tangophilia blog

The most important ideas in any discipline are those that are considered “beautiful". In math and science, these are the ideas that demonstrate parsimony, but are also very powerful in that they make it possible to both describe and predict an array of theories and observations. When you tie these ideas together, you make it possible to understand so much more than just the one situation you may be applying it to. You can immediately see the relevance of the idea to other situations and examples. Tango is composed of these ideas as well. At least, it can be.

There are plenty of ideas in tango that are very popular because they appear to be simple, easy, and convenient. Taken in isolation, they usually are. They’re typically single, narrow ideas that provide a solution to the narrow situations that they are being applied to. For a narrowly defined problem or set of techniques, they seem to work very well, and they also appear to be very easy to use and understand. At the very least, they get the job done with much less effort and command of technique than some other ideas. The problem arises when a seemingly novel situation presents itself, and now a new technique has to be concocted to explain this new situation. Do this enough times, and your “simple” tango is no longer very simple, but is instead a mish-mash of several unrelated ideas and exceptions tied together with duct tape and string. No technique informs any other technique, and every step-pattern appears to be a unique and indivisible thing.

In tango, the most important ideas are the “beautiful” ones. If you accept them, then it becomes possible to understand and predict a wider variety of movements than with other ideas. Tango ceases to be a potpourri of steps and instead becomes a coherent discipline of thought and motion. All ideas can be derived a common foundation, and the techniques that you use to lead and follow any step are applicable to any other step. When you see something that appears new, you’re able to understand whether what you’re seeing is truly novel or simply an unforeseen application of a familiar idea. You’re able to improvise by extending what you already know into new situations. When you take classes, you’re able to learn more efficiently because you can see how the ideas and techniques relate to other ideas and which elements are to be learned as new. The perceived complexity of the pattern disappears when you can recognize and understand the relatively few components from which it is constructed.

What Fabian Salas and Gustavo Naveira contributed when they developed their analysis and synthesis of tango was a set of very powerful ideas that made it possible to systematize and understand so much more about tango than ever before. They took the “thousands of steps” and teaching methods ("copy what I do", “learn this pattern") in circulation and distilled them down to some general principles that made it possible to not only understand what already existed, but also to discover and explore new territory that wasn’t as common or accessible through other ideas. Fortunately, there is now a wide array of teachers worldwide that came to understand the parsimony and power of these ideas and have chosen to use them in their own teaching instead of the other “easy” methodologies commonly used in other dances.

If all this seems a little too abstract, then let’s compare and contrast. The “easy” approach to tango teaches that walking, forward ochos, back ochos, overturned ochos, turns (giros), changes of direction, ganchos, and boleos are all separate “patterns", unique entities that require very different techniques to lead and follow. The “beautiful” idea is that all of these are simply applications of crossing or open steps, linked with pivots, that may be interrupted.

Learning a few elegant ideas like this makes it possible to immediately understand the relationships between each of these “patterns", to understand what’s required to lead them, and to improvise variations even if you’ve never done some of them before. These ideas can make the complicated accessible, and the simple sublime.