[Tango-L] Four Layers of Tango Learning

[Jake Spatz (TangoDC.com)]

Hi Carol,

Carol Shepherd wrote:
> Some people are very good at learning by watching. While they are watching their sympathetic nervous system is rehearsing the very same move and learning the technique.  Others don't have quite 
> so much of this in their body and they need to "step through" dance moves and positions slowly with a partner and "feel" it kinetically to understand and remember it.
>
> Once again, it's the way we're made. No one can change it.
This is rather more forbidding than my observations and experience 
attest. We can _cultivate_ new ways of learning, perceiving, and so 
forth: we are an adaptable species, even highly so. In fact, some people 
become better dancers, while others become better _students_ of the 
dance and thereby improve more rapidly. (I'm not using "students" here 
to mean "perpetual" or "mere" students... I use it to mean "one who 
continually studies the dance," as an actor-scholar of Shakespeare might 
also be called a "student" of the bard.)
> Good teachers will recognize these basic differences in personal style and aptitude and will teach a couple of different way to slice the bread to make the same sandwich.
>   
Agreed. And yet one can try to help students cultivate an understanding 
unique to tango. I find that when a student suddenly "clicks" (and all 
of us do, at numerous times), it's because they've understood the dance 
in its own terms, rather than by reference to something else (e.g., 
yoga, sports, grammar, bicycles).

In short, to overemphasize where someone starts is for me a little too 
deterministic, and also lacks adventure. (This is also an abstract, 
quasi-philosophical point with me generally.) But it's also just honest, 
at least when I speak for myself, to say that learning the dance 
requires some adapting and growth as an individual.

Perhaps I merely emphasize the other end of the equation, though.

Jake
DC