Getting "better" at tango
Over at TangoSpam Deby Novitz is dismayed by certain attitudes she encounters in the tourists she hosts in Buenos Aires.
I still don't get it. Why don't they just enjoy dancing?
Unfortunately, these attitudes poison the tango scene here in the US as well. We're blighted with a lot of people obsessed with quantity: how many master classes, how many private lessons, how many dances a night to how many songs, how many shoes bought, how many years, how many festivals attended. There's an anxious feeling about these people, and they turn out to be no fun to dance with. The oddity is that they go to all the trouble and expense of going to Buenos Aires, and...never...get...it.
Deby points out that dancing tango isn't, for most of us, a job. It's supposed to be a social outing, a relaxed evening with friends, but you wouldn't know by going to so many milongas where people grimly attempt the inappropriate stage show figures they learned at the expensive workshop last weekend.
Meanwhile, the teachers who could really educate us otherwise-- those famous dancers from Argentina -- don't spend much time teaching us to relax and enjoy a night of dancing. It's a chicken-and-egg problem: do we gringos learn choreographed dance moves because that's all these instructors will teach, or do they teach these because this is what we request of them?
