Lessons for beginners

It may help the beginner to know that there are, broadly, two approaches you're likely to encounter in a beginner's class. In reality, everyone uses some more-or-less-successful mixture of these two approaches, I don't know anyone at all who keeps absolutely to one or the other, that would probably be silly. But in most classes, one or the the other is very much dominant. I'm going to describe what the two extremes are, tell you my opinions about them, and hope that it helps you get what you need out of your classes.

Top-down: Learn some steps by heart, do them, and then work out how to lead and follow them. Break them up into simpler parts and recombine them. Repeat this without limit, looking at technique wherever it comes up, and then at some point later maybe go on to how to actually dance if you are interested or have talent. Very common in my experience.

Bottom-up: Learn how to move to the music and connect with your partner, start dancing in response to the music in a very basic way more or less immediately, and grow the steps from there. Work on technique as necessary. Get better at it over time. Add more complex skills if and only if they appeal to you. I've seen this only rarely around here, but it does happen.

The advantage of  top-down is that you get a map of where you're going, which is reassuring and gives you a sense of progress. The danger of this approach is that you get a map of where you're going which reduces a real landscape to a two-dimensional drawing, and makes you think things that aren't true, so that your sense of progress might be false.

The advantage of bottom-up is that you quickly get a view of the landscape, which is vast, awe-inspiring, and full of possibilities. The danger of bottom-up is that you quickly get a view of the landscape, which is vast, terrifying, and a bit short of signage.

Limerick has a great post on why that landscape appeals to him, and apparently looked good to George Bernard Shaw.

Practical advantages of top-down include that it's traditional and widely used, and it seems to be normally used to teach professional performers, so they feel very comfortable with it. Anyone with previous dance experience will probably also feel comfortable with it. It's also very good for bringing out points of physical technique, and introducing new techniques and ideas.

However, in my view it is very poor and slow at producing social dancers who anyone else would really want to dance with. The problem is that with non-professional students, the vital last few steps very often never happen - the procedure never gets broken down into re-usable elements, and even if it does, the student never actually gets to move to the music and develop their own dance.

Another problem is that the way a moves-based class has to work, spending 80% of the time on leader problems and then trying to compensate for that in various ways, it tends to seperate rather than integrate the leader's (man's) part and the follower's (woman's) part, so that the dance is a to-and-fro rather than a joint production.

Practical advantages of bottom-up include that it's (in my limited experience) about 1,000% more efficient at producing people who dance well, both more of them and much faster. This is a major advantage for the teacher who is primarily a social dancer and wishes to dance with his or her students. Another advantage is that leader and follower can get something much closer to equal time, because of the attention paid to creating and keeping connection, and to musical movement. That means the women can be more challenged and contributing more equally right from the start, which makes for less stress and soul-searching for everybody, as well as a better dance. It doesn't always happen, but it's much more possible.

However, it's demanding on the communication skills and curiosity of teacher and student. It also requires a much smaller number of lessons; the dancer can continue to improve at his or her own pace with relatively little help, a lot of it in the form of mentoring from peers and/or professionals, and just personal discovery, rather than actual teaching. Lessons will be fewer, more interesting, and more focused. So it only makes sense where the goals of both teacher and student are primarily to do with social dancing, rather than lessons as such.

So you can see what my opinion is. I think the bottom-up approach is better overall, but top-down is very useful for certain tasks and it never really makes sense to seperate them completely. Any teacher you choose will probably use some mixture, but with one approach predominant. Some will switch approaches if they realise you have a preference. And if you are informed, you can understand what is going on, and look for the useful bits.

OK, this is one of what I hope will be a series of posts intended to help out the beginner who has had either rather few lessons in tango, or no lessons at all. I'm not claiming any special authority, but I think help from peers is quite important. It is to me. And it's a confusing world. It's a common thing to take someone new under your wing as best you can; this is too important to be left to people who make their living out of it. If you are a beginner you don't need to assume I'm right, but I hope what I say will be useful to you; comments from prospective and recent beginners are particularly welcome. The next one I have in mind is a discussion of styles, and whether that concept means anything or is even slightly useful.