Thoughts on Tango Teaching | Part 63
Somatic Milonguero by Tom Tabaczynski – Is Teaching Unnecessary, or Does It Need to Be Fundamentally Different?
Preliminary Note
Tom Tabaczynski originally asked me himself whether I would review Somatic Milonguero. Given my own experience with alternative approaches to learning and movement, he apparently initially considered me a suitable author. During the course of our exchange, however, I raised a number of critical questions about his model. After that, he decided no longer to regard my contribution as the review he was looking for and approached other authors or blogs instead.
In the meantime, a guest article by him has appeared on another blog. This could create the impression that the following text is a response to that article. It is not. I have been working intensively on this article for four days; it grew out of my earlier engagement with Somatic Milonguero and from our exchange.
Precisely because I have spent more time examining the underlying questions critically, what finally emerged is not a conventional book review, but a much more extensive contribution to my series “Thoughts on Tango Teaching.”
This obviously lengthy article is not a conventional book review. Somatic Milonguero by Tom Tabaczynsky is, for me, an opportunity to reconsider some fundamental questions about tango teaching. Much in this book touches on subjects I have been thinking about for decades. Some of it confirms experiences I have had in my own teaching, other parts have provoked disagreement, and on some points I changed my mind several times while reading. I therefore want less to evaluate the book than to examine its theses in the light of my own experience with tango, learning, and teaching.
I want to make one thing clear from the outset: I consider a substantial part of Tabaczynski’s criticism of common tango teaching to be justified. Overloading students with figures, the idea that progress consists mainly in acquiring ever more movements, the mechanical repetition of external forms, and the attempt to have a stored solution ready for every dancing situation — I have considered all of this problematic for a long time. I also share the view that people need more time to perceive for themselves, discover differences, experiment, and find their own solutions.
That is precisely why the book has occupied me so much. Starting from observations with which I often agree, Tabaczynski draws conclusions that I increasingly find difficult to follow.
Tango Is More Than a Dance Technique
To understand Tabaczynski’s argument, it should not be read merely as a criticism of particular teaching methods. Something larger lies behind it: tango appears in his thinking as a cultural system. How people dance therefore depends not only on which movements a teacher shows them. The entire environment matters: what music they hear, which dancers they observe, what ideas about tango prevail around them, how a milonga is organized, how much space is available on the dance floor, which movements are accepted there, and which social rules determine behaviour.
I consider this thought very important. Teaching never exists outside a culture. If, for years, a tango scene mainly teaches figures, spectacular movements, external body images, and ever more levels of progression, it will produce different dancers from an environment in which music, social responsibility, perception of the partner, and adaptation to the actual situation are more important.
Tabaczynski accordingly describes his own experience in the crowded downtown milongas of Buenos Aires as a process of doing less. Large movements and stored sequences proved of little use there; the situation demanded smaller solutions, constant readiness to adapt, and attention to partner, music, and available space.
One of his strongest ideas, for me, is therefore the distinction between product and process. The visible movements of experienced milongueros are not necessarily a technique that can be isolated and then handed back to other people. They may instead be the result of years of adaptation, exploration, musical experience, and individual development.
A dancer does something. An observer sees the movement, breaks it down, names it, and then begins to teach it as a technique. There is a genuine danger here of confusing the product of a learning process with the learning process itself. A movement shows very well what something looks like. It does not automatically show why it came into being that way.
Teté Rusconi – Dancing from the Organization of the Couple
While reading Somatic Milonguero, I repeatedly found myself thinking of Teté Rusconi†, whom I had the opportunity to experience myself. For me, Teté was a particularly vivid example of how contextual dancing can work. At the same time, he also showed why it can be so difficult to translate such dancing into conventional forms of teaching. When dancers wanted to know from him how a particular movement worked, he quite often ended up with “rhythm and feeling.” That could be extremely frustrating, because the visible movement was very concrete, while his explanation offered hardly any reproducible instructions.
Over time, it became clearer to me that Teté apparently did not organize his dancing primarily through his own step sequences at all. In the close embrace, both partners leaned into one another and thereby created a shared balance. This balance was not a static condition, but had to be continuously maintained and reorganized while dancing. In very practical terms, this also meant that Teté had to make sure his partner did not fall over. As soon as she shifted her weight, changed her position, or the situation on the dance floor demanded a different direction, he had to adapt his own movement accordingly.
His own step therefore did not stand at the beginning of the organization. Rather, it emerged as a consequence of what was happening with his partner and with the couple as a whole. Teté set his partner in motion, perceived how she actually moved, and then organized his own position so that shared balance, direction, and musical coherence were maintained. In such an understanding, the leader may give an impulse or open up a movement possibility, but his own next step is not fully predetermined. It also arises from what the follower actually does with that impulse.
This, to me, marks a decisive difference from a widespread way of dancing in which the leader defines himself primarily through his own step patterns. He has a rough idea of the movement he wants to execute and then tries to lead his partner through this already imagined pattern. The partner can easily become part of his own movement plan. That can work, but it carries the danger of becoming a pattern prison: familiar sequences increasingly determine which possibilities are perceived at all. The dancer may combine ever more stored elements, but the actual situation becomes less important.
This can in turn produce the very dancing stagnation that later creates a demand for ever more new figures. One looks for the solution to one’s boredom in further patterns, even though attachment to patterns may itself have caused the problem. An odd cycle emerges: The pattern creates stagnation — and stagnation creates the demand for new patterns.
Teté’s dancing points towards a different organization. The central question is not, “Which step am I going to do now?” but rather: “What is happening with my partner right now, and what movement follows from that for me?”
The step did not organize the couple. The movement of his partner and their shared balance organized Teté’s next step.
Conditional Learning – One of the Strongest Ideas in the Book
I found Tabaczynski’s discussion of conditional learning particularly interesting. It makes a considerable difference whether I tell a student, “This is the correct way,” or, “Under these conditions, this may be one possible solution.”
This corresponds very strongly with my own teaching experience. One essential principle of my teaching is learning through differentiation. I do not merely want to show a student how something is supposedly done correctly. I want to make differences perceptible. What happens with more pressure? What changes with less? When do I open a path for my partner, and when do I block it? How does a shared movement change when weight, orientation, or position are organized differently?
From this follows a sentence that probably describes one of the core ideas of my teaching:
You can define a task without prescribing its solution.
And this is precisely where my real difference with Tabaczynsky begins.
Is Teaching the Problem – or a Particular Form of Teaching?
Tabaczynski criticizes a model of teaching that can be summarized roughly as follows: the teacher demonstrates, the student reproduces, the teacher corrects, the student repeats. More and more movements are added and eventually automated.
If this is what is meant by tango teaching, I largely agree with his criticism.
But is this really teaching itself?
A teacher can do something entirely different. He can create a situation, make a difference perceptible, ask a question, change one variable, or help a student perceive the cause of a problem in the first place. He can organize a learning task without predetermining its outcome.
The teacher then ceases to be a supplier of ready-made solutions and becomes an organizer of a learning process.
For precisely this reason, Tabaczynsky’s conclusion seems too far-reaching to me. A justified criticism of overloaded, form-oriented teaching develops into a fundamental scepticism towards teaching itself. Yet even the somatic approaches he draws upon show that guidance and exploration are by no means opposites. Attention can be directed, a task can be set, and an experience can be made possible without prescribing the outcome.
Less Teaching or Less New Material?
Students are often curious and positively hungry for something new. New movements are enjoyable, create variety, and give a sense of progress. The problem begins when this hunger is constantly fed with new material.
A new figure is exciting. Re-examining a supposedly familiar movement under different conditions, varying it, and really exploring it in depth is much harder work. Yet that may be precisely where the more important learning takes place.
For this reason, I am not convinced by a simple opposition between more and less teaching. A weekend workshop can contain so much input within a few hours that a large proportion of it has disappeared again only a few days later. Fewer teaching sessions do not automatically mean less overload.
I can, by contrast, easily imagine regular teaching sessions in which almost no new material is introduced. Students dance, experiment, encounter problems, and increasingly bring their own questions. The teacher does not constantly provide new answers, but helps them investigate their questions more effectively.
Perhaps we should therefore distinguish less between more and less teaching than between more and less unnecessary input.
Krashen and the Idea of Learning Through Input
One of the book’s central theoretical foundations is Stephen Krashen’s model of language acquisition. Put very simply, learning in this model takes place primarily through comprehensible, meaningful, context-related input. Tabaczynsky transfers this idea to tango and contrasts it with the conventional model of explanation, production, practice, and correction.
The idea is stimulating. Tango does indeed have something language-like about it. Two people communicate with one another, respond to one another, and develop movement within a shared system.
The question, however, is how far the analogy can be taken. Tango is also a complex sensorimotor process involving two physically connected bodies. As soon as a beginner dances, his movement produces a reaction in his partner; that reaction in turn changes his own behaviour. Learning therefore does not take place solely through the reception of external input, but within a continuous feedback loop between two acting human beings.
This is precisely why problems can arise whose causes are not at all obvious to beginners. Both partners may experience a movement as uncomfortable or unstable without being able to identify what actually caused the problem.
An error does not automatically contain its own explanation.
The “Silent Period” – and What Is Actually Being Observed
Krashen’s model also includes the so-called silent period: learning may already be taking place even though little outward production is visible. People listen to a language, observe relationships and patterns, and only later begin to speak themselves.
Tabaczynsky transfers this idea to Buenos Aires. A person there may hear tango music, experience milongas, and observe social processes long before beginning to dance seriously. I find that plausible.
But perhaps this silent phase describes less a pedagogical method than a cultural head start. Someone living within a tango culture can absorb such information almost incidentally over a period of years. For an adult interested in tango in Germany or Australia, a comparable situation would have to be artificially created.
Above all, however, something is overlooked in this idea: someone observing dancers during a “silent learning period” does not merely absorb abstract context.
He sees movements.
Buenos Aires Also Has a Shared Movement Repertoire
A milonga in Buenos Aires is not an open movement space in which every person reinvents tango entirely from within his own body. Like every social dance, tango has a historically evolved shared pool of possible movements and forms of organization. Certain weight changes, ochos, crosses, turns, openings, transitions, and spatial relationships appear again and again. Dancers recognize them, observe them, and adopt them.
The systematic investigations of Gustavo Naveira, Fabián Salas, and later Mariano “Chicho” Frúmboli in particular have shown that tango contains structural possibilities that can be analysed, combined, and expanded. This does not mean that tango consists of a closed catalogue of figures. But it certainly shows that improvisation takes place within a culturally existing movement space.
These movements themselves emerged at some point from concrete situations involving the couple, space, and music. They may therefore indeed be products of earlier processes of adaptation. But once these products become part of a culture, they in turn become input for the next generation.
This complicates the distinction between product and process.
The beginner at a milonga does not merely observe people moving “naturally.” He sees culturally shaped movements, recognizes repetitions, and may begin to imitate them.
Imitation does not disappear when the teacher disappears.
The product already exists before the beginner has found his own somatic solution.
Perhaps tango is therefore better understood as a cycle: earlier dancers find solutions for concrete situations. These solutions become part of the culture. Other people observe and adopt them. Through new bodies, partners, music, and spatial conditions they are modified. New variations emerge and in turn enter the cultural pool.
Tango would then be neither a fixed vocabulary nor pure spontaneous self-organization, but a culturally transmitted and continuously changing movement repertoire.
The Milonga Corrects as Well
This shared movement space is by no means value-neutral. A traditional milonga has not only códigos in the narrower sense, but also expectations about what tango should look and feel like. Someone who moves far outside the commonly accepted forms may be perceived as inappropriate or disruptive and may have difficulty finding partners.
The context is therefore not only liberating and creative, but also selective. Certain solutions receive social acceptance; others receive less.
The milonga corrects too — just not necessarily through a teacher.
There is also an aesthetic dimension. Dancers observe one another. They see musicality, calmness, elegance, expression, embrace, and quality of movement. These perceptions also influence whom they later want to dance with. Partner rotation in particular makes such aesthetic evaluations into a powerful social learning mechanism.
A milonga therefore communicates not only: “This is how you can adapt spatially.” It also communicates: “This is what attractive or acceptable tango looks like within this community.”
Certain solutions are admired, copied, and socially rewarded. Others remain marginal.
The teacher disappears, but the norm does not. It is simply communicated differently.
Shared Forms and Somatic Adaptability Are Not Contradictions
This certainly does not mean that dancers in Buenos Aires merely reproduce a shared repertoire of figures. On the contrary, I consider the ability of many experienced dancers to respond to the smallest changes in their partner within the close embrace one of the great qualities of this dance culture.
A social dance always requires shared forms. Without a culturally shared movement space, spontaneous dancing with changing partners would hardly be possible.
The decisive difference therefore lies not between movement vocabulary and freedom, but in how that vocabulary is used.
Especially in the close embrace, the external movement form often recedes into the background. What becomes decisive is the bodily sensation within the couple: How is our shared weight organized? Which direction is possible now? How much movement is actually necessary? What changes when the partner responds differently than expected?
In this I see one of the great strengths of this tango.
But the crucial sentence, for me, is this:
It is not the absence of a shared movement vocabulary that makes this tango adaptive, but the ability to reorganize that vocabulary within the couple again and again.
Or, more generally:
What characterizes the tango of Buenos Aires is not an absence of cultural conventions, but the flexible way in which they are handled.
If Buenos Aires is to serve as Tabaczynsky’s reference model, then the whole dance culture there should be considered — not only those characteristics that fit particularly well with his theory. That includes not only somatic adaptation, closeness, and contextual learning, but also transmission, imitation, shared movement forms, aesthetic norms, and social selection.
Can Buenos Aires Be Transplanted?
A traditional milonga in Buenos Aires is not simply a room with traditional music, limited space, and certain rules. It is part of a historically evolved social system. People bring listening habits, experiences, expectations, role models, and an understanding of what this space actually means.
If, in Germany or Australia, you reduce teaching, play traditional music, and make the dance floor more crowded, you do not thereby create Buenos Aires.
At first, what you get is people who have had less teaching.
But not yet a mature tango culture.
A learning culture cannot simply be dug up like a plant and transplanted into different cultural soil.
Anyone wishing to reproduce the learning conditions of Buenos Aires would have to transfer far more than floor density and music: social motivation, aesthetic expectations, movement culture, role models, changing partners, social conventions, and in some cases years of prior cultural experience.
A culture is more than the sum of the conditions one would like to create.
Trial and Error – but Under What Conditions?
Trial and error is, of course, a fundamental learning mechanism. A child learns to walk by trying, failing, trying again, and gradually moving towards more functional solutions. Adults can learn in this way as well.
The problem is not the failed attempt.
In tango, however, the situation is more complex because two people simultaneously alter weight, direction, contact, and timing while responding to one another. It is therefore not always easy to recognize which change actually caused which result.
Good guidance can help here by reducing the number of variables that are open at the same time.
The failed attempts are not the problem. They become problematic when their number and complexity exceed a learner’s ability to remain curious and continue learning from them.
Because frustration changes learning.
There is also the opposite effect: when something finally works after several failed attempts, that particular solution is understandably repeated. Success creates security. New possibilities suddenly appear risky.
In this way, trial and error itself can eventually produce a fixed movement routine — precisely what Tabaczynsky wants to avoid.
The ability to improvise therefore requires more than finding a functional solution. One also needs enough confidence to leave a functioning solution again.
The Crowded Dance Floor – Creative for Whom?
Tabaczynsky assigns an important role to the densely crowded milonga. The spatial conditions force adaptation.
Here too, I can initially agree from my own experience. A crowded dance floor often makes me more creative. If my path is suddenly blocked, I can stop, shorten a movement, redirect it, or find another solution.
But this works for me because I have enough alternatives available.
The lack of space does not create these alternatives. It merely requires me to use them.
For a beginner, the same situation can have an entirely different effect. If only a few secure options are available to him, a crowded floor does not necessarily create creativity. It may create anxiety: don’t bump into anyone, don’t try anything that might not work.
A context can challenge existing adaptability. It does not automatically create it.
And the other dancers at a milonga are not extras in a pedagogical experiment. They too want to dance and expect a certain degree of spatial responsibility.
The Embrace as a Dynamic System
One area that seems insufficiently developed in Somatic Milonguero, in my view, is the embrace — not as an external form, but as a dynamic system of information and organization.
The height and position of the right arm can affect the freedom of movement of the partner’s shoulder and shoulder blade. Foot positions can open or block pathways. Weight shifts change the information within the couple. Torso orientation, opening of the shoulder, pelvis, direction of gaze, and relative position constantly affect one another.
In addition, people are different. Height, proportions, mobility, habits, and preferred degree of closeness vary. A solution that works wonderfully with one person may be unsuitable for another.
Of course, genuine adaptability can only develop by dancing with many different partners.
But that does not mean, in my view, that all the perceptions needed for this must arise exclusively through self-organization.
A teacher can make differences tangible without prescribing a single “correct” embrace.
Somatics Explains the Body – but Does It Explain the Couple?
Tabaczynsky draws strongly on somatic approaches and particularly on Steve Paxton. Somatics focuses less on what movement looks like from the outside and more on how it is perceived and organized by the person himself: weight, tension, balance, joints, flow of movement, and internal organization.*
I consider this perspective extremely valuable.
But an individual body and a dancing couple are not the same system.
A movement that is functional or “natural” for an isolated body does not automatically have to be the best solution within a couple. Crosses and open steps, for example, change the relationship between the two partners. Torso, pelvis, gaze, and direction of movement do not have to remain constantly aligned.
In partner dancing, a new system emerges.
And sometimes the functional organization of that system takes precedence over the self-organization of an isolated individual body.
* Somatics refers to body-oriented approaches to learning and movement in which perception of one’s own body is central. What matters is less how a movement looks from the outside than how weight, tension, balance, and movement organization are perceived by the person performing it.
Do We Automatically Learn Good Solutions?
People do not learn only through their own experience. They also learn very strongly through observation and imitation.
That can work extremely well.
But it can also spread bad habits.
Someone sees an arm position, a head position, or a particular way of walking and adopts the visible form without understanding why it works in that particular situation. This brings us back to Tabaczynsky’s own distinction between product and process.
Problematic solutions can also stabilize within couples. A follower may regularly compensate for unclear leading. The leader nevertheless experiences a successful movement and interprets this as evidence that his leading works. The next time, he repeats the same thing.
Self-organization therefore does not automatically guarantee good organization.
A community, too, can stabilize problematic habits.
Students Are Not Ideal Self-Learners
One factor that is easily underestimated in theoretical models of learning is motivation and group dynamics.
I once tried to give an existing tango group greater responsibility for its own learning. I did not want to travel there every week, but instead provide a manageable amount of input every two weeks. During the week in between, the group was supposed to continue working independently.
That was explicitly agreed.
In practice, however, many people mainly came when I was present. The independent practice sessions were less well attended. And even when some of them worked on something for a while, they eventually stopped and preferred talking at the buffet.
Eventually, I returned to a more closely guided form of teaching.
That experience taught me something important: people do not come to tango exclusively because they want to learn.
They come because of other people, the atmosphere, the music, a pleasant evening, and the conversations — because of the event.
There is nothing negative about that. Perhaps precisely there lies an opportunity.
The Event as a Learning Space
Instead of expecting adults to become perfect self-organized learners after a day’s work, perhaps we could use their actual social motivation as a vehicle for learning.
People come for the evening — and learn along the way.
A práctica or milonga could become a social space in which dancing, observing, asking questions, experimenting, music, and conversation naturally interweave.
On this point, I do see considerable potential in Tabaczynsky’s ideas.
But such a space does not arise automatically simply because teaching is removed.
Community Is Itself an Organizational Achievement
A community has to be organized. Someone needs a room. Someone takes care of the music. Beginners have to be integrated. Social conventions are communicated. Conflicts arise. Dates have to be organized. People have to take responsibility.
This work does not disappear when paid teaching disappears.
It is merely distributed differently.
Volunteer-run clubs can of course work. But there too, people are needed who continuously invest time, energy, and competence. Often, structures eventually reappear that one may originally have wanted to avoid: people in charge, organizers, teachers, workshops, or external specialists.
Community is not a substitute for organization. It is itself an organizational achievement.
For that reason, the idea of a small self-organized tango biotope in which people simply dance together, observe, learn from one another, and continue developing functionally over time seems idealistic to me.
Not impossible.
But by no means self-evident.
Community Is Itself an Organizational Achievement
A community has to be organized. Someone needs a room. Someone takes care of the music. Beginners have to be integrated. Social conventions are communicated. Conflicts arise. Dates have to be organized. People have to take responsibility.
This work does not disappear when paid teaching disappears.
It is merely distributed differently.
Volunteer-run clubs can of course work. But there too, people are needed who continuously invest time, energy, and competence. Often, structures eventually reappear that one may originally have wanted to avoid: people in charge, organizers, teachers, workshops, or external specialists.
Community is not a substitute for organization. It is itself an organizational achievement.
For that reason, the idea of a small self-organized tango biotope in which people simply dance together, observe, learn from one another, and continue developing functionally over time seems idealistic to me.
Not impossible.
But by no means self-evident.
Demand Also Produces Tango Teaching
Tabaczynsky’s criticism of commercial teaching touches on a real problem. If teaching constantly has to provide new material, it can easily produce students who confuse progress with consumption.
But the process also works in the other direction.
Students ask for something new. A new movement is stimulating. Spending another hour on something that appears familiar is hard work. And when one’s own dancing development stagnates, the hope quickly arises that the solution lies in a new idea, a new figure, or a new technical detail.
Figure-based teaching offers a particularly seductive answer to this problem: one feels that one has learned something new and is therefore moving forward again.
The difficulty is that the cause of stagnation often has nothing to do with a lack of movement material. It may lie instead in perception, musicality, connection, balance, insufficient adaptability, or simply in the fact that familiar material has not yet been thoroughly understood.
Even so, adding something new is psychologically more attractive than fundamentally re-examining something already known.
Teachers therefore provide new material because students ask for it. Students expect new material because teachers regularly provide it.
Supply and demand reinforce one another.
The teaching system therefore does not merely produce consumers. The experience of one’s own stagnation can itself turn students into consumers of new solutions.
This also brings us full circle back to Teté: someone who organizes his dancing development mainly through the acquisition of his own movement patterns may eventually stagnate within those very patterns — and then attempt to solve the problem by adding more patterns.
The pattern creates stagnation — and stagnation creates the demand for new patterns.
Anyone who wants to change this therefore has to do more than abolish teachers or shorten lessons. A different learning culture has to be developed — one in which progress does not automatically mean adding something new, but may sometimes consist precisely in perceiving something long familiar in a different way.
A Method Is More Than Its Exercises
I once tried to adopt someone else’s teaching system because its underlying ideas had convinced me.
In my hands, it was a disaster.
The person who had developed the system, by contrast, was able to work with it brilliantly.
That experience taught me something important: a method consists of more than its visible exercises. Its originator often possesses an enormous amount of implicit knowledge. He knows when to intervene and when not to, when an exercise needs to be changed, when a student is overwhelmed, and which deviation may actually be productive.
Anyone who merely adopts the visible structure can lose the underlying idea.
And suddenly precisely what Tabaczynsky himself says so convincingly about tango becomes true:
You adopt the product — and lose the process.
For that reason, what interests me most about his model is this: How does it work in the hands of its originator?
Has Tabaczynsky himself accompanied genuine beginners over an extended period under these conditions? What emerges after several months? What difficulties occur? Where does he have to intervene after all? Which things genuinely develop independently? How stable does the group remain? And how do changing dance partners experience this development?
Such a practical reference would interest me much more than another theoretical argument.
Does the Theory Support the Observation – or Does the Observation Support the Theory?
At this point, I want to formulate my thoughts with deliberate caution.
While reading, I often had the impression that the learning theories brought into the argument tend to support an already existing conviction rather than subject that conviction to open examination.
The cultural model appears relatively clear: the social tango of the traditional milongas of Buenos Aires serves as the crucial reference point. The Western teaching system has produced a different tango. From this follows the search for learning conditions intended to produce a more adaptive, social tango again.
Krashen, Paxton, somatics, conditional learning, and other theoretical approaches then fit remarkably well into this picture.
This does not mean that these theories are wrong, nor that Tabaczynsky consciously bends them to fit his argument. But for me, a methodological question arises about the direction of the reasoning:
Do the theories examined actually lead to his cultural model? Or do they mainly provide retrospective justification for an already existing idea of what tango ought to be?
For precisely this reason, a practical examination of his model would be so interesting.
There is also another impression: At times, counterarguments seem not to be treated as legitimate alternative perspectives, but as expressions of an already defined opposing camp.
In a book that places such strong emphasis on context-dependence, adaptability, and conditional learning, I find this striking.
A theory that criticizes absolute solutions should perhaps be especially cautious about absolutism in its own conclusions.
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If Buenos Aires Is the Ideal, Then Please the Whole Buenos Aires
Perhaps my objection can be summarized most simply at this point.
If the traditional milonga of Buenos Aires is to serve as the central reference model, then the entire cultural systemshould be considered, not only those parts that fit one’s theory.
That includes the remarkable somatic adaptability of many dancers and the importance of the close embrace.
But it also includes a shared movement repertoire, observation and imitation, aesthetic ideas, social acceptance and exclusion, partner choice, unspoken norms, and a substantial amount of prior cultural exposure.
The milonga is therefore not a place where conventions disappear.
It is a place where conventions arise and are communicated in different ways.
For me, this also makes the opposition between teaching and “natural” learning questionable.
Perhaps the more important question is which forms of influence keep learning open and which ones narrow it.
The Diagnosis Convinces Me More Than the Therapy
After reading Somatic Milonguero, I am therefore left with a contradictory conclusion.
I consider many of Tabaczynsky’s diagnoses extremely important. Too much movement material can hinder learning. Figures can create the illusion of competence. External forms are easily confused with the processes from which they emerged. Music, the social environment, and cultural context are often underestimated in European tango teaching. Students need more time to discover things for themselves. Teachers should provide fewer ready-made answers.
I can follow all of that to a large extent.
But for me, these observations do not lead to the conclusion that teaching should largely disappear.
The fact that poor teaching can hinder self-organization does not mean that good guidance does the same. The fact that people can learn tango without formal teaching does not mean that perceptual guidance, feedback, and help in diagnosing errors have no value. The fact that a crowded milonga can challenge an experienced dancer creatively does not mean that it automatically provides a beginner with the alternatives needed for such creativity. And the fact that people within an established tango culture may already learn a great deal before their first dance does not mean that this learning culture can simply be transplanted at will to another place.
The alternative to poor teaching is therefore not necessarily less teaching.
It can equally be a different kind of teaching.
Teaching that provides less material and generates more questions. That does not merely correct mistakes, but makes them understandable. That does not bind students to ready-made solutions, but helps them perceive differences. That does not teach the existing cultural movement repertoire as a fixed vocabulary, but as material that must constantly be adapted to partner, music, and situation. That does not replace the milonga, but prepares people to learn independently once they are there.
Perhaps the original question therefore needs to be asked differently.
Not:
Do we need tango teaching at all?
But:
What kind of tango teaching enables people to need it less and less over time?
I do not have a definitive answer.
But that is precisely why I find this question more interesting than any rigid answer to it.