Re: [TANGO-L] Christy Cote's syllabus

[Tom Stermitz <Stermitz @TANGO.ORG>]

I would judge the success of a curriculum on whether it sent students
out into the community (or festivals or Buenos Aires) with the ability
to dance.

I guess you could create a bunch of dancers who skillfully danced only
with each other, but that is a business strategy, not a successful
community building strategy.

Of course, if your goal is to produce good stage or maybe good showcase
dancers, then that would be a different way of measuring success.

The Bronze/Silver/Gold terminology seems designed to market the
curriculum itself to ballroom studios, or else to market tango to
people familiar with the Ballroom Studio way of doing business.


So, I'm suspicious of any move to get tango into traditionally
organized ballroom studios. Look what they've done to social ballroom!
Only two styles of ballroom they tell us! What about all the OTHER
great social dances and dancers of the 1910s and 1920s?

While some local ballroom studios have offered the odd Argentine tango
class in Denver, their students either cross over to the tango
community, or else they merely dabble in tango, not really learning it.

One problem has been that these ballroom teachers have not been part of
the tango community, so their teaching ability has been based on their
skill at memorizing and regurgitating something off a video, not
actually learning how to tango, or going to Buenos Aires.

They did not at all have an ideology of community building.


On Jul 6, 2004, at 2:18 PM, Christopher L. Everett wrote:

> Lee Sobo wrote:
>
> > The fact that a TAngo syllabus was written by Christy is a good thing.
> > It demonstrates the need for such a thing.
> It demonstrates the need for no such thing.  Rather it demonstrates
> a person's willingness to create a syllabus.
>
> > However, it should be noted that we at El Mundo del Tango have been
> > using a syllabus written by Ive Simard perhaps 10 years ago and is
> > complete for Bronze, Silver and Gold levels of Tango, Vals, Milonga
> > and
> > Pecho. This was the first and is the original syllabus written for the
> > Tango. If you'd like to see the contents, you can view it at
> > http://www.elmundodeltango.com/video_library.htm.
> Bleah!  Phooey! I suppose we can adopt the Ballroom Dancing Business
> Model from here:
>
> 1. Make students pay for lessons.
> 2. Make students pay to perform in the Teacher's/Studio's showcases.
> 3. Make students pay to rehearse for the showcases.
> 4. Make the students get all their friends to pay to watch the
> showcase.
> 5. Use the showcase to market the teacher/studio.
> 6. Go back to step 1.

Tom Stermitz
2525 Birch St
Denver, CO 80207
h: 303-388-2560