You know what - it isn't.

I know all of this has been said a million times before. I'm not even going to search for the blog entries. But just the other day I overheard an experienced leader telling one just starting out that it's all about practice.

You know what, it is not all about practice. For perfection, perhaps yes; for competence, no.

Well, maybe it is. You have to practice to get good at anything. But practice is not the whole story.

I can think of people who've danced for a very long time, who throw me around like a frog in a blender and have such terrible posture that it causes me physical pain to dance with them. These are the bad intermediate dancers; middling skill level with giant holes in crucial places, awful results, no progress. As they practice, they stay the same or get worse.

I can also think of some pleasant young gentlemen ten years younger than me who have been dancing for less than a year or eighteen months and who are clear and gentle and reasonably decisive and have good posture and listen to the music and are fun to dance with. These are the good intermediates; basic skill level, just in the bits that really matter, good results. As they practice, they get better. (As long as they don't take too many intermediate classes full of material that's totally inappropriate to their skill level, in which case they stop getting better and start to get worse).

And when I find one of these, I try to dance with him regularly. I try to invest in him, and make the simple things feel like fun and encourage him to stick with it and have the confidence to give worthwhile skills priority over useless ones. It pays off immediately, because he is nice to dance with already, but it'll pay off even more if I'm still dancing tango when the grey exceeds the brown. He may be unexciting or make a few mistakes but I can add a little of my own excitement, and I don't care about a few mistakes.

I don't know for certain what determines which one you end up as, although my guess is that which beginners' class you take for the first five weeks of your tango career probably explains a lot. But on the basis of my observation so far, I can falsify two things:

1. you don't need years of practice to be pretty nice to dance with, and
2. practice is not going to help you at all if you're practicing the wrong thing.

Now you may well ask me why I dance with the bad ones at all. The answer to that turns out to be more interesting than you'd think. I don't, very often; but those I do occasionally dance with are among the people who were kind to me and danced with me regularly and took notice of me and encouraged me and supported me when I started out. If you have an adventurous spirit and you're dancing mostly open embrace, you don't notice bad posture, and being a frog in a cheerful, friendly blender is great for your sense of achievement and actually not at all bad for your technique. Anyway, their gentlemanly and considerate behaviour in simply bothering to be there back then counts for something now, and at the time, it counted for a lot.

Were there any among the actually-skilled dancers who made the same investment in me? Not many, no.

Now that might be because presentable women who dance fairly well are in oversupply and there is no incentive to bother with beginners. But it might also have something to do with beginner women not being taught until many months later - if ever at all - how to dance close embrace, or even led to think that it's usual to do so.

Which brings me to a point of good news: the practice of treating close embrace as other than a non-optional basic beginner-level skill seems to be a little less normal than it was. I think the consequences of that go a long way.