[Tango-L] why is it always the guy who's doing the 'teaching' ?

[Tony Rathburn]

no one teaches you the 'right' way to dance tango... at best, they teach you how 
they dance...  or, how they would like someone to dance with them...


----- Original Message ----
From: Balazs Gyenis <gyepi at hps.elte.hu>
To: TANGO-L <tango-l at mit.edu>
Sent: Tue, January 11, 2011 12:54:26 PM
Subject: Re: [Tango-L] why is it always the guy who's doing the 'teaching' ?

>  but why is it always the guy on the dance floor who is doing the 'teaching'?

  As a leader who thinks he learned the most from female tango
teachers I also often wander why it is so frequent that even when they
are clearly much more knowledgeable and can express their thoughts
much more clearly than their partners, they still relegate most of the
teaching to them. I definitely think this should happen way less
frequently than it does, and that machismo should not play any role in
splitting up the task of teaching.

  There is one reason though why it's often important to get the
leader's teaching perspective, which has to do with the extent to
which the style of the dance is determined by the leader. When I
started to learn tango I was often quite frustrated with how one
teacher would insist on a point of technique which then later would be
directly contradicted by the next one. It took me an entire year (and
a remark by Robert Hauk) until I realized that it's not that some of
these teachers are right and others are wrong, but that there are many
different styles of tango which have many different valid technical
advices necessary to make the dance comfortable. And so in order to
understand why a certain teacher insists that things should be done in
this or that way you need to first carefully watch how they dance. If
you want to dance the way they do, then you should pay more attention
to their technical advice than if you don't. (We can of course learn
something from everyone, but we need to be conscious of how their
advice is relative to the way they dance.) And so this is the point
where it's more difficult (for me) to evaluate technical advices given
by teachers who I don't see leading.. their feedback about how
comfortable the dance is is definitely more important, but that mainly
comes through privates, and not during regular classes.
  Best,

         Gy.B.


-- 
Balazs Gyenis
Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Pittsburgh
1017 Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, PA 15260, USA
http://www.pitt.edu/~gyepi
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