[Tango-L] teaching technique vs. choreography

[Jay Rabe]

I agree that technique (how to walk/step, posture, balance, how to lead, how to follow) is the most important thing to teach. But, some comments:

1. Learning technique is a life-long process. There are dozens if not hundreds of individual "technique principles." It's not something you learn once and then you're done. You may quickly learn some key points, but refinement and fine-tuning continues for years/decades.
2. "Pure" technique is pretty boring, and hardly qualifies as "dancing." Beginning students are anxious to start dancing.
3. Simple steps can be executed with pretty sloppy technique. More complicated steps/patterns require more refined, more precise technique.

So you teach the technique that is necessary for whatever steps you're teaching.
If you've got absolute beginners, you start with posture, and the basics of how to step/walk. Then you teach the embrace and rudimentary lead and follow for walking. Then you teach them the first "pattern" - simple walking and pausing in LOD in open embrace. But now at least they're dancing. If they have trouble, you refine wherever they're deficient, whether posture, embrace, or lead/follow technique.

Then if you want to teach them turns, you refine the technique of leading, by teaching how to turn the torso/chest necessary to make the turn happen. If you want to teach close embrace, you refine the posture/body-mechanics technique of having intention forward, weight on balls of feet, and body held straight without tipping or bending.

And so it goes. When you want to teach another step - ochos, check-steps, the cross, whatever - you refine the basic technique with the subtleties that are necessary for the new step/pattern.

I guess the point I'm trying to make is that you can't effectively teach JUST technique without boring and losing all but the most die-hard students. You have to embed the technique instruction into a dancing context of some step or pattern.

If you try to teach algebra as nothing but x's and y's, it gets pretty dry. A student is likely to ask what good is all this. If you show them how to calculate whether the 47oz package is cheaper than the 28oz package that's on sale, then it's got context. So if you teach technique in the context of a step, then it's got relevance and the student can immediately see that, hey, if I use the right technique, viola, the step works.

          J
     TangoMoments.com

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