Re: [TANGO-L] Community Development

[Marisa Holmes <mariholmes @YAHOO.COM>]

--- Bugs Bunny <bugsbunny1959 @HOTMAIL.COM> wrote:
> ... How much sense does it make for beginners to try
& learn, in classes, while dancing with each other?
Seems like everyone would pick up the dance faster
if they could learn from a gracious experienced
counterpart...

No kidding!  An in fact, they don't even have to be a
lot more experienced - just not struggling with every
single thing about the tango.  I recently began
studying the lead, after having followed for a couple
of years, by taking a beginner's class.  My partner
and I discussed whether he would join the class as a
follower.  He finally said that he was interested in
learning to follow, but he had no interest whatsoever
in taking a class with leaders who were brand new.
And yes, he does dance with new followers all the
time, so it's not just a horror of having to deal with
folks who haven't learned to dance yet.  He had
experienced beginning leaders when he was one (and
when I was complaining about them) and he felt it
would waste his time at best and teach him bad habits
at worst.  On the occasions when we had too many
leaders in class and we had to work together I
entirely agreed with him - those guys were simply not
giving understandable leads, and there was no way on
earth someone could follow them except by ESP. Well,
that's not quite true: one of the guys did give verbal
leads, which I must admit were comprehensible.  Every
time one of the new followers went to dance with them
she was getting really bad info about how the dance is
done.

I did not have a totally awful experience with the new
followers, I've got to admit - just with some of them.
There were some I just couldn't lead, no matter what I
tried.  Now, I know that more experienced leaders
could communicate with them better than I could,
because my partner danced with them too - but the
ladies I failed time after time to lead to the cross,
for example, he also had trouble with. My contention
is that it helped neither me nor the women for us to
struggle together and practice failure.  I'm not in a
position to know if it was very bad for them to dance
with me or not - it may have been.  At least I am on
the beat myself, which put me ahead of some of the
guys.  On the other hand, I am certainly not always
early enough to be on the beat for the follower - and
ladies, I apologize.

I have gotten the opportunity to lead more experienced
followers, and I found the time spent a lot more
useful than that with the beginners, in terms of
learning to lead.  When the ladies who have been
following as long as I have ask me what I was trying
to lead, I _know_ where the problem is.  And when I
finally set them down on the beat in a little ocho
cortado and they smile, I'm sure I got it.

I'm as sure as I can be that Bugs is right, and that
the most effective and pleasant way to learn to dance
is with partners who can dance - and that learning
with other beginners is unnecessarily slow and painful
(not to mention an unnatural way of learning to dance
socially, which reasonably occurs within an
established social group).  It also leads to cliques
and divisions in the community, as people stick to the
folks they struggled through beginner classes with,
figuring that the known evil can be borne.  If instead
we danced _across_ ability divisions, we would have a
crowd of beginners who progressed faster, and we would
integrate people into the community better. And we
might have those higher retention rates we were all
calling for a week ago.

So - how do we set it up so that new people dance with
folks who are not struggling as miserably as
themselves?

Happy New Year!
Marisa

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