The formula for good tango

Is technique important in tango? Yes. If you want to enjoy any activity, then developing the appropriate skills and improving yourself in it will bring you joy. The technique will give you the comfort of movements, make them more free. Your dance will become richer, more complex, will help you climb a step higher in the hierarchy of partners and partners. You will be able to enjoy the dance more fully and deeply. However, the formula “good technique = good tango” does not work. More precisely, not completely.

I very often hear partners say something like this about partners (and vice versa, so you can simply replace “she” with “he” in the quote): “I like to dance with her. She may even be a very average dancer, but she has … ”And then follows a quality that does not always have anything to do with technique: hug, contact, musicality, energy, passion. Quality, the totality of which would be more correctly called the “human factor”. And in my opinion, the correct dance formula sounds like this: “technique + human factor = good tango.”

What do I understand by human factor? First of all, attitude towards yourself. The way or how you see yourself, feel and present to the world. How much you like or dislike yourself, how much you love or despise yourself. The way you feel about your dance, your technique, the way you look, your femininity or masculinity, your posture, your skills, and so on. The human factor is your ability to love yourself and the light that love shines on you from within.

In dance, you can always see what a person really is. And to show yourself without hiding anything, you need courage. As one flamenco teacher wrote, “You can’t learn to move beautifully if deep down you are convinced that you are ugly.” No teacher will teach you how to tango if you don’t love your body. And even if you do fifty correct ochos in a row, it is unlikely to help you. And if you learn to admire your body, it will help.

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• Why do we dance

The second important component is the attitude towards others. But it also depends on your attitude towards yourself. Love breeds love. Specifically in tango, this means: are you able to hug another person and be with him until the end of the dance? Are you able to feel his body and feel his musicality? Do you easily forgive others for not meeting your expectations? Do you use a partner or partner solely for your own pleasure? After all, the difference between “dancing” and “dancing together” is the same as between “having sex” and “making love.”

There is another very important point in the “human factor”: your connection with the dance as such. This connection is born through music. The essence of dance is not to perform certain movements. The essence of dance is to express musical images with your whole being. As Eric Franklin, dancer and teacher of classical and contemporary dance, writes, “The most important technique in dance is to love it.” There are people who are able to express music with movement, and further training in technique helps them develop this ability. But for many, this ability is absent or very poorly developed, so the most difficult task of a tango teacher is not to teach you the right movement, but to teach you to DANCE.

Is there any pleasure in tango without technique? Yes, as much as you like! If you are an advanced dancer or a dancer, it already means that you somehow got a lot of pleasure as a beginner – otherwise you simply would not have stayed in tango. Is it necessary to study technology? Let’s put it this way: no one has yet suffered from its excess, but I meet people suffering from its lack every day. But a really good teacher helps not only to master the technique, he also teaches what constitutes the very human factor.

One of my very old friends once told me: “You know, I remember well our acquaintance many years ago. You sat, such a pretty, brand new girl, and looked fascinated at the cool dancers. And I was one of them, I was cool, I had been dancing for so long – two years, no joke! – that I started to forget what, in fact, is so good in tango … I invited you. You were just a beginner, not only didn’t know how to do ocho, but you didn’t even have a clue what it was. But while dancing with you, I suddenly realized what I was always looking for in tango for myself. There was so much dance in you, such fullness of it, such unconditional return … I remember that that evening I left the dance floor and thought: henceforth I want all this to be with me – always.