Learning Without Lessons?
A Practical Test of the Learning Model in Tom Tabaczynski’s Somatic Milonguero
Tabaczynski’s learning model has considerable appeal: a few basic movements, plenty of observation, comprehensible input, personal exploration, different partners, and finally learning in the real environment of the milonga. On paper, this produces a plausible learning path.
It becomes more interesting, however, when we try to work through this path with two actual beginners:
1. A Few Simple Movements as a Starting Point
Yes. You do not need a large repertoire of figures in order to start dancing tango.
But: “few” does not automatically mean “easy”. Even a small number of movements first have to be physically understood, remembered, and made available within the couple. Posture, weight, partner, music, and space all compete for attention at the same time. A brief introduction therefore does not yet provide a stable foundation.
Too little repetition threatens stability; too much repetition, according to Tabaczynski’s own logic, risks turning the movement into a trained pattern. The practical question remains: When are these few basic movements stable enough for the learner to actually begin exploring with them?
2. A Silent Period: First Absorb, Then Produce
Yes. Listening to tango music, observing dancers, and becoming familiar with the social world of the milonga before dancing much oneself can make a great deal of sense.
But: such a phase does not organize itself. Where does it take place? How long does it last? Who takes beginners along, invites them to a table, explains the social conventions, and helps them distinguish what they are actually looking at?
The organizer, too, provides space and infrastructure. Beginners would presumably pay admission, buy drinks, travel to the event, and occupy seats. At some point a rather mundane question arises: How many adults will go to a milonga week after week, pay for the evening, and initially spend much of their time simply watching?
It is certainly possible. A beginner could be introduced to a table of experienced dancers, observe the ronda, listen to the music, ask questions, and gradually become familiar with the social environment. But this already requires a community willing to organize and support such an introduction.
A silent period does not organize itself.
3. Simplified, Comprehensible Input
Yes. Dancing with a good, experienced partner can allow a beginner to experience things physically that are difficult to explain in words. Tabaczynski even allows a role here for teachers or experienced dancers: they can simplify their own dancing so that it corresponds to the learner’s current level.
But: who are these people?
Not every experienced dancer is a good learning partner. Different dancers also have very different ideas about what is important or correct. One may emphasize posture, another axis, another musicality, another the embrace. What one experienced dancer encourages may be corrected by the next.
And once something does not work, these dancers are unlikely to remain silent. They will explain, demonstrate, modify the embrace, or give small suggestions: wait a little longer, make the step smaller, stay here, do not move before your partner has arrived.
At that point, teaching is already taking place.
It may be cognitive or somatic, verbal or physical, competent or confused, intrusive or helpful. But learning within a community does not become instruction-free merely because nobody is formally called a teacher.
There is also the question of resources. At first it may be quite easy to find experienced dancers willing to spend time with newcomers. But for how long? Weeks? Months? With how many beginners? People normally go to a milonga because they also want to dance with the partners of their choice.
Simplified input requires competent people who are willing to provide it reliably over time.
4. Developing One’s Own Movement Instead of Imitating
Yes. Improvisation cannot simply consist of accumulating more and more prefabricated figures. Tabaczynski therefore wants learners, after acquiring a few basic movements, to begin generating their own adaptive solutions.
But: solutions to what?
Exploration requires a problem, an intention, or at least a perceptible difference. Without some kind of task, a beginner may produce movement, but there is no reason to assume that this will automatically lead to differentiated tango improvisation. The learner may just as easily return again and again to the few solutions that already feel safe.
In tango, at least three dimensions have to be coordinated continuously: music, partner, and space.
Music is certainly present in Tabaczynski’s model, but as a distinct learning problem it remains comparatively underdeveloped. Music imposes a temporal structure on movement. The dancer has to decide not only where to move, but when: when to start, stop, accelerate, delay, or remain still.
At the same time, the partner and the available space may suggest something entirely different. The music may invite movement while the floor requires waiting. There may be plenty of space just as the music suggests a pause. The leader may have a musical intention while the partner’s movement makes the intended solution impossible.
Tango arises from continuously negotiating these demands.
And this is precisely where a concrete task can help without prescribing the solution. A learner could, for example, explore several ways of responding to the same musical phrase, solve the same spatial situation in three different ways, or deliberately avoid the solution that has become habitual.
You can define a task without defining its solution.
There is also reason to ask whether Tabaczynski transfers some assumptions from Contact Improvisation into tango. He himself describes his Contact Improvisation skills as crucial in helping him move beyond his earlier tango training. In Contact Improvisation, movement can emerge very strongly from contact, weight, gravity, partner response, and the immediate spatial situation. Much of the learning path he describes transfers extremely well to that form of improvisation.
Tango, however, contains an additional external structure: its music.
A crowded floor creates spatial problems. Music creates temporal and expressive problems. Tango emerges when the couple solves both at the same time.
5. Exploration Through Interaction and Disturbance
Yes. This is one of the strongest aspects of Tabaczynski’s model. A crowded floor prevents a once-successful solution from simply being repeated unchanged. A path closes, another couple stops, the available space shrinks, and a planned movement has to be shortened, interrupted, redirected, or abandoned.
The environment therefore continuously generates new tasks without a teacher having to invent them.
But: a disturbance forces a reaction; it does not automatically produce a good reaction.
A dancer can respond calmly, pause, redirect, and discover an elegant solution. The same dancer can also react hastily, pull the partner off balance, or establish a poor emergency strategy that later becomes habitual.
The disturbance produces adaptation, but not necessarily good adaptation.
At this point another aspect becomes important. A large part of the movement vocabulary we now associate with tango can be understood as the result of earlier improvisations. Movements may have emerged from spatial constraints, unexpected partner reactions, misunderstandings, or spontaneous solutions. If such a solution proved useful or aesthetically interesting, it could be repeated, refined, and eventually become part of the cultural repertoire.
The problem begins when later generations learn only the visible result. What was once a meaningful response to a particular situation becomes a “step” to be reproduced without understanding why it once made sense.
This is precisely where teaching can take a completely different approach.
Instead of beginning with the finished figure, one can reconstruct the situation from which it becomes meaningful: a direction is blocked, the partner is in a particular position, continuation along the original path is impossible. What possibilities are now available?
The sequence then becomes:
Situation → problem → possible solution → variation.
The learner does not merely learn how the movement looks, but why it makes sense in this situation.
Why should every beginner have to rediscover every useful solution that previous generations have already found?
The wheel does not have to be invented twice. What matters is understanding why it is round and when it is useful.
Teaching, understood in this way, is not the transmission of finished movement patterns. It is the transmission of previously acquired experience within its original context.
The teacher does not merely show the solution. The teacher reconstructs the problem from which the solution emerged.
6. Integration into the Tango Community
Yes. Tango is a social culture. Music, social conventions, different partners, aesthetic expectations, and real experience cannot be reproduced completely in an isolated classroom.
The community supplies something lessons alone cannot: a large variety of bodies, movement habits, unexpected situations, and social feedback.
But: the community is neither a neutral learning environment nor automatically a competent teacher.
A large proportion of dancers may move around a crowded floor without disturbing anyone, yet this does not necessarily mean that their dancing is genuinely context-driven. A memorized repertoire can also be reduced, adjusted, and managed skillfully enough to function on a crowded floor.
One dancer may be highly adaptive. Another may navigate well while largely reproducing habitual patterns. Another may have a pleasant embrace but little musical differentiation. For a beginner these distinctions are extremely difficult to recognize.
The beginner sees that something works. The beginner does not necessarily see why it works.
The community also teaches through imitation. Beginners observe experienced dancers, adopt ways of moving, receive advice, notice what is admired, and learn what is socially accepted or rejected.
Imitation does not disappear when the teacher disappears.
And there is another difficulty. The community often transmits the visible product of earlier improvisation without transmitting the situation from which it arose. In that sense, informal cultural learning can reproduce exactly the problem Tabaczynski criticizes in conventional teaching: learners copy the result while losing the process that gave the result its meaning.
A good teacher can sometimes make this invisible relationship visible again by asking: What was the situation? What problem did this movement solve? Why does it work here? What alternatives would have been possible?
In this sense, well-designed teaching may actually be more context-oriented than simple imitation within the community.
The community remains indispensable as a place of real experience. But reality alone provides no guarantee of learning quality.
The community provides reality, but it does not provide a guarantee of quality.
And:
The milonga shows beginners results. It does not necessarily explain the conditions from which those results emerged.
7. The Milonga as the Primary Learning Environment
Yes. Nowhere else do music, partner, social conventions, and unpredictable spatial conditions come together so completely. The milonga is therefore the place where adaptive dancing ultimately has to prove itself.
But: the milonga is also not a protected experimental environment.
When a beginner experiments and fails there, the consequences do not affect only the learner. Poor timing may disturb the partner’s balance, an awkward change of direction may obstruct another couple, and an oversized movement may cause a collision.
This applies particularly to beginner leaders. They already require a minimum level of navigation, distance management, stopping, changing direction, and awareness of the ronda before they can learn safely on a crowded floor.
This creates a paradox:
The milonga partly requires the very adaptability that it is supposed to produce.
One obvious solution would be an intermediate learning environment: a practica with several couples, deliberately limited space, changing partners, unexpected stops, different music, and gradually increasing density. Conditions could be made increasingly representative of the milonga without immediately exposing beginners to its full complexity.
But that would once again be a deliberately designed pedagogical environment.
The fact that the milonga provides certain learning conditions particularly well does not prove that these conditions can only be produced there.
The milonga is the place where adaptability has to prove itself. It does not necessarily follow that it is the best place for beginners to acquire that adaptability in the first place.
The context provides feedback about whether something worked: the path was open or blocked, the couple remained balanced or did not, a collision occurred or did not. But the context does not necessarily explain why something worked or why another solution might have been better.
The context presents a problem. It does not automatically contain the good solution.
And finally…,
…one very practical question remains: Who organizes this entire process? Who makes sure that beginners meet the right people, gain suitable experiences, and are not simply left to their own devices? If nobody takes on this role, the learning process is largely left to chance. But if someone does take it on, then teaching may not have disappeared at all — it has simply taken on a different form.
Final Thoughts
Tango Milonguero Between Tradition and Export Culture
Among many younger dance couples in Buenos Aires, one often notices a high level of dedication to training. At the same time, a distinct subculture has developed there that is strongly influenced by competitions, stage performance, and in particular the Tango Mundial. This form of tango is often technically highly refined and internationally very visible. As a result, it also has a considerable influence on the image of tango that is exported today to Europe, North America, and Asia. I sometimes call it, somewhat pointedly, “tango for export.”
This aesthetic is not necessarily my own model. But it is a real part of contemporary tango culture in Buenos Aires and therefore cannot simply be treated as a Western foreign body that has nothing to do with Argentine development.
That raises an interesting question: What chance does the Tango Milonguero that Tabaczynski takes as the starting point of his model actually have under these conditions?
The challenge today is no longer simply to defend a supposedly “original” tango against Western figure-based teaching. The competition also comes from within Buenos Aires itself: from highly trained younger couples, competition aesthetics, stage tango, the international teaching market, and the images circulated worldwide through festivals, videos, and social media.
This makes it increasingly difficult to present Tango Milonguero as the self-evidently “more original” tango, or even to identify it clearly as such. Today it is better understood as one line of tradition within a plural tango culture rather than as its uncontested norm.
This is important for the critique of Tabaczynski’s model. If he describes a particular milonga culture as the natural learning environment, one has to ask: Which Buenos Aires exactly? From which period, which milongas, and which social milieu?
My question to Tom:
The cultural biotope that you want to preserve or transfer has itself long been competing with other forms of tango within Buenos Aires.
Anyone who invokes “Buenos Aires” as a learning model today has to say more precisely which Buenos Aires they mean. Perhaps exactly the one that emerged from your own experience as a visitor?
Response to your critique above: https://www.unpluggedtango.com/p/tango-teachers-critique-of-somatic
Tom,
ich glaube, wir müssen die einzelnen Einwände gar nicht mehr Punkt für Punkt durchgehen.
Der entscheidende Grundsatz liegt für mich inzwischen woanders:
Je komplexer ein alternatives soziales Modell wird, desto schwieriger wird seine praktische Umsetzung. Solche Systeme scheitern oft nicht an der Idee, sondern an Organisation, Ökonomie, menschlichen Eitelkeiten, Gewohnheiten, lokalen Bedingungen und daran, dass freiwillige Mitwirkung nie dauerhaft planbar ist.
Je mehr Menschen beteiligt sind, desto stärker verändert sich ein Modell. In jeder Stadt entstehen andere Prioritäten, andere Regeln, andere Gewohnheiten und schließlich andere Formen. Dann stellt sich zwangsläufig die Frage: Wer entscheidet eigentlich noch, was dem ursprünglichen Modell entspricht?
Ohne Kontrolle zerfällt das System in lokale Varianten. Mit Kontrolle braucht man Standards, Autoritäten und letztlich wieder ein System, das genau dem ähnelt, was Du am bestehenden Tango kritisierst.
Für mich ist das der zentrale Widerspruch:
Ein freiheitliches Tangomodell kann seine Reinheit nicht erzwingen, ohne seine Freiheit zu verlieren.
Deshalb halte ich weitere Detaildiskussionen für wenig sinnvoll. Nicht die Diagnose trennt uns, sondern die praktische Umsetzbarkeit der Therapie.
Vielleicht solltest Du Dir noch einmal Animal Farm ansehen – oder besser noch Orwells Buch lesen. Es geht dort nicht darum, eine gute Idee zu verurteilen, sondern darum, was menschliche Unzulänglichkeiten, Machtinteressen und Eitelkeiten aus einer guten Idee machen können. Vielleicht bin ich durch meine Erfahrungen inzwischen zu pessimistisch geworden. Deshalb brauchen wir Idealisten wie Dich – aber eben auch ein gesundes Misstrauen gegenüber jeder Idee, die zu viel Disziplin und Selbstlosigkeit von Menschen voraussetzt.
PS: Allerdings lässt mich Deine aggressive Antwort daran zweifeln, ob Du wirklich nur ein Idealist bist oder eher die Neigung hast, Dich mit Deiner Ideologie zu einem „Tango-Stalinisten“ zu wandeln.
You offered to review my book. You wrote a critique of it. But you’ve shown yourself to be a bad actor. The book is selling at USD48, and that means that people find it interesting. The problem with you is that you have a blog on which you spread misinformation and do hatchet jobs on people’s books. I accepted that some of your points were valid and addressed in my other book, but like a bad loser you run with your tail between your legs. My approach is brutally simple, and the only reason you people are in business is bc of the Peronist governments that have been funding and supporting your astroturf stuff. It’s actually quite simple.
You keep replacing arguments with insults, motives and conspiracy-like claims. That is exactly why I ended the discussion.
However, your aggressive response makes me wonder whether you really are just an idealist, or whether you have a tendency to turn your ideology into a kind of “Tango Stalinism.”
Thanks, Klaus, for so expertly letting the air out of Mr T.’s balloon here.
It reminds me of an old joke about a sign on a hand dryer: “Please press button for a speech by [insert appropriate politician’s name].”
Thank you, Yokoito, for the positive feedback. Whether I really managed to “let the air out of the balloon” is for others to judge. In any case, the discussion was not easy; arguing against such confidently asserted academic authority takes quite a bit of energy.
For me, any theory ultimately has to be measured against practice. The real challenge in writing my review was therefore to examine more closely the research Tom Tabaczynski says led him to his conclusions, and especially the conclusions he draws from it. The longer I looked at it, the clearer it became to me that this is where the main weakness lies: not necessarily in every individual observation, but in the question of whether his research really supports such far-reaching conclusions.
Yes, Klaus, that is the point. Academic sound without academic thinking, in the hope that people can be impressed that way. A hypothesis or theory needs data points to become meaningful. I see none.
A personal assessment:
Tabaczynski may be mistaking his own successful learning biography for a general theory of learning.
Tabaczynski already brought an unusually rich set of prior experiences to learning tango: somatics through Alexander/Feldenkrais, Contact Improvisation as experience with improvised partner and group movement, as well as theoretical knowledge from language learning. If someone with exactly these prerequisites discovers on a crowded milonga in Buenos Aires that much of what he learned in tango classes does not work there, it is only natural that he draws on abilities he already possesses: body awareness, adaptability, improvisation, physical closeness, spatial responsiveness, and a willingness not to treat movement as a fixed product.
That may have worked extremely well for him personally. But this is precisely where a possible fallacy arises: a successful individual learning biography does not necessarily amount to a generally successful learning model.
Another dancer might have completely different prerequisites and would therefore explain his or her development differently. Someone with a strong musical background might see the music as the decisive driving force in the learning process. Someone with many years of experience in partner dancing might emphasize partner organisation and movement structure. Another dancer may already have acquired a broad repertoire of movement possibilities through good teaching and regard precisely that as the basis for later being able to respond flexibly on the milonga floor.
There is therefore a risk that Tabaczynski gives particular weight to exactly those learning factors that proved successful in his own biography. This is, in fact, a common pattern among teachers and learning theorists: “My teacher neglected something that later helped me enormously, so I will make exactly that the centre of my own method.” This can lead to a very good teaching idea. But it does not prove that the same factor has the same importance for other learners.
It is particularly interesting that Tom himself describes his earlier tango lessons as largely restrictive. But even if he later discarded or transformed many of those patterns, that does not automatically mean they were irrelevant to his learning process. Perhaps those earlier experiences initially provided him with certain tango-specific forms, spatial concepts, or movement references that he was later able to reorganise under the conditions of the milonga.
In that case, his development would not be:
Teaching → dead end → Somatics/CI → real tango
but rather:
Teaching + existing tango material + Somatics/CI + real milonga experience → reorganisation of already existing material.
That would be a substantially different explanation.
And this is exactly why I would be cautious about the conclusion that his somatic and improvisational prior experience explains the decisive learning process. It may well have been an important factor. But without comparison with other learning biographies, it is difficult to determine how much of the result actually came from Somatics, Contact Improvisation, earlier tango instruction, observation, partners, music, or simply years of practice.