[Tango-L] Women and Classes

[astrid]

> I personally agree with Igor who says. "...
> It is most important - to be happy. More classes
> will not make you happier"

And sometimes, more classes will make you less happy.

That is partly true but it really depends on the kind of classes you take
and WITH WHO(m) !

You can reasonably say
that you have to get the men moving before the women
can do anything at all $Bc`!&(Bif the leader stands with a
blank expression and his feet planted, there is no
dance to work with.  But the common pattern is to work
with the leaders on the figure or technique under
discussion until they can blunder through it, and then
move on to the next figure, leaving practicing for
time outside of class.  So the follower's experience
is one of being dragged, shoved, and put off balance
until the leaders just start to be able to do a figure
(at which point the follower might be able to work on
technique, expression, etc.) and then the class moves
on to the next thing.

I know exactly what you mean, Marisa, even though I have never encountered a
man who just stands there when he is supposed to practise a step. Sometimes,
a man may ask me:"Do you remember what we are supposed to do?" I almost
never remember anything, as Ezequiel trained me systematically to have my
mind go blank, regarding steps and being led. He ideally prefered if women
did not watch, or at least, did not move while he showed a new step in his
group lessons. So, in that case I always call over the teacher and ask
him/her to show the man what to do one more time.
And yes, I hate it too when the teachers simply move on to the next, even
more complicated move on their agenda, when none of the men have really
understood the lead of the former yet. Talk about cheating yourself thru a
class as teacher ! My boss and me, both working at the same educational
institution, would stand in the back and mutter about the self-declared
tango teacher's lack of a pedagogical concept...

And for this, they pay the same
price as the guys on whom the instructor's attention
is being lavished.

Yes ! So true ! We also pay the same when there are almost no men around and
the teachers and assistents lavish all their attention on the wealthy female
students taking the most private lessons, and ignore those who just dance
and learn, in grupos as well as milongas.
I remember, I once said to the man who ran the practica I attended for
years, after plucking me out of the arms of an advanced dancer to give him a
female clueless beginner, and then making me practise with a male clueless
beginner:"I think, instead of me paying you, you should pay me to come here
!" The teacher said:"Hush", flashed me a smile, appeased and cuddled me and
showered me with his irresistible Argentine charm, remembered my words for
two weeks, and then did the same thing to me again... Nevertheless, I loved
him and his warmnth and his hospitality, even if he had me want to pretend
to strangle him in front of his students at times...; )

I have taken classes where the instructor said we were
going to work on techniques for the women.  In a
surprisingly large proportion of those classes, old
habits re-surfaced, and the instructor was soon
spending more than half their time on the men.

the classes that I have attended with technique for women were always
organised much like a "secret meeting of conspiring sisters", much like
belly dance classes are.  Only the women would meet with the female teacher,
and she would give us all kinds of advice and show us little tricks, that
became our precious little secrets and were never explained to the men. Or
if not that, then at least, like during a group class with our local Juan
Guida and his former teacher, Melina Brufman, Melina took all the women
aside for a while and showed them how to do adornos. Meanwhile, Juan worked
with the men. Or she would get all the "superfluous" women, while he taught
the couples that could be paired up from the number of students, and then
they exchanged the groups of women.
Coppello worked that way too, when he was here. His new partner would work
with the women on technique while they were waiting for their turn to dance
with the men.

 And
many of the men chose to either wander around in a
lackluster way $Bc`!&(Bor simply to ignore the point of
the exercises.

I think, you were in the wrong class.

 The very last regular class I took as
a follower was supposed to be about followers adorning
or otherwise expressing the music.  We did exercises
that were well within the limits of the technical
abilities of the dancers present (people who had
danced for 3-6 years); the leaders were asked to do a
number of simple figures and to pause at specific
points and then wait until they understood the
follower was ready to move on.  The followers were
invited to see what they felt like doing when they
were guaranteed that the leaders were listening to
them and were not about to cut off the little flourish

And you say, these people had been dancing 3-6 years already????
In my experioence, inserting adornos are not something you can really teach
in class. The teacher will teach a combination that has an adorno in it.
Fine, works, as long as all the students agree on practising the same step.
Or the female teacher will teach firuletes as such to the women, and during
which moves to insert them. But the interactive play of the couple, with the
woman taking her time, and the man giving her time til she finishes, I
think, this is a skill you can only acquire by dancing in practicas and
milongas. Dancing when you don't know what the steps are going to be and
finding your moment. With some men, this is very easy, they are simply the
type who accepts having the woman do her thing and contribute to the dance.
It does not wiork with the "authoritarian" type I described before, who
wants to control the woman at all times. There will never be enough time,
unless you use physical power to slow him down and make him stop and wait
for you. But he will probably resent that and look for someone more "fluffy"
next time. .
(Did you know that some veil wearing Arab women think that Western women are
more violently suppressed than they are? At least they can just take off the
veil and be themselves at certain times...)

 He did the requested
figures about a quarter of the time, and filled in the
rest of the time with whatever tough figures he was
trying to work on from his last class.  If he paused,
I missed it.

Maybe he was just trying to dance, instead of walking through the same moves
all the time. No?

 I whipped my foot forward to sandwich one of
his.  He laughed out loud, apparently in delighted
astonishment.  He turned to the teacher, still
laughing, and said, "She grabbed my foot!"  We all
smiled at one another.  And then he said, "How do I
_make_ her do that?"

Men!!!

Gavito was a great one for showing how to stop the man. He told me during a
privada:"The man may not expect this, but if you stop him like this, he
will..." and he drew an invisible zipper across his mouth, looking into my
eyes with a very "significant" look.. As though the man would be so thrilled
with having the woman pressing against and rising against his chest like a
dancing cobra at step #3 (Gavito took the woman's role to show me what he
meant and made me feel it with my body) that he would swallow all his macho
complaints and let himself be seduced by her into stopping to see what other
sexy tricks she had in mind (you go on by doing sexual games on the floor,
expressing your subdued passion and desire with your feet, for lack of
movable hands...) . Unfortunately, I never really got much of a chance to
practise the move he showed me. Maybe I should have learned more about it,
but Gavito's fees for privadas were astronomic, and I could take only 60
minutes. Also, Gavito was short, much smaller in real life than he looked on
stage. It was the time before he announced publicly that he was going to die
soon..

I'm taking classes as a leader now. Why on earth would I pay
every week to be dragged around and ignored?

But why, Marisa, do you keep going to that school of mediocre teachers and
students who don't know how to work with adornos even after 3-6 years?
Once somebody gave me excellent advice when I tried to find a good flamenco
teacher: "Look at his advanced students. If they are looking good, he is a
good teacher. If even the students in the advanced classes look mediocre,
you will never learn much with him. Go find someone else immediately."

I have never thought of taking on leading, in spite of all my exasperation
with teachers, classes, lack of men and the people dancing around me.
Dancing with a woman, or leading a man simply does not give me that High
that I am looking for. Morevover, leading is not usually encouraged much in
women here, unless a woman is asked to "help out" in a very unbalanced class
by becoming an extra man for a while. After all, our teachers are from
Argentina.
If I get all too frustrated with the dancers or the teachers, I simply go
somewhere else for a while. In Tokyo, you can go to one or several places to
dance tango practically every day of the week.

And as for that discussion on whether to take classes or not, in my opinion,
this subject is ridiculous. This is starting to remind me of the fanatic
milonguero fraction putting everyone else down for being inauthentic, and
the "salon" dancers" fighting back by saying, milonguero style people can't
really dance.
Only the completely ignorant would assume that people take EITHER lessons OR
go to milongas, that they EITHER learn OR dance. What nonsense. As though
learning and practising were mutually exclusive. Lessons are not some kind
of lab where you learn grey theory before you venture out into real life.
And milongas are not places for those "privileged" dancers who are
"intelligent" enough *not* to take lessons. Give us all a break, Chris. You
are simply defending the fact that you are not taking any lessons yourself.
So don't ! If you believe in that approach, why don't you just do that,
without asking 1100 people to agree with you, that this is the right way?

Astrid
in her supposedly insufferably direct German self ; )