I want us to talk a little about what is the dancer’s role in the context of the music ho or she is dancing with. This is, of course, a quite long and complex subject… Patience! And you might want to take a look at this other post that I wrote a while back to have some extra context and information on the subject. Today we’ll be focusing on understanding how dancers relate with the music we dance and what is our role in doing so, we’ll take a look at some of the more familiar ideas and a few less treaded territories as well.
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Why is creativity so hard?
Big question, right? I don’t believe some people are creative while others aren’t. Of course just like in everything else some folks are just natural, but creativity is a process that we can all explore. In this path, some of the difficulties that we find are conceptual, some are physical/technical and yet others have to do with the general framework with which we approach what we want to learn. Let’s expand a bit on each of those issues, OK?
The general framework
So, a part of the problem lies in the way we think about and understand tango. We know that in order to dance we don’t need to learn a complete choreography beforehand, right? But still we usually learn and study the dance and its elements with little pieces of choreography that we need to repeat very precisely (the steps or figures). Because this repetition creates “muscle memory” (actually, procedural memory), it turns out that by studying these same actions we end up becoming stagnant and repeating them almost exclusively. In other words, learning steps hinders our creativity because it makes it easy to repeat dance fragments almost automatically.
Clues on how to dance to the music in tango
As you might know, besides dancing and teaching how to dance tango I’m also a pianist and composer (I eventually teach piano and harmony). In fact, I started in tango dancing and in music more or less at the same time, and I see them as two aspects of the same thing… But I’m getting ahead of myself. The thing is I’ve been helping dancers to integrate music to their dancing a little better for many years now, and I’d like to talk with you about this today.
When I gave my first music course some 15 years ago, I organized how to teach based on some basic ideas that we musicians use to explain what we do, like rhythm and melody. Back on those times there were not that many people dedicated to this specific subject. But because nowadays it’s more common to see lessons and seminars on this, we can try to talk about how to approach music and the problems related to those approaches.
A proposal to solve the educational problems in tango [VIDEO]
The way we teach how to dance tango is full of problems that we’re all aware of. In this exclusive (fun!) video you’ll find the full presentation on this subject that I gave at IUNA’s 2º Congreso Internacional de Tango Argentino. It is in Spanish, but English subtitles are available.
Some of the ideas you’ll find are the current difficulties in teaching tango, the values that tango has that we destroy when we teach, and some further reflections on technique, the codes for leading steps (“la marca”), roles and improvisation.
Without further ado, the video (English subtitles should be enabled by default here):
So, what did you think about this? Leave your comments below!
Effortless tango or lazy tango?
So, this is a follow-up on my previous post on technique. I’ve received some absolutely lovely feedback these past few days, and I wanted to take a moment before I start to thank all of you for reaching out, it means more than you can imagine.
One of the comments I read was about working from a more instinctive place and if this could actually just be attributed to laziness, since the mainstream, more “intellectual” approach seems too hard at times. And I think that’s a great question to explore, there’s so many things to unravel!