[Tango-L] Learning through DVDs

[Ricardo Klapwijk]

As a producer of 2 series of tango DVDs I have totally other experience as
.

Since 1997 I produced 2 series of instructional Tango DVDs., and for many
dancers it is a good way to learn. A DVD will never replace a person,
that’s sure, also because the screen is 2 dimensional and our dance 3
dimensional. That is a problem you can solve, the way I did it was to show
it from different angles also filmed from above.
If you like to learn it from the absolutely beginning it not easy with a
DVD, but still I know many, not only Tango-, dancers who learn with DVDs.

There are many advantages to learn with a DVD:
You can learn in your in your pace, you can repeat as often you like, you
can also skip if it’s too slowly for you.
A DVDs is ideal if you visit a course with a teacher to see details and
ways of teaching of another teacher.
A big advantage of DVDs is, that the instructor of the video can guide the
eyes of the user, something you can’t in a lesson, when the teacher
explains something about his feet, the DVD shows you details exactly in
the angle where you can see what you have to see. In the lesson this is
not possible, as a teacher you can only explain yourself.
When you learn with the DVD and you didn’t understand something, you just
repeat it as often as you need it, you “have” it forever. This in some
situation even gives you a better basis as in the lesson.

Ravi Shankar explained in an interview that nowadays students are much
faster learning as when he studied. He explains why.  Now a day’s his
students have i-pods and can listen to recorded music and read written
music. They study with archives. Ravi had no archive, he just had to
listen to his master and listen to his play, to repeat in his classes all
the different rhythms till he got it.
Instructional dance / tango DVDs are the books for dancers, written music
for musicians. I watched the first instructional DVDs of Gloria and
Eduardo in the 90, I learned a lot with watching and trying, although the
modern DVDs are  much better, but I saw a certain perfection and different
ways of walking and steps, musicality and so and so on, very different
from the way my teacher danced. That was very interesting for me, so my
teacher was just one way of to dance tango, and some figures and walks
where much more comfortable how Eduardo danced it, without his VHS videos
I never could study this because Eduardo lived in Buenos Aires and I in
that time in Holland, later I took some lessons with Eduardo, which was
very interesting for totally other details as I learned from his
instructional VHS
.


A DVD cost between 10 and 50 US$, how much cost you a class or a workshop?
What is the benefit of 2 Workshop in your tango life? How many workshops
you visit and you learned a new step, a way of walk, etc, with one DVD of
90 minutes you have such a lot of information. It is always a good
investment, so much information you never get in 2 or 3 workshops which
cost, more or less the same.
A DVD is like a book you read. You can like the book or not, but books
will never replace something you experience, which not means that books
are useless.

The experience shows that a lot of people actually are very happy with
instructional DVD´s.  As I said in the beginning a DVD will never replace
normal teaching, but for many people it is a meaningful way, for a low
price to learn at home.  So I don’t agree that you can’t recommend DVDs in
general.
The instructional / pedagogic / technical quality of dance DVDs is another
chapter.  There are from excellent- to very bad DVDs.
If you make a mistake we show you in our DVDs the most common mistakes, as
already Osvaldo and Mora and also Pepito did in their DVDs, here you lea
rnto be critic to yourself.

If you like to orientate between all dvds I can recommend Stephen Browns
Homepage.
I guess there exist more pages where users of DVDs write about their
experience with instructional DVDs.

kindly regards,
Ricardo "El holandés"

www.tango-argentino.info
www.tango-dvd.net

.info