[Tango-L] Community Expansion Brainstorming

[Tango Tango]

In most tango communities outside of Argentina, great focus is often placed
on growing the community. This goal seems to be one of universal appeal and
as such, becomes something that occupies both the resources and attention of
the community.

However, you can grow a community on two ways: You can grow it larger or you
can grow it into a better community with higher communal skill. Which one
should it be?
As I have an occupation that involves a great deal of international travel,
I have been able to visit tango communities all over Europe, US and in the
Asia Pacific. Among all these, the answer has always been to grow the number
of attendees at local practicas and milongas. Little or no emphasis is
placed on increasing the quality of the tango experience within the
community.

Now, when I use the term 'quality' (which of course is subjective), I mean
an experience more like the one you will have at a milonga in Buenos Aires.
When we speak about quality of a community, the gauge should be: How does
this event compare to an event I could attend in Buenos Aires? Numerous
factors go into this equation of quality: The venue, the layout of the floor
and tables, the lighting, the DJ (meaning the material, how it is played,
how the tandas are structured, type and length of cortina), line of dance,
conduct of dancers, adherence to tango protocol, etc. The number of people
attending and the dance skill level are just two small parts of the picture.
Communities in the US seem to focus entirely on increasing the number of
attendees at events while just paying lip service to the other elements.

It is a great and admirable goal to create a large community where people
can dance with each other, but if a community wants to drape itself with the
term 'Argentine Tango', then at the very least one should expect that
efforts are made to make the dance experience in that community as close as
possible to the one you would have in Buenos Aires. If this is not the goal,
then why call it 'Argentine'? Convenient interpretations of this word in
order to make it 'fit' the local circumstances is, -quite honestly,
disrespectful to the originators of this wonderful dance. If embracing the
whole of tango, -and not just the dance steps, is somehow not deemed
necessary, then the practitioners of this should call it 'American Tango' or
something altogether different. Unfortunately, it is much easier to steal
legitimacy for whatever it is that you are doing by borrowing established
terminology and hoping that the people you seek to impress do not know the
difference.

The paragraph above may seem a bit off the subject, but it ties into the
following: Before the decision as to how to best grow the community is
taken, you first have to ask yourself; "What KIND of community do we want
this to be?" Do we want to gather as many people as possible in one spot on
a Friday night or do we accept the responsibility that comes with calling
ourselves Argentine Tango dancers and work to recreate a bit of Buenos Aires
right here in our own back yard? The latter does not seem to be the popular
option. As a matter of fact, when engaging in proper tango protocol in
Denver, one will most likely hear: "Oh, don't worry about it! You're not in
Buenos Aires".

Comments such as this point to a mentality where quantity, not quality is
valued. This behavior is fueled by people who are uninitiated in tango, but
nevertheless are billing themselves as teachers of Argentine Tango. The
teachers in a community are the foremost proponent of habits, -good or bad.
If teachers churn out large amounts of poorly educated students, does this
serve the community? If a teacher is afraid of going to Buenos Aires because
he thinks the floor is too crowded, what does this say about that teacher?
If a teacher doesn't want to go to Buenos Aires because she says she can't
get any dances, what does this say about that teacher? Is a 'teacher' who
has never even been to a Buenos Aires milonga qualified to teach Argentine
Tango? If we get more of these 'teachers' who in turn produces more people
that dance like them, we will surely have a larger community, but do we have
a better community? One could be tempted to say we would then have a
'diverse' body of people, but diversity is not really what we seek when we
join a community that specializes in one single dance form from a very
narrowly-defined geographical region.

When looking at what motivates students, teachers and promoters in the US
today, it becomes clear that unless special attention is given to growing
BETTER communities, then this is as good as tango will ever be in the US.
The larger a community grows, the less motivated people will be to seek out
the roots and foundation of what it is they are dancing. (After all, with a
large group, doing something incorrectly becomes easily justifiable by the
fact that 'everybody else does it'). Less people will go to Buenos Aires to
see how Argentine Tango is danced, and the result is that local communities
develop entire sub-genres of the dance. -American Tango. This new dance will
naturally draw heavily from the culture in which is was formed as as such
will appeal to more of the local population. Voila! -We now have a large
community.

Growing a large dance community is easy: Give the dancers what they want.
Give them something that is easy to learn but is presented as something
spectacular and extraordinary. Also, low cover charge, cheap drinks and
popular music are time-tested methods of drawing large crowds. Creating a
good Argentine Tango community on the other hand, is far more complicated.
It must fall upon the few knowledgeable teachers to not only teach steps and
combinations, but to initiate the student into the world of tango.
Non-profit organizations can make efforts to promote events that are as
authentic as possible and support teachers that make an effort to teach in
that same spirit.

Growing large, or growing better? A community must first grow into the best
community it can be before the focus shifts to becoming the largest it can
be. After all, who wants to super-size an airline meal?

Neil




On 11/28/06, Jacob Eggers <eggers at brandeis.edu> wrote:
>
> I have observed that musicians, people who migrated from other dance
> forms,
> and scientific types are all disproportionately represented in the US
> tango
> scene. So, focusing recruiting efforts on people from those areas seems
> like
> the most successful method to retain new tango dancers. Targeting each of
> these groups has special added benefits:
>
> Dancers already have many skills that'll transfer to tango, and they also
> might start recruiting their friends and students if they become tango
> addicts like the rest of us.
> Musicians might be inspired to start playing tango music, and if they also
> dance tango they might even start playing tango music that's danceable.
> Scientific types--well, I actually don't know of any benefit for
> recruiting
> them except maybe that they're generally more affluent and might inject
> some
> extra money into the tango community.
>
> One way to do recruit these people would be to give out free lesson
> coupons
> to people from those three groups. Drop the coupons off at the local salsa
> club, give them to street musicians, leave them in music stores, leave
> them
> at universities.... Since it would be extra effort to control the
> distribution of those coupons, I would suggest that passing coupons off to
> others is allowed. That doesn't seem like much of a risk since musicians
> are
> generally friends with musicians, dancers with dancers, ...
>
> These are just thoughts. I haven't tried any of them, but I would be
> curious
> if anyone has done something similar, or would be willing to do an
> experiment. Mainly, I'd just like to start a general discussion on tango
> marketing concepts.
>
> chau,
> j
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