Movement repertoire and starting from “what works”

Back in 2004 I took up gymnastics, with no previous experience, and I seemed to make very linear progress over time: taking small steps and building up on existing movements or learning new ones.

With tango, my learning equation has been very different: I experience a sort of plateau for a length of time and then, suddenly, something will happen and I will make a leap.

I made one of those leaps in 2006, when I took one lesson with Javier Rodriguez and his partner Andrea Misse, in Tangocamp Greece - a very unconventional lesson, by all means.

I can’t bring myself to remember how the lesson started out exactly… perhaps with a warm-up dance to get the blood flowing and give them an idea of our level or maybe with some walking exercises. I honestly don’t remember.

What I do remember however is Javier’s immediate and emotional protest at the way we walked!

He interrupted whatever was happening at once, took a serious look and spent the next hour and a half working with us on walking, by ourselves!

And I don’t say that it was unconventional because we just walked… I started learning tango with two teachers who take technique very seriously and walking was a routine exercise on every lesson.

It was unconventional, because, in more words than these, Javier told us to forget everything we had learnt about walking tango technique and “just walk”, the same way we would walk on the street. He pointed out that tango is a natural kind of dance where we “walk”… that elderly people who dance in Argentina have never learned how to walk specifically for tango… they just walk.

After the class, I was reminded of going to milongas and seeing a lot of people who have been taught walking technique walking the same funny walk that Javier protested about. Until that day, I was one of them, and I made a leap by going back to “what works”: I started walking in tango like I walked on the street with an intention to build on it and improve to accommodate for tango.

This spurred me into thought…. why is it that most people look funny when they try to walk with a particular “technique”?

I will use the language paradigm to explain.

When children learn grammar and syntax for the very first time and attempt to make up sentences using those rules, their speech is disrupted. They lose their flow, “uhm” a lot and take a few seconds just to form the sentence in their mind.

Why?

Simply because our conscious resources are very limited and we are used to doing things automatically, or unconsciously. When people open their mouth to talk, they don’t think “Ok, first I am going to put a noun, then a verb, then a…” and so on, do they?

That’s an unconscious way of going about talking.

On the other hand, applying a syntactic or grammatical rule explicitly is a conscious way of going about it and requires the use of different kinds of resources and processes that take much longer than our specialized and very efficient unconscious speaking circuits.

Is that limited to language?

Certainly not.

Let me give you another example that involves the body.

Think about people who learn to drive. Male or female, old or young, when they begin learning how to drive a manual drive car they will often make it stall or move in a jerky way… I have yet to meet someone who didn’t do this at least once on their first lesson. Some do it more than others (and we might say that those who do it less, have a “talent for driving”) but nevertheless, everybody does it.

Driving requires a set of synchronized movements that is not part of our every day life and an accomplished driver has mastered this set of movement and performs them unconsciously.

Initially however, the same driver had to consciously control his or her body and slowly, using repetition, form a habit or an unconscious circuit that will then take care of that for the rest of their lives.

In learning walking technique for tango, not only do we have to learn how to walk consciously again but the movements that are required are significantly smaller than the movements that the average person has conscious access to, like walking or running.

Now, let’s compare the two:

In driving, to change gear for example, we have to press down with our leg on the clutch and simultaneously set the gear with our hand. These are really big movements that are part of our conscious movement repertoire. In other words, we are used to doing similar movements and we only to set our intention; our body then knows how to engage all of our muscles in order to execute the required action.

In tango walking technique, the movements are so broken up and isolated that are outside the average person’s movement repertoire. We simply are not used to braking up each step into several smaller movements and even though are body is able of achieving this controllably, we do not hold a conscious circuit of execution.

And so, it is in this way natural for most people to look “funny” as they attempt to break a step up and change it in some way than the way they already walk, just like it is natural to stall the car or make it move in a jerky manner when you begin learning how to drive.

The point to all this is that things are much easier when you begin from “what works” and this is what Javier did for us in that hour and a half.

He started out from what is already working: we all knew how to walk on the street and by doing this, he didn’t have to do things consciously… he accessed the unconscious circuit that all of us already had and which organizes our body in order for us to walk.

The result? We all walked smoothly and in balance. I mean, how many times have you seen people walk in a jerky way or lose their balance while the walk (without tripping on something that is)?

Is that enough to be able to dance tango as elegantly and controllably as some of the best dancers out there?

Certainly not; by the same token, movements like voleos are not in our every day movement repertoire.

However, it’s the most solid foundation to build on.

By starting from what is already working you are able to access all your existing resources and building up on them or making them work even better will be a smooth and natural process.

If you are a teacher: begin from what already works for your students. Think of those situations in life that they use the same sort of movement and have them do it. I have had greater success applying this concept with complete beginners over 4-5 lessons than other more experienced teachers have had with beginners in months.

If you are a student: use this to your own advantage! If you are learning a movement that is new to you in tango, mentally go through your life and find a situation that you would need to do this movement and simulate it! Make up the scenario as a fun exercise that you and your partner can do, and do it. Then, build up on it, in small steps, until you can apply it in tango.

If you start from “what works”, it’s guaranteed that your progress will be faster by several orders of magnitude.