one of the most effective means of improving your dance. But please choose what you focus on first and be very gentle with yourself. Remember that kicking yourself over all the things you notice won’t help you, it will just cause you to avoid filming in the future.
When deciding a correction to make or suggest, remember the chosen focus, and give one correction at a time, or even the same correction several times. It is better to give one piece of feedback a hundred times than give a hundred pieces of feedback once. As an example of what not to do, I once had a partner who, when I asked if she could give feedback on a fewer number of topics and provide positive feedback when I was improving, responded with “How can I give positive feedback when everything you are doing is wrong?” I hope none of you will be this blatant to your partner, but many of us say something similar with our internal narrative. It is not the corrections we get that are important, but the corrections we can improve upon that matter.
The final step is to compare yourself before and after to see progress. This step is often overlooked but is critical. For one, the correction may not have solved the problem, in which case you want to iterate with different options. Some corrections may work for some people but not others, or may only solve part of the puzzle. We want to find what works for us and in our body. Even more important though, you want to get the dopamine hit of seeing yourself improve. Take pride and joy in the fact that you are improving yourself and your dance. Instead of the masochistic onslaught of self-critique that we mistakenly think is helpful, mark the improvements that you make and celebrate each one. Make it a practice that every time you practice, you choose a few focused elements to capture and correct, and then celebrate each incremental progress. After all, it is not your current level that matters but your ability to grow that counts. Feedback in a focused and positive manner, as the four Cs hopefully provide, leads to sustainable growth and sustained joy throughout your tango journey.
[1] my partner chooses what they want to focus on as well.
Every tango dancer wants a powerful and elegant walk. Ask a tanguero what they are practicing, and the most common answer is “I am working on my walk”. Whole books have even been devoted to analyzing the walk. For many, a good tango walk is synonymous with a good tango dancer. But how do we actually improve our walk?
Improvement takes two steps. You first make choices about what you want to do, and then you check to see if what you did was what you wanted. You first pick your target and then you check your accuracy. This article discusses choices we can make for the tango walk—the targets we can pick—and a follow-up article will discuss methods to check our accuracy.
The walk is too simple to be the only thing you practice. It does not have pivots, does not change systems, and does not have the pattern of alternating crosses and open steps that is fundamental to understanding many tango movements.[1] At the same time, the walk is too complicated to practice as a whole. An elegant walk is an integration of many specific components, each performed correctly and in the correct sequence. If we try to improve everything at once, then we overload our capacity to focus. Instead, we want to improve our understanding, control, and mastery of each component, and then reintegrate them into an improved whole. Practice the walk, and your walk won’t improve. Practice the components of the walk, and your walk will improve.
So how do we go about breaking down the walk into components and picking our targets? The approach I find helpful is to ask myself a series of questions about what I want to do. I have listed 10 questions below that are a good place to start (see here and here for a discussion of the joint terms used in some of the questions). I recommend you take the time to write down your answers for your own walk. These questions are just a starting point, and there are many more we could ask, especially related to the effect and intent of what we want to convey. The specific questions are less important than the specificity of your answers. Try to be detailed with your response. Clarity of intent leads to clarity of movement.
There is no “one true tango,” and there is not one correct way to walk, so there is not a right or wrong answer to these questions. What is important is to start making choices. That being said, some choices will better convey our desired effect, and some choices need to be bundled along with other choices we make. Studying the choices we can make, and the choices great dancers make can help with our own clarity. Consider some of the choices made by Jonathan and Clarisa in the images below (images taken from https://youtu.be/ujs4hFT2Kz0 filmed by 030 tango).
A few notes on some of the choices we can make. There are three main answers to the question of how do you line up your feet? One answer is to have the feet on two tracks, where the inside of the heels line up with each other. Another potential is to have the center of the feet line up with each other, so the back foot fits in the shadow of the front foot (if the light were directly in front of you). A third option is to have the balls of the feet on one line, in which case the center of one foot actually crosses the other. There are amazing dancers who use each of these three possibilities, and each results in a different style of walk.
Turnout determines where your knee is pointing relative to your hip, and beveling determines where your toes are pointing relative to your knee. The turnout and beveling combine to determine the size of “the pizza slice” your feet make on the floor. Your choice of beveling and turnout depend on your aesthetic preferences, foot strength, the music, and what you want to express. You can see Vanessa expressing turnout and some impressive beveling in the first image, and a more neutral ankle and turnout position in the second image (images from https://youtu.be/_7wySfMSuvA). Beveling the standing foot requires a lot of balance and ankle strength to perform safely, so I recommend most dancers to have a neutral ankle for the standing foot and play with different shapes with the free foot. One (more or less) universal rule is to position your feet such that when walking backwards the big toe is the first to arrive, and when walking forward the big toe is the last to leave. This rule is clearly shown by Roxana and Sebastián in the third and fourth images (from https://youtu.be/NFXs20kygAY).
How you collect depends on some of the other choices you make. One important choice is whether your free foot is flexed or pointed when passing through collection. If your foot is flexed when passing through collection, then your knee, and ankle will pass through collection at the same time. If your foot is pointed, then your knee and ankle will pass through collection at different times, and you will have a continuum of collection (Credit to Jackie Pham for coming up with the term continuum of collection). In the panel above with Jonathan and Clarisa, you can see how they keep a pointed foot through collection. When Clarisa collects at the ankle, Jonathan collects his knees. And when Clarissa collects at the knees Jonathan collects at the ankles. This creates space for the step and makes the movement look connected. Your type of collection also depends on the amount of turnout of the standing leg. When you pass through collection, you want the knees to pass close to each other to not leave a gap between them. The more turnout you have, the more potential gap. This can be solved by turning in the free leg when passing through collection, which leads to a snakelike walk. If you want the snaky effect, then more turnout of the standing leg is helpful, and if you want a more linear direct effect then less turnout of the standing leg is helpful. The choice of turnout impacts your choice of collection, which in turn impacts the effect you display.
So, you want a better tango walk? Then do this: ask questions and come up with specific answers. These answers give you specific components to work on. Work on the specific components and it will lead to improvement and clarity in these components. Better components sum up to a better walk.
[1] Practicing a range of movements exposes our body to new concepts, improves our balance and coordination, and highlights technical flaws which can then be corrected. Improving a variety of movements makes us a better dancer, when in turn gives us a better walk.
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:
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.
To get strong, you start with light weights slowly increase to heavier weight. To become a better runner, you progressively increase the speed or distance. To learn a musical instrument, you start with simple scales and songs and progress to more challenging pieces and concepts. In all cases, we learn by progressively increasing difficulty such that the task stays challenging but not too challenging. We build a staircase where each new step is a little bit higher than the next. The same principle applies to learning Tango.
Beginner dancers often feel overwhelmed and lost, and most dancers struggle to integrate moves they learn in class into their dance in the milonga—both symptoms of the difficulty being set too high. At the same time, dancers who have been at it for a few years tend to plateau, reaching what psychology professor Anders Ericsson calls “that level of ‘acceptable’ performance and automaticity [where] the additional years of ‘practice’ don’t lead to improvement.”[1] This stagnation is a symptom of the difficulty being set too low.
The gym has nicely labeled weights that we can add, and we can change variables such as reps, sets, exercises, and recovery time to increase difficulty as we get stronger. But how do we vary the challenge of Tango? What are the variables that we can use to dial up or down the difficulty of the dance?
There are six variables that determine the difficulty of a move, sequence, concept, or really any part of the dance. I’ll call them familiarity, complexity, accuracy, timing, partnering, and navigating. A new movement is more difficult than a familiar movement. A complex pattern is more difficult than a simple pattern. Execution with precision and accuracy is more difficult than ‘just doing the step’. Specific timing and musicality is more difficult than doing a step to the beat or without music. Leading or following a step with a new partner is more difficult than with your regular partner. And finally, navigating a crowded milonga is more difficult than when no one else is around.
Familiarity, complexity, and accuracy are internal variables while timing, partnering, and navigating are external variables.[2] Internal variables are based on our own knowledge and actions—our familiarity with a concept, our choice of movement complexity, and our accuracy as a dancer. External variables depend on the external environment—who asks us to dance, what music is playing, and the amount of space.
Learning depends on being able to progressively vary the difficulty, so learning Tango depends on our ability to vary the difficulty of these six variables. Few if any dancers can accurately execute a new, complex move musically with a new partner in a crowded milonga. Something must give. The challenge is that in the milonga the external variables are not set by us.[3] The milonga dials up the external variables, increasing total difficulty, which often leads to sacrificing the development of internal variables to meet these difficulties. We all know dancers who pull out every complicated move, but without accuracy or grace. We also know dancers who may be musical and have a yummy embrace but just repeat the same few simple steps over and over at every marathon they attend. So many late-night Tango conversations revolve around the merits of fancy moves versus elegant posture versus connections versus musicality. But the truth is we can have it all. We can learn new concepts and dance complicated sequences musically and with connection in a crowded space. We just need to turn down the external dials for a bit.
For many of us, we go straight from learning a new step in a class to trying it out at the milonga. It ends up not working so we go back to our tried and true dance. But of course it doesn’t work. at the milonga all the difficulty dials are all turned up to 11. It’s a recipe for disaster. Instead of trying our new step at the milonga, first go to a quiet space. No music, no navigation, no need to perform, no distractions. Turn all the dials way down and then build back up. Start with getting familiar with the concept. Then break the movement into small components to reduce complexity. Drill each component and film ourselves to work on accuracy. Then start combining and adding back in the external variables. Play with different variations to work the lead and follow. Practice to different music to work on musicality. Start controlling the spacing, see how big and how small you can make the same movement. Ask for help and feedback along the way. Finally, test it out at a milonga. Soon enough you will have a new move to play with, dance and enjoy. By controlling your dials instead of being controlled by them, you build your staircase to become a more expressive and enjoyable dancer.
[1] Anders Ericsson spent much of his career studying what makes experts experts. I highly recommend checking out his research and writings. Quote comes from the book Peak: Secrets from the new Science of Expertise
[2] With a little word smithing, I was able to get the internal variables to end with ‘y’ and the external variables to end with ‘ing’, which can be helpful for identifying each.
[3] Granted, we can choose who we dance with and the songs we dance to. But the fact remains that it is generally frowned upon in the milonga to do things like trying the same move several times in a row paying no attention to the music or space.