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Re: [TANGO-L] Tango teachers that hurt the community
Andy Carrillo wrote
Randy,
Great question with a very simple answer: no agreement
could ever be reached amongst the "great masters"
because their egos loom in the way.
Christy Cote, San Francisco, has quietly written a
beautiful syllabus ... Despite her tremendous talent as
both a teacher and performer, she has never allowed
her ego to prevent the furtherance of this wonderful
dance. She's dedicated her entire life to it and has
been quite successful in doing so.
Hi Dear List,
It's been a long time since my last post. The issue of the standardization
of tango seems to confuse a lot of US students and tango lovers. Because
I've experienced the ballroom and Argentinean tango worlds, I'd like to
share my thoughts with all of you.
I've taught tango for months to English ballroom champions, and I had the
opportunity of getting to know much about how the ballroom world works.
First of all you should all understand that both worlds have very different
objectives :
Main goal of ballroom : To perfectly perform the dance within parameters
that can be judged later by those that created the parameters. To produce
dancers that will compete against each other. In addition, to advance you
must invest a sufficient amount of money, over a long period of time, to
enroll and complete the goals/levels (bronze, silver, and gold).
Main goal of tango : Individuality is respected and fundamental. You have
many resources to express yourself by learning from many different teachers
that will contribute to your dance their different personalities and visions
of tango and which will make you a richer, more open-minded,
non-descriminatory dancer. There are no parameters eventhough you have some
basics to respect such as: crossed (backwards and fowards) and open
single-foot positioning like Gustavo Naveira and Fabian Salas established.
And then the infinite relationships that we could get by combining those
units. People don't go to competitions. This is a popular art and it's
evolution goes hand-in-hand with popular feelings. You can not set
boundaries around people's feelings. Don't you think that would be quite
dictatorial?
I wanted to teach the ballroom champions how to improvise and they were like
'Are you crazy?!' and they reacted like that because improvising or creating
new moves will get the judges very confused and then they would be
disqualified. So... I understood that the process of creation, learning from
mistakes to create new moves, and improvisation was completely forbidden to
them. They are not free to feel and dance. They have to think about the
judge and try to please them.
Naveira and Salas have developed a system that gives you bases to develop
your improvisation skills. That's why this system is so popular among tango
students.
By teaching a syllabus, you are teaching student sequences already created
by you or Christy. We lose our most important tool for expressing ourselves:
improvisation. And please don't come up with that stupid idea that you
improvise by combining the syllabi! That is like saying that you have
created a song by combining the musical phrases of "The Way We Were" and
"Beat It".
Andy, if you want Christy judging YOU as a highly qualified instructor
through her methodology, then she leaves you with the authority to judge
your students within the same methodology. Christy will then have to
continue judging your teaching (which is her teaching) and your students.
This diploma or degree supposedly gives you and your students the right to
judge each other and other teachers who don't adopt the same methodology.
This generates money and the future possibility for Christy to promote
syllabus 2, 3, 4, and so on; however, this new community will be more
focused on having students that follow the "right" parameters and teachers
who get more money from promoting the new syllabus. This will create more
competition among the community rather than acceptance of self expression
and creativity. Judgement thus discrimination does not match TANGO beliefs.
Tango is an art, an expression, and thus a personal path.
About the tango master's meeting you talk so freely about, I was there. I
was an assistant of Eduardo Arquimbau. And it's not that they didn't
agree... they did agree about some things. I know most of them and let me
tell you that if their egos were forbidding them to agree, they never would
have met in the first place! They were very open about the subjects and they
tried very hard but, the DANCE was not very well developed yet or at least
the understanding of it. They could not agree on any standard method to
execute a "sequence" because each master's way of doing the sequence was so
personal. However, this meeting was very helpful to Naveira in creating a
system that could be used for any kind of style, a system that opened the
analytical eye of the dance for tango fanatics. A system that would analize
a sequence by units of movement and by axes positions. Most importantly this
gave anyone the freedom to express themselves with their bodies, even in
ways that would transcend previous conventions.
At our last Festival here in Paris we had more than 300 people for the
workshops and an average of 650 people per milonga - 3 milongas total. And
you know what... another Festival was going on during my Festival ! This
success is not because this is PARIS ! Sorry but no! It was thanks to the
teachers and their great ability to communicate tango. There has not been a
tango event like this one here in Paris for years!
You can create all the syllabi you want but this is about creativity and
freedom. People will have the last word and it will be their choice.
Sebastian ARCE
Tango Argentino
www.allthattango.com
www.mephisto-tango.com
+33 (0) 1 46 78 63 58
+33 (0) 6 09 52 39 28
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