[Tango-L] Milonga 101 -- conversation between dances

[Victor Bennetts]

Teach always in couples? That is partly true in my view. If I ever go to a class and it starts with the teacher telling all the women to go to one side of the room and all the men on the other (sound familiar?), my heart sinks. At that point I am getting ready to walk out. If they start counting out from one to eight then I am changing my shoes and heading for the door :-). But there is a place for individual work. If a class starts with the teacher leading everyone in a walking exercise then I start grinning. If the exercise gets more complex with pivots and embellishments added in and they do it more than for a token couple of minutes I start to really feel like a dancer, warmed up and ready for my partner.

OK, so combinations are a necessary evil, because we all need examples to learn from, but I agree with Krasimir that if you teach the combination without correcting basic technique you are doing people a major disservice. For instance, it is interesting how if you see people doing combinations in class out of time to the music you will also find their social dancing is all disconnected from the music. We could call this 'Victor's Law', which has a nice ring to it :-), but I have to admit I got it from my first teacher, who thinks pretty deeply about these sorts of things.

Victor Bennetts

>Krasimir Stoyanov>In theory, yes. In reality, no.
>Most people do not understand they do things that are disastrous both
aesthetically and technically. One of the great features in this dance (and
>maybe some others) is that they coincide - or even, that aesthetics comes
>from the correct technique. Not the other way around. In other words, form
>follows function. So when people try to learn a combination, they try to
>repeat the form, and have no idea how it is ticking, what the function (the
>technique) is. Even if they suspect something is not correct, they'll need
>many years to discover it themselves. It is the job of a qualified teacher
>to explain where do the problems come from. And in 99% of the cases, it is
>from improper walking, pivot and posture technique (leading and/or
following). I do not separate these basic things. You cannot have correct
>posture for more than a short second, if the walking is incorrect, because
>the next bad step will spoil the posture. And the other way, you can't walk
>properly, if you use bad posture. Same with the pivot. So these things are
>inseparable, and this is how I teach them. ALWAYS in couples, NEVER
individually.

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