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                                                      Come Dancing
                                                      Meetings with  remarkable teachers
                                                       
                                                       by Gerry Kenny, France

The following article is not about language teaching but a series of snippets from learning to dance Tango Argentino.  It is also about a series of meetings with remarkable teachers.  I hope the reader will appreciate my leaving it up to him or her to draw any other possible parallels between this account and language  learning and teaching.

In the beginning

Looking back on the time before Tango, telling myself that there was such a time, I realise now that I had categorized it as ballroom dancing and looked no further.  Images of the BBC’s Come Dancing come dancing back in what my mind’s eye now refuses to see as anything other than dinner suits moving to music with evening dresses on floodlit dance floors.  The tangos, if there were any, were merely in among the waltzes and the foxtrots.  I certainly don’t remember wanting to be part of any of it.

Then came the party at a colleague’s home when, after some fairly predictable but friendly drink sipping, the small group of people we were talking to noticed that all the rest of the guests were, well, dancing, er, together as it were.  We stopped our conversation to watch the dozen couples.  It was like being suddenly confronted with people able to switch codes: from ordinary conversationalists to secret movers in a completely foreign language. What was the name of what they were doing?  Tango. And, that music I can hear in the background?  That’s Tango too.

This was when the Come Dancing stereotypes from 25 years before got a serious shaking up. There were no dinner suits or evening dresses, and none of the ballroom dancers mannered movements.  As we would discover that evening, what we were seeing was Tango Argentino as it was danced in the Rio de la Plata, and not the stagy European version of Latin passion.  The music was also the real thing.  And even the uneducated eye could see, as it moved from couple to couple, that these dancers communicated in ways rarely witnessed in everyday life - creating and sharing movement without so much as a word passing between them.  Here was a community of people moving two by two in total respect for the rest of the community’s space on the dance floor.

If I hadn’t ever thought of learning to dance before, this encounter with Tango changed all that.  Reassuringly, a few years after this beginning the film The Tango Lesson by Sally Potter portrayed a similar “encounter” scene when the female lead character played by Potter chances upon a Tango show given by Pablo Veron and his partner in a theatre in Paris.

Learning to walk

Imagine a huge gymnasium one autumn Saturday morning with four participants quivering on the threshold of the new, and Catherine de Rochas and Henri Vidiella, our teachers, brimming with patience, kindness and encouragement.  There you have Tango for beginners.

The first exercise involves walking to music.  This sounds, and is, simple enough.  The sensation is familiar, and walking in time to the music is easy because, when in doubt, you just follow Henri.

Things change on the second exercise.  Again the idea is to walk, but this time not to put your heel down first.  You put your heel first when you are in the street, when you’re in a hurry, or when you have to get somewhere fast.  Here, we are dancing and the only time we need is the time the music gives us : the tempo, el compàs.  When you walk to a tango you put your foot forward so that the ball of the foot touches first and your heel last.  Then, and only then, do you transfer the weight from the trailing leg to the leading leg, freeing the trailing leg to move forward for the next step.  Echoes of Tai Chi sound as you practise this in silence, but disappear once the music comes on and you are dancing again.  When was walking last this interesting?  Tango, Henri and Catherine say, is basically walking to music.  Sounds good to me.

The next step is learning to walk to music with your partner.  And as your teachers announce this to the group it suddenly occurs to you that you have just been walking solo for the past fifteen minutes.  It takes two to tangle, er, to tango.  But walking together in step is much harder than it sounds.  In Tango, the man faces the direction in which the couple moves and so walks forward, while the woman faces the man and so walks backward.  As the man leads, he gives the start signal.  

But what exactly is the start signal? As an absolute beginner in Tango you discover that you are an absolute beginner in observing movement.  You fall for the illusion of the couple moving magically together. You attempt to reproduce this magic by telling yourself that when the man moves his left leg forward his partner magically moves her right leg back.  You don’t hear all the stuff about weight transfer to indicate that it is the free leg which is to move.  You think it is the contact of leg against leg.  You repeat to yourself that all you have to do is walk.  However you feel us if you are constantly walking into, rather than with your partner And, as your teachers come and see how you are getting on, they tell you about transferring your weight but all you here is the end part when they tell just to think of it as walking.  And remember : ball of the foot first, heel last.  And don’t look down.  Stand up straight or you’ll lose your balance.  And relax.  It’s only walking.  Remember learning to walk?  

Learning to count

After teaching us how to walk again, Henri and Catherine turn to counting.  They teach us the basic 8-step figure of Tango known as la salida.  The learning proceeds, as in any movement class, by repetition.  First you watch your teachers perform the sequence.  Next the group shadows a slow-motion paused  version of the sequence following the teacher-model.  Finally each couple sets to walk on the sequence at their own pace;  All this is done without music until the steps fall into place.  But until is a faraway country.

In order to reach that distant destination you have to remember the number of steps.  How many of the 8 can you recall?  And in which order?  And what about the gaps?  In fact, you discover many lessons later that it is not the individual elements which count, so much as the direction in which you seek to move.  However, this is Day 1, Unit 1, Page 1, and all you can think about is your search for what should be in the gaps.  You feel as if one mistake makes the whole thing wrong.  Your teachers hover, ready to help and advise.  They show you the thing again, giving you a fresher visualisation of what you are working on to encourage you in your efforts.  Inside you, an obscure sense of panic sets in : I can’t do it.  I can hear the numbers going from 1 to 8.  But I can’t reproduce the corresponding movements.  I can reproduce certain steps, but not the others.  I feel as if I am a blind man surrounded by people saying “Look!”.  With Henri’s voice telling me which foot to put where, I feel I can do it.  Then he moves away and I get lost.

Leading and following

There are limits to solipsism at the best of times.  Here, it is necessary to point out that I have a partner in my arms.  She is the patient companion to my distress.  Less out of her element, with a dancer’s eye for what we are supposed to be doing, she tries to help by prompting and occasionally leading.  How can I accept?  Beyond the step problem, my male pride is also battling with a basic principle which Tango has parachuted into my comfortable existence.  The rule as I understand it is that, whoever I dance with, whoever she is, however I feel, whatever the weather, I am supposed to lead and my partner is supposed to follow .  If I don’t lead, nothing can happen.  Here we are with our 8-step salida, and already I am unable to lead.  This feels like a bad situation which can only get worse. I cannot even bring myself to talk about it.  The only thought in my mind is that the cultural rule says that I must manage alone.  

Years later, we would hear Tete, a milonguero figure from Buenos Aires with more than 40 years of Tango behind him, say that leading and following means sharing equal responsibility for what happens : the woman must not anticipate but the man must not force.  His remark did not come out of nowhere.  He began by first refusing to teach us specific steps.  His method was simple enough: he repeated what he pretended was the same movement over and over again for us to imitate while actually changing the movement each time.  Offering a constantly changing model was revolutionary enough, but he went even further when people began to complain: he encouraged them, saying it would do them good to get it out of their European system.  He then told the men in the class to stop focusing our attention on pasos and to start working on how to communicate our intention of movement to our partners.  To the women he said that they were to stop worrying about reproducing steps they had learnt and to start focusing on picking up their partner’s intention of movement.  As this required concentration, the women were to dance with their eyes closed.  And as intention requires communication, people must dance close, chest to chest.  Finally, he pointed out that, by virtue of this closeness and mutual communication, the responsibility for leading and following would be equally shared : the woman must not anticipate but the man must not force.  Tete had left school in his early teens, sold papers, driven buses and taxis.  Not encumbered by unnecessary distraction, he had a way of explaining things that was particularly convincing.

Back on Day 1 of my beginner Tango class though, all I can tell myself is that it is just like walking.  We try to keep steady and move forward, back, to the side, and forward again together, as a couple. I rationalize everything. I realize that my usual strategy for problem-solving is introspection, but that it will not work here because I cannot cut myself off from the person I am dancing with.  We can only succeed if we move together, and my partner only moves when I move.  This does not make learning easier but does change the nature of the problems because they have to be shared.  We laugh when we hear other people echo our own exchanges (….That’s not what we’re supposed to be doing … I can’t see where you want me to go if you don’t show me… You’re not following what I’m leading at all … I won’t follow if you try to use force … But I’m only forcing, as you call it, because I know I’m right …).  Such exchanges are enlightening about couples in particular and human relationships in general. They are also punctuated by more constructive, friendlier dialogues between couples working on the same steps as an alternative to teacher assistance.  

Ultimately the outcome of all work described in this first class is a feeling of great satisfaction during what are sometimes whole minutes when movements do flow and your couple moves magically from 1 to 8 several times in a row.

Learning to memorize

The day after that first class with Catherine and Henri there is a second, for this is the first of umpteen Tango weekends.  The feeling of muscular and emotional exhaustion does not even bear thinking about.  The numbers are about all I can recall from the previous class.  Fortunately my partner’s memory is much more reliable.  50/50, as Tete would later say.

But how do you stock information in a learning process for which the basic lesson pattern is built around repetition of movement?  The first few months of Tango were difficult ones from this point of view because while classes would give me the sense that I knew more at the end than I did at the beginning, I would simply forget from one class to the next.

Hubert, a friend, volunteered the following story one evening when telling us how much his bee-keeping was teaching him about himself.  He told the story with the smile of hindsight.  told me of a similar experience in another more orthodox realm.  Having left school at 16, he did not pursue formal education again until well into his twenties when he decided to become a bee-keeper.  He had no idea how to go about organizing his course content as it was taught to him in the classroom, so he simply bought a note-pad which he took to class every day.  He took down notes as clearly as he could in each class, only writing on one side of each sheet.  This was part of a plan. In the evenings, he would stick his notes up on the wall of his room so that he would have it all instantly available for study and memorization at all times.

This went on for some time.  None of the sheets already stuck up were taken down again.  New sheets were simply added each evening.  It was not until a co-trainee came by one day that he got a second opinion on this procedure.  In fact, the concern Hubert expressed to his co-trainee was that of the obvious long-term limitations of wall-space.  How would he get to the end of the course?  Would he have to start using the ceiling?  Or simply move to somewhere bigger?  His classmate, magician like, pulled a folder out of his bag in which he had his course notes classified using subject-dividers.  Hubert said that he immediately recognized this system as much more flexible and efficient both in terms of stocking information and of recoverability.   The future bee-keeper went out to the stationer’s, bought a folder, and cleared the walls of his hive.

I was very like Hubert as a Tango beginner.  I had no idea how to stock dance-steps so as to make them retrievable on future occasions.  I could see no link between Tango and writing things down because my teachers had no blackboard.  Fortunately Federico came along.

Argentinean chalk lines and circles 

Federico Rodriguez Moreno had started out as a gym instructor in Argentina where his mother also taught art.  As false-beginners and beyond we attended numerous Tango weekends with Federico and Catherine Berbessou, a contemporary dancer and now a well-known choreographer.  Their approach to teaching beginner and intermediate levels was to draw diagrams of the steps we were to work on in chalk of the floor during class.  These mappings were almost full-scale and easy to follow.  Each of the 8 steps in the salida sequence had its line and direction accompanied by appropriate circles, crosses or arrows.

Each phase of the class would begin with the teacher-model and participant-shadowing described above.  However, for me, the most precious moments came when Federico put his hand in his pocket for that piece of chalk and drew the map of where he wanted us to go.

The writing on the floor gave me a visual language through which I could both better understand and also organize my learning so as to make it accessible later.  This unique vision of Tango could also be adapted to steps taught by all and any other teachers.  Like Hubert, I was able to go to the stationer’s for my first Tango note-book and start blackening the pages, for I now had a symbolic language with which I could make notes about movement and position.

Appropriately, the floor never needed to be cleaned at the end of the class because, as we danced, caught up in our movements we unwittingly danced upon the diagrams, rubbing them out - or assimilating the steps up through the soles of our shoes perhaps.  No chalk maps were used at advanced level.  When I asked Federico why, he pointed out that people had learned to watch by then.  He also insisted that people from the advanced class would do well to come to beginner classes from time to time : apart from the obvious renewal of basic skills, they would also learn many things they had not been able to hear when they were beginners.  In other words, an advanced learner can turn a beginner class into an advanced one, not by asking the teacher to say more complicated things, but by being able to listen in a more attentive, enlightened way.

Learning to improvise

Tango is made up of identifiable steps, but is ultimately an improvised dance created on the spur of the moment according to the music which the dancers hear.  Mood, tempo and emotion are the triggers, but the dancers can only be fired by their ability to  communicate and collaborate within the limits of their technical ability and the available dance floor space.  If the steps we learn are like words, the chalk maps were crucial for discovering helping even beginners to discover the rudiments of the syntax of improvisation in order to help us articulate new sequences of our own.

Federico and Catherine divided the salida into 3 parts : steps 1 to 3 were part 1; steps 4 to 5 were part 2; steps 6 to 8 were part 3.   They first demonstrated then drew new combinations of steps we knew in order to help us visualize 1 to 2 minutes of dance in sequence : parts 1-2-3, part 1, part 1 again, part 2, side step to the left, part 2 again, part 3, part 2 directly (i.e. without part 1), part 3 and finish.  When we tried it, the thing worked because each element fitted to the next.  This made improvisation a more accessible process.  First I was able to see the connection between the movements in the initial demonstration; this was reinforced by the map; finally, our own practice then reproduced the path traced by the map.  Once we had understood how the thing worked, Federico and Catherine encouraged us to find new combinations of our own using the same elements.  In our own modest way we suddenly became creative.  Our movements began to make sense and we began to experience for ourselves something which we had only heard about: that Tango is improvisation within a perceptible structure.

With hindsight I can now see that Federico and Catherine’s approach made dancing creative by keeping it rational.  However, when they danced on stage for us, or even in the course of a Tango evening where they were out on the dance floor among the other couples, they looked more inspired than rational.  Was there something they weren’t telling us? What was the key to great Tango?

Technique or emotion?

With the growth of Tango in Europe in the 90s, there came a demand for teaching based on more and more difficult figures.  Commercially and pedagogically, the key to progress was seen by many groups of dancers and many teachers as being a development of greater and greater technical prowess.  This led to accidents on the dance floor and and even scenes of Tango-rage : dancers required more and more space in which to move, and on crowded dance floors the number of collisions and heated exchanges increased.   In spite of market pressures, certain Tango teachers began to other voices heard.  These put forward a cultural response which, in substance, told Europeans that by reducing Tango to technical feats they were in the process of refusing community (the dance floor is, first and foremost, a social space) and refusing emotion.  The classes given by these teachers were decidedly different.

When Paola Canals and Julio Zurita announced that for their Tango weekends there would be no beginner-intermediate-advanced levels, but simply a “morning” and an “afternoon” group, we could already discern a different approach.   The class confirmed this impression.

Alternative approaches

Paola and Julio began by putting on a couple of tangos and asking us all to dance while they watched.  They then called us all round so they could give us their comments : they told us that we were all moving oblivious to the music that was playing, we only seemed interested in doing the various figures we had learned, and we were all dancing off balance.  They only spoke Spanish, so the process of feedback was slowed down considerably by the passage via the interpreter.  This slowing down also gave a ceremonial aspect to what they said : they seemed to aim for clarity, using formulae which would be both translatable and memorable.  They were clearly people interested in bringing about change.

Having made these comments in what can only be described as a objective, non-judgemental way, Julio and Paola danced a tango for us.  They chose a slow tango with a very expressive arrangement by the Anibal Troilo Orquesta Tipica.  They took up position as the music started and their abrazo was literally like an embrace.  Paola closed her eyes from beginning to end and Julio seemed to reflect on every step he took.  In terms of figures, their dance was relatively simple, yet in terms of expression they moved with the music.  They were light years from the Tango we knew.  

They had us dance in slow motion.  They had us dance on fast forward, on rewind, on pause.  Julio insisted that a pause was a step for a dancer who was really listening to the music.  They had us choose a 3 or 4-step sequence on which we worked without music experimenting with pauses, accelerations or decelerations at different moments in the sequence.  We created new steps for ourselves by dancing through the looking glass where we tried to reverse left and right.  They gave us homework for the next day: we were to learn a tango by heart so that we could hum it from start to finish, thereby becoming our own humming orchestra.

Julio and Paola took us out of mere figures and put us into the music and the emotion of Tango.  In order to begin work on the issue of leading and following within this context of emotion, they first had men dance with men and women with women.  The result was a sort of focused chaos, but was an unforgettable experience which raised awareness of the difficulties of interaction where no spoken communication is possible.  

They then showed us how delicate we had to be when dancing with each other by an intriguing exercise. The women in the group danced three tangos blindfold, each with a different partner.  Speaking was forbidden before, during or after each tango.  As the feedback showed, the experience was a moving one for all of us : the men spoke of the need to be gentle with their partner who did not know who they were and could not see where they were going; the women voiced impressions of how much less hurried their partners seemed, and how closely they tried to genuinely follow the lead the men gave them.  This was a renewing exercise, the effect of which can still be seen in the sparkle in people’s eyes at its being mentioned even now, years later.

Julio came from contemporary dance and Paola from a theatrical background.  Both are  Argentinean but were based in Barcelona in the mid 90s. Both have since gone back to Argentina, but the ingenious exercises in the work which they proposed bear witness to considerable personal training and research.  They must have been somewhere in their twenties at the time of the classes described here.  However, the channels which they explored are no different from those worked on by the more intuitive older dancers known as milongueros using less structured but no less effective methods.

Tete, already mentioned above, was certainly no academic, but he gave us lessons in community living.  In one workshop he set up the dance floor as an obstacle course with chairs for us to avoid as we danced.  We were to think of these chairs as other dancers, he said, and to remember that, wherever we were, it was in the nature of Tango as a community culture for us to find ourselves having to share space with others.  Personal space on a dance floor is important and the only way to find your own is to respect other people’s.  After saying this, Tete had us dance a whole tango while maintaining the same distance between each couple.  

He also reminded us that in the world of Tango dancers were always in the public eye by having each couple dance in front of the rest of the class for a minute or so and invited us to make comments and suggestions and even applaud.  Tete also insisted on the need to be able to adapt to different partners.  He paired us off with others in endless ways : people of similar heights or different heights dancing together, people paired off by somebody else in the group who hardly knew anybody else, people paired off totally at random.  And before each tango he would wish us “Buen viaje!” .  And, just to show us how different each journey could be, he had us dance to the same piece of music with different partners; sure enough, nothing was ever the same after working with Tete.

Final word

The final word has to go to Hernan Obispo.  In the 2 years in which I got to know Hernan before his tragic death in July 2002, much happened.  He decided to come and live here in Toulouse, making him a Tango teacher who was not simply in town for a weekend workshop, but a local immigrant resident.  He taught Tango as part of a wider dance-culture along with traditional Argentinean dances using knowledge and skills from his years of study.  His long-term presence here meant that he was never in a hurry.  He taught classes and animated regular events, but he also observed and got to know people.  We saw him change from the life and soul of the party who laughed just slightly louder and more often than was appropriate to a calmer more composed personality.  He was fallible, and that made him human.  

But Hernan’s real gifts showed when teaching : he was able to diagnose problems with amazing directness, his correction procedure would always begin with a compliment and finish with an encouragement.  Most impressive of all was his ability to take totally different people to the same learning destination by completely different but appropriate paths.   He brought together the best aspects of the teachers whose work I have chosen to describe here.  He had Catherine de Rochas and Henri Vidiella’s kindness and generosity, Catherine Berbessou and Federico Moreno Rodriguez’s sense of structure, Paola Canals and Julio Zurita’s sensitivity and capacity for taking risks, and Tete’s sense of Tango being part of  life and just as unforgiving.

It feels strange writing all this for HLT.  The process of putting this into words has been a long one, and this piece has been sitting in note-form for almost a year.  Hernan’s death is what has really pushed me into finishing the thing. I suppose, in a way, I have resisted finishing because Tango has helped me get out of my EFL dependence and into learning to learn and think for myself as a teacher, and I have not wanted to admit that.  Of course, I still teach English and train teachers, but the encounter the world of Tango has shown me that EFL is not the only field where one meets remarkable teachers.  But then if you read HLT you will already know that.

Toulouse, France. 
7th August 2002

Further study
Reading: An excellent introduction to the history of Tango with remarkable photographs and documentation is  Tango! by Collier, Cooper, Azzi and Martin, Thames and Hudson, London 1995.
Film : The Tango Lesson by Sally Potter, 1997.
Website : www.buenosairestango.com