What to do

The Fastest, Most Effective Way to Learn Argentine Tango

The best way to learn Argentine tango has already been invented. You can recognize it by its results. No one can say absolutely where the traditional method came from. It evolved over time, by trial and error, as the dance was passed from dancer to dancer throughout the 20^th century.

The syllabus is simple. You have to learn in a logical order all of the tango steps that are so famous that they actually have a NAME.

Basic step

Hamaca

Forward Ocho (from the cross)

Cross Basic Step

Back Ocho

Sandwich

Cuadrado

Molinete

And others...

In addition to providing a basis for navigating the dance floor and expressing the music, these steps condense an enormous amount of learning about tango technique and structure into compact, manageable sequences.

But people ask me: “How you can learn an improvised dance by memorizing sequences?”

And I respond: “Is it possible to sit at the piano and play jazz improvisation without having studied scales first?”

Just look at the list of artists at any international tango festival and find out how they first learned Argentine Tango.

Confused grasshopper

Yes tango is based on walking. But that doesn’t mean that you are going to walk forever, and that the more you walk, the more Argentine you will look.

I have a friend who heard that and got up early every mornnig to spend an entire half hour walking forward--with no results for his learning process! I’m not making up this story.

I told him that if he wanted to practice alone, he should instead practice the basic step, ochos, the hamaca, etc. as much as he wanted. And to stop walking forward, for god’s sake! The results were obvious and he started dancing something resembling tango!

Musicality and Line of Dance

Many teachers preach the same drill to raw beginners. “Music and line of dance!” And if you don’t do it, the tango god is going strike you down.

Musicality and line of dance are very important, but it’s not worth changing the logical structure of tango in order to make it possible for beginners to follow the music and line of dance immediately. A clear example of changing the logical structure of tango is the prevalence of teaching 45-degree back ochos in order to enable couples to continue moving around the line of dance while executing back ochos. However, the traditional back ocho is 90-degrees and it’s very important for followers to learn how to execute a 90-degree back ocho and default to that, instead of defaulting to a 45-degree-angle. When followers are initially exposed to 45-degree back ochos, it’s very hard for them to learn to do a correct back ocho later on.

Yes, it’s a bit harder for the beginner to move around the dance floor with a dance that is based on the traditional steps (basic step, cross basic step, 90-degree ochos, hamaca, sandwich) than on pure forward walking. But if we invest the time and energy to teach the beginner to do the traditional steps correctly, he or she can within the space of a few months learn both to navigate the dance floor and begin to express the music through traditional tango steps. And when it’s time to add on to his or her repertoire of steps (by adding boleos, barridas, ganchos, etc.), he or she will have a strong foundation of tango technique and structure to support his or her continued learning process.

Finishing

The speed and quality of your learning process depend on what you practice and how you practice. This applies to tango, and to any art form. If you want to be great you have to do what the great did.