Chris, UK wrote:

"one private lesson is worth is worth is more like minus five group classes hereabouts, since the value of the average group class is negative."

Chis has told us previously that he's attended group classes with more than 60 different teachers, presumably some of them more than once. If what he says is true, he must have spent a fortune on private lessons just to get back to beginner level.

Nobody would seriously disagree that private lessons are far more valuable than group classes when learning to dance. However, not everyone can afford the US$50 to US$150 that private lessons cost. Also, many students prefer the fun and comraderie of learning in a group environment, rather than the more serious one-on-one private lessons.

The fact remains that, in this day and age, hundreds of thousands of dancers around the world have learned Tango from group classes, without ever taking a single private lesson. Without group classes, Tango just wouldn't exist in most communities. But, by far the worst thing any student can do is try to learn any kind of dance without proper instruction; I've seen it many times and the results are often disasterous. One major problem is that people don't like tell their friends that they're dancing badly or that they look awful. The result is they go from bad to worse and no one says anything until, in the end, it becomes an embarrassment to the Tango community resulting in jokes and sniggers. Does that help the student who doesn't take proper instruction? Of course, if you're young, female and pretty this will never happen as there will always be lots of good male dancers prepared to help. But what about the less popular majority? The truth is they just fade away from the Ta
 ngo scene because nobody will dance with them.

And Chris, why did it take more than 60 group classes with different teachers before you finally realised they were totally useless? 

Chris, UK also wrote:

"there's no place for rote-learning and memorisation of movements in salon tango. Tango is improvised - the moves come from the feeling of each moment. Memorised moves degenerate the dancing into choreography."

AJ Azure replied:

"Again I'm not a dancer but, it seems to me that if you consider that in music improvisation can not be done with out a basis of patterns, theory, understanding of the key, etc. I submit you can't improvise, i.e. run till you can crawl, i.e. Learn some moves. There has to be a basis for improvisation in anything."

How absolutely true. AJ may not be a dancer, but he clearly knows a lot more than Chris when it comes to how to learn Tango. Improvising without first spending hundreds or thousands of hours learning and practicing the many movements of Tango? What a load of rubbish. Chris has clearly never attended a class in Buenos Aires where, in a 3-hour class, 2-hours might be spent walking back and forth. Perhaps Chris would tell the teacher to forget about practicing the many facets of the walk and say .... "let's just improvise!". For our American cousins, that's sarcasm, by the way.

Regards to everybody,
Keith