What Does It Mean to Teach Tango Well?

There is an assumption in tango that I have been thinking about lately: if someone is an excellent dancer, they must also be an excellent teacher.

But I am not sure this is true.

Being able to dance tango beautifully and being able to help another person learn it are two different skills.

And that leads to a surprisingly difficult question:

What does it actually mean to teach tango well?

Start with the student

As teachers, it is easy to start from ourselves: this is how I dance, this is what I believe about tango, this is what I normally teach.

But students come for very different reasons.

A couple visiting Buenos Aires may want a romantic experience together. Someone else may be curious about tango. Another person wants to become a good social dancer. And another may be an experienced ballroom dancer trying to understand what makes tango different.

They can all book the same private lesson, but teaching them in exactly the same way would make very little sense.

So perhaps the first question shouldn't be “What should I teach?”

It should be:

“Who is this person, and what are they hoping to get from tango?”

What does it mean to learn tango?

Knowing tango is not the same as knowing many steps.

Someone can know ochos, giros, sacadas and boleos and still not be someone others particularly enjoy dancing with.

Social tango requires many things at once: balance, communication, musicality, improvisation, navigation and, perhaps most importantly, the ability to create a dance that feels good for both people.

You are not simply learning movements.

You are learning to improvise with another human being, to music, inside a shared space.

A good teacher doesn't correct everything

Watch a beginner for thirty seconds and you can probably find ten things to correct.

But correcting all ten is unlikely to help.

The difficult part is deciding:

What matters most right now?

Maybe one problem is creating three others. Maybe another can wait. Maybe something isn't perfect, but it doesn't matter yet.

A good teacher needs to know not only what to teach, but what not to teach.

Think more so the student can think less

I personally like understanding why things work. I tend to analyze movement, communication and music.

But tango ultimately has to happen in the body, not in an explanation.

If a student is thinking about six different things while dancing, even perfectly accurate instructions may make things worse.

So I like this principle:

The teacher should think more so the student can think less.

Observe the problem. Understand it. Choose one useful intervention.

Then let the student move, feel, adjust and try again.

Maybe there is no perfect tango lesson

The more I think about teaching, the less convinced I am that there is one perfect method.

Perhaps good teaching is mostly about understanding the person in front of you.

What do they want? What do they need? What is preventing them from getting there? And what can we do today to move them closer?

I don't have definitive answers to all of these questions. Thinking more seriously about teaching tango has actually given me more questions than answers.

And one of them may be even more fundamental:

Why do we want to dance tango in the first place?