Kurznotiz 48: Tom Tabaczynsky
Manche Satire schreibt sich praktisch von selbst:
Nachdem der bekannte Tango Blogger Gerhard Riedl seit vielen Jahren betont, wie wichtig es für ihn ist, beim Tanzen möglichst viel freien Raum zu haben, hat er nun auf seinem Blog einen Artikel veröffentlicht, in dem das genaue Gegenteil beschrieben wird:
Was man auf den Milongas im Zentrum [von Buenos Aires] sieht, sind Tänzer, die sich an eine volle Tanzfläche anpassen. Sie drehen auf der Stelle und rücken dann in der Ronda auf den nächsten freiwerdenden Platz vor. Mehr ist es nicht.
Dieser Tango lässt sich also nur erlernen, indem man im natürlichen Kontext der vollen Milonga tanzt. Der Kontext unterrichtet.
Genau das hatte Klaus Wendel in seinem Blog schon mehrfach beschrieben: Der verfügbare Raum muss beim Tango Argentino (genauso wie in anderen Paartänzen) berücksichtigt werden. Je enger der verfügbare Raum ist, desto bewusster muss man seine Schritte wählen. Und ja: Genau das sollte auch unterrichtet werden.
Riedl hat diesen gut begründeten Beschreibungen von Wendel bisher immer heftigst widersprochen. Deswegen meidet er Encuentros und verunglimpft das Tanzen auf engem Raum. Umso bemerkenswerter ist es, dass er nun auf seinem Blog einen Artikel veröffentlicht, der genau dieses Konzept unterstützt - und er widerspricht mit keinem Wort. Offenbar weiß er inzwischen selber nicht mehr, was er eigentlich will.
Eine Empfehlung zum Schluss: Klaus Wendel hat gerade einen sehr lesenswerten Kommentar zu den Büchern von Tom Tabaczynsky veröffentlicht.
Ich hatte mich in einem früheren Artikel ziemlich kritisch zur Buchwerbung des Autors geäußert.
AntwortenLöschenhttps://milongafuehrer.blogspot.com/2026/07/unplugged-tango.html
Daher hielt ich es für fair, ihn nun einmal selber zu Wort kommen zu lassen.
Ich hätte eine Rezension zu seinen Büchern verfassen sollen, was ich aber abgelehnt habe, da ich kein Englisch-Muttersprachler bin.
Eigentlich hätte die Besprechung Klaus Wendel übernehmen sollen, aber die Herren wurden sich wohl nicht einig.
Was du zu erwähnen vergessen hast: Herr Tabaczinsky hält wenig von Tango-Unterricht.
Aber wie dem auch sei: Wer auf meinem Blog kommentiert, muss nicht meine Ansichten vertreten. Auch dafür gibt es bereits andere Beispiele. Wenn man mir das nun vorwirft, sehe ich es gelassen.
Hallo Gerhard,
LöschenZum Thema "Herr Tabaczinsky hält wenig von Tango-Unterricht.":
Siehe unten: Er sagt ganz ausdrücklich, dass diese Aussage nur für den Tango Milonguero Stil gilt, so, wie er der auf den dicht gepackten Milongas im Zentrum von Buenos Aires getanzt wird. Seine Lernmethode ist also nicht mal ansatzweise anwendbar auf die Art von Tango Argentino, die auf den Milongas hier in Europa getanzt wird.
Liebe Grüße,
Helge
Ich bin da der falsche Ansprechpartner, weil ich einfach Tango tanze.
LöschenAber immerhin scheint der betreffende Autor Wert darauf zu legen, sein Buch in Europa zu vermarkten.
Nein, siehe unten. Er hat bestätigt, dass das Buch für Tango Tänzer in Europa völlig nutzlos ist.
LöschenDann wundere ich mich, dass er so scharf darauf war, sein Buch in Deutschland besprochen zu bekommen.
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LöschenHello Tom,
Löschentwo days ago I spoke with an old friend from Buenos Aires who has been dancing for many, many years and is deeply rooted in the tango scene there. He is not a tango teacher, simply a very good and very experienced dancer. I deliberately do not want to mention his name here. Incidentally, he also knows your name and has heard of you.
We talked about your book and about the idea that Tango Milonguero is a clearly definable, particularly authentic style of tango. He is already very sceptical of that idea. In his view, dancers from outside Buenos Aires are often not really regarded by people within the local scene as part of the same cultural world anyway — not necessarily out of contempt, but because origin, socialisation and everyday participation in that culture cannot simply be copied.
What he finds even more absurd is the idea that, outside Buenos Aires, another group should emerge that believes it dances an even more “original” tango than others and claims the term Tango Milonguero for itself. He simply laughed at the idea that this could be used to define what the “real” tango is. Even within Buenos Aires, terms such as tradition, style and milonguero are used so differently that even insiders do not necessarily mean the same thing by them.
And that is exactly where I have arrived as well: when someone from outside, on the basis of a few tango-tourist impressions, selected observations, books and a particular learning theory, concludes what the real tango is supposed to be, and then dismisses large parts of the worldwide tango culture as “fake” or “garbage”, I can no longer regard that as a serious description of a living culture.
And when, on top of that, you dismiss large parts of tango that do not fit your idea of Tango Milonguero as “garbage”, “fake”, and in some cases not even dancing at all, that is the final straw for me. At that point, you are no longer describing a diverse tango culture; you are simply drawing the boundaries of your own definition.
You have now explicitly counted people like me among those whom encuentros were created to get away from. Fine. Then I will spare you my presence in this discussion from now on.
And after everything you have written here, I will say this just as clearly in parting: as a representative of an open discussion about tango and learning, I can no longer take you seriously.
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AntwortenLöschenSorry Tom, but "the learning process is unconscious" is utter nonsense. No adult learns a foreign language or how to drive a car just by practicing. On the contrary: There are well established processes how to teach a language and there is actually a requirement to formally learn how to drive a car.
LöschenAs Klaus Wendel has pointed out repeatedly, the goal of that learning process is to get the acquired knowledge into your body memory - which is different from the memory in your cortex. All of that is pretty obvious for anyone who has worked with beginners.
Tom, I am quite familiar with the distinction between conscious control, automatization, and implicit learning. Precisely for that reason, I find the conclusion you draw from it problematic.
LöschenThat complex skills such as speaking, driving, or dancing are eventually performed largely without conscious control after sufficient practice is not in dispute. But it does not follow that these skills can only be acquired unconsciously and without structured guidance. In my view, you are conflating the way a skill is ultimately performed with the way it is acquired.
Research on motor learning does not simply recognize an opposition between conscious instruction on the one hand and natural, unconscious learning on the other. Explicit and implicit processes can interact, consciously acquired components can become automatized, and learning environments can be deliberately designed in such a way that adaptive solutions emerge without the teacher prescribing those solutions.
For precisely that reason, I also do not think the statement that a crowded dance floor is “the only way to learn” is scientifically supported. A crowded milonga can be an extraordinarily effective learning environment. But it does not follow that the relevant perceptual and adaptive processes cannot also develop in other deliberately designed learning environments.
Since this subject goes well beyond the scope of a comment, I have written a separate short article in which I examine the distinction between automatization, implicit learning, and teaching in more detail:
[https://www.tangocompas.co/if-we-dont-have-to-think-while-dancing-how-do-we-learn-it/]
And one final point: a theory does not become stronger by describing people who disagree with it as unintelligent, psychologically disturbed, or otherwise deficient. It becomes stronger by answering their arguments.
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LöschenA PhD demonstrates academic qualification, but it does not replace an argument. What matters is not the title someone holds, but whether the specific conclusion logically follows from the evidence presented.
LöschenVehicle control and driving skills are initially learned through guidance: steering, braking, shifting, visual attention, distance management, and traffic rules are explained, consciously practised, and then increasingly automated through experience. The fact that these actions eventually become largely unconscious does not prove that they had to be learned unconsciously in the first place. After all, a completely inexperienced driver is not simply placed in dense urban traffic so that “the road can teach them.” Real traffic is indispensable, but its complexity is normally introduced gradually and with guidance. Driving competence therefore develops through an interplay of instruction, conscious attention, sensorimotor experience, and automation. Automation is not evidence against teaching; it is often the result of something that was first learned consciously and then embodied through experience.
Dear Tom,
LöschenBoth Klaus and I have repeatedly emphasized the importance of practice. Yes, you do need a real lot of practice to learn Tango. Nobody denies that.
However, here we are talking about learning. Which means improving over time. I know quite a number of people dancing tango who no longer take tango lessons. And none of them improves anymore. They dance the same way today as they did a year ago or five years ago or ten years ago. I am not talking about the number of different figures they dance. I am talking about the quality of their steps, of their embrace, of their timing, of their communication within the couple. Which is not surprising: When they don't know what they should be looking for, how can you expect them to work on those little nuances that tell an advanced dancer from a beginner?
So: The experience of a milonga only takes you so far. To really improve, to really keep learning, you need a teacher who consciously points you to the topics worth improving, and who can suggest what you need to do to improve on these topics.
Best regards,
Helge
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LöschenTom, ich schreibe Dir jetzt mal in deutsch, denn Du bist Linguist und benutzt ja auch KI zur Übersetzung:
LöschenDu trägst Deine akademischen Titel wie Patronen im Revolvergürtel und glaubst offenbar, wenn Du damit nur kräftig genug herumballerst, seien danach alle mausetot vor Ehrfurcht. Aber werden Deine Argumente dadurch besser? Werden meine gelebten Erfahrungen aus vierzig Jahren Bewegungs- und Tanzunterricht dadurch zu dummen Einbildungen?
Ich habe Dein Buch und Deine Texte gelesen. Du beschäftigst Dich mit Sprachvermittlung und Lernprozessen. Umso erstaunlicher ist es, dass Du offenbar nicht einmal in der Lage bist, uns Dein eigenes Lernmodell so zu vermitteln, dass wir es nachvollziehen können – obwohl wir keine Laien sind und uns ernsthaft damit auseinandersetzen. Stattdessen bescheinigst Du uns „stupidity and ignorance“, ohne uns überhaupt zu kennen.
Es ist natürlich bequem, wenn die Vermittlung des eigenen Wissens scheitert, die Verantwortung den Schülern, Lesern oder Zuhörern zuzuschieben: Sie hätten es eben nicht verstanden, weil sie zu dumm, ignorant oder fachlich nicht qualifiziert genug seien.
Erstaunlich ist das gerade deshalb, weil Du mit Deinem Buch doch offenbar eine Botschaft vermitteln möchtest – vermutlich sogar eine Alternative dazu, wie Tango gelernt und unterrichtet werden kann. Oder verstehe ich das falsch?
Denn wenn das Dein Anliegen ist, müsstest Du doch gerade in der Lage sein, dieses Modell Menschen verständlich zu machen, die sich seit Jahrzehnten mit Tango, Bewegung und Lernen beschäftigen. Stattdessen erklärst Du diejenigen, die Deinen Schlussfolgerungen nicht folgen, zu „stupid“ und „ignorant“.
Oder besteht die eigentliche Botschaft am Ende darin, der Tangowelt zu erklären, dass Tangolehrer Narzissten seien, dass Schüler ihr Geld für Unterricht zum Fenster hinausgeworfen hätten und dass sie ohnehin keinen „echten“ Milonguero-Tango lernen könnten, weil dieser angeblich nur unter ganz bestimmten Bedingungen auf überfüllten Milongas in Buenos Aires entstehen kann?
Dass wir Nicht-Porteños keinen historischen Originaltango aus Buenos Aires tanzen, braucht uns niemand in einem Buch zu erklären. Das dürfte dem überwiegenden Teil der weltweiten Tangoszene vollkommen klar sein – und vielen ist es schlicht egal. Sie tanzen Tango, weil sie Freude daran haben. Sie gehen zum Unterricht, weil sie merken, dass sie dadurch etwas lernen, sicherer werden, mehr Möglichkeiten bekommen oder besser mit ihren Partnern tanzen können.
Und diese Menschen sind auch keine hilflosen Abhängigen ihrer Lehrer. Sie sind erwachsene, mündige Menschen. Sie können jederzeit entscheiden, ob sie einen Kurs besuchen, den Lehrer wechseln oder ganz aufhören. Umgekehrt müssen Tangolehrer ihre Schüler nicht psychologisch an sich binden. Solange Menschen tanzen lernen wollen, wird es Menschen geben, die Unterricht anbieten – und Schüler, die freiwillig dafür bezahlen.
Vielleicht überschätzt Du nicht nur die Schädlichkeit von Unterricht, sondern unterschätzt zugleich die Mündigkeit der Menschen, die ihn freiwillig in Anspruch nehmen.
Und deshalb noch einmal die einfache Frage: Wenn Dein Modell tatsächlich eine Alternative sein soll – warum gelingt es Dir dann nicht, diese Alternative zu vermitteln, ohne diejenigen abzuwerten, die Dir widersprechen?
Ist das Dein Lehrmodell?
First of all I have eyes and can clearly see whether a couple dances in a fluent and elegant way interpreting the music or they are dancing off beat in a bumpy way.
LöschenSecond: Tango is freedom. Why would anybody in this world want to restrict himself to dancing in one particular club? Even in Buenos Aires you have a vivid landscape of all kinds of styles. People do crazy things there like men dancing with other men, or people dancing in open embrace using volcadas and other stuff.
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LöschenWell, your books don't really spell out that the learning method you suggest only applies to the tango milonguero style, i.e. only to that tiny little fraction of the tango universe. Which means that the remaining 90+ percent of tango argentino (which includes virtually all milongas here in Europe) require a different approach to learning. Glad that we can agree on that.
LöschenWhat strikes me even more is that you have published your article on Gerhard's blog. He openly despises the tango milonguero style. There are literally hundreds of articles by him where he makes fun of the tango milonguero style. For him, due to its limitations this style can hardly be considered dancing at all.
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LöschenTom, how do you actually know what I do or do not know about tango milonguero culture? You do not know enough about either my experience or my background to simply declare me “completely clueless.” That is not an argument; it is a claim about a person whose knowledge you are not in a position to assess.
LöschenThe more interesting question is therefore this: What exactly do you mean by “tango milonguero culture”? Which milongas, which generation, which social milieu, and which period in Buenos Aires are you referring to? The milonga world there has never been homogeneous. It has changed over the decades, continuously shaped by tourism, teaching, economic pressures, generational change, and different local scenes.
It therefore seems rather absurd to take one very small, historically specific, and today only partially visible segment of Buenos Aires milonga culture and make it the starting point for a worldwide learning model. If this supposedly defining “tango milonguero culture” has to be reconstructed mainly through certain blogs, yet can hardly be encountered in this pure form even by attending milongas in Buenos Aires today, then the question arises: what is your model actually based on — a living contemporary culture, or a retrospectively idealized memory of one particular segment of it?
The smaller and more historically specific the point of departure, the stronger the justification needs to be for why precisely this should serve as a general model for today’s international tango world.
And before telling me that I have no idea about “tango milonguero culture,” please first explain precisely which culture you actually mean.
So you are essentially saying that your books are of no use whatsoever for someone who wants to dance tango in a milonga or a festival in Europe. Glad to see that you finally admit that! This has been my impression all along.
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LöschenTom,
LöschenA small irony on the side: El Beso, of all places — which you use on the cover of your book as a symbol of that milonguero world — is by no means a space free of teaching. A publication by the City of Buenos Aires explicitly describes El Beso as the venue for several milongas and a tango academy. Susana Miller’s “estilo milonguero” was taught there; classes were held almost daily, in addition to a practica. Tango was and still is taught there, sometimes immediately before the milongas. Historically, El Beso was even closely associated with the teaching and dissemination of the so-called “estilo milonguero.”)
This raises an interesting question: does the very real place that you use symbolically for your idea of natural tango milonguero actually contradict the strict separation between teaching and authentic milonga learning that his theory seems to presuppose?
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LöschenTom, I understood exactly this problem — and my teaching developed from precisely that observation.
LöschenI do not first teach figures and then hope that students will somehow manage to fit them into a crowded milonga. I take the opposite approach: I recreate real situations in class as they actually occur at a milonga, and I turn those situations into the task.
For example, a couple moves along an imaginary line of dance. But that line is never really free. Other couples block the way, change direction, or suddenly occupy the space you were about to use. The task is then not: “Now dance figure X,” but rather: What do you do if, as the leader, you are moving in the line of dance with your right leg and suddenly have to stop? And what changes if you are interrupted on the left leg?
From that concrete situation, different possible responses can emerge: shifting back onto the rear leg, using a remate- or cuñita-like solution, organizing the follower around your own position, or using different changes of direction to return to the line of dance. The point is not to memorize a finished figure, but to understand the relationship:
Situation – problem – possible solution – variation – return to the ronda.
For this I partly use structural insights from Mauricio Castro’s work and from the analyses developed by Salas, Naveira, and Frumboli. But I do not teach these structures as abstract systems or as a catalogue of figures. I use them as tools for making real milonga problems understandable and solvable.
So on this point I actually agree with you: The floor rules. The dance floor creates the real tasks.
The difference lies in the pedagogical conclusion we draw from that. You rely on the real dance floor itself to generate the necessary solutions. I reconstruct those same problems in class, initially reduce their complexity, make possible relationships visible, and then let the students increasingly find solutions on their own.
In other words:
I do not teach the figure and hope that it will later work at the milonga. I teach the milonga situation from which the movement becomes meaningful in the first place.
That is exactly why I see no contradiction between teaching and real milonga experience. Good teaching cannot replace the dance floor — but it can prepare people to perceive its problems, understand them, and increasingly solve them independently.
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LöschenPoliteness is also a skill that one might reasonably expect in a discussion. But even that was difficult to detect in my exchange with you.
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LöschenTo make one thing clear: the review was already finished. You, however, apparently never showed much interest in it. It was only after you had largely ignored my questions and it had been decided that the text would be published on Gerhard’s blog that I turned it into my “Thoughts on Tango Teaching | Part 63”, rewrote it and expanded it considerably.
LöschenMy first draft was very friendly and overall positive. It was a short review with only a few critical comments. My questions arose mainly because of the discouragingly rigid tone of your book and because of the far-reaching nature of some of your conclusions. Those points in particular have considerable potential for discussion — as we have now been able to see rather clearly.
My objection was, and still is, quite simple: for me, the persuasiveness of a conceptual model also depends on its practical viability. It has to be open to being tested against concrete situations, counterexamples and alternative possibilities. If a model does not allow for that kind of examination, or simply dismisses everything beyond it as “my ideas”, then — sorry — in the end it, too, remains little more than a stream of thought.
And one more thing: if you expect a blogger to write nothing but an unconditionally positive review, you can simply say so in advance. The blogger can then decide whether they want to write under those conditions at all. But if you expect someone to praise a book whose central claims contradict their own professional experience and, in large part, the entire subject matter of their blog, then you should at least be willing to tolerate a few questions asked privately. If only out of politeness — though, as we have now seen, that does not exactly seem to be your strongest point.
If all you wanted was a friendly promotional text for the book, you could have asked a neutral writer or, these days, simply used AI. But you specifically chose me because of my experience with the Alexander Technique and Contact Improvisation and described me as the “ideal author” for the review. I think it was therefore reasonable for me to assume that my professional assessment in precisely those areas was actually wanted. Otherwise, there would have been little point in choosing me for those reasons in the first place.
Yeah, a guy who has written two completely useless books (by his own words) will surely give you the best advice available about writing books.
LöschenYes, it seems like it.
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LöschenYou yourself said:
Löschen- There are people dancing tango. These people don't need books because they learn everything they need to know in a milonga.
- On the other hand there are people who listen to teachers and read books. They don't dance tango.
So why would anybody need your books? Obviously, you are only screwing people. Nothing I would be proud of.
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Löschen@Tom - If, on top of that, you need promotional support from tango bloggers who, by your own assessment, neither dance tango nor know anything about it, I almost feel a little used in hindsight. The strategy didn’t exactly work out with me, though.
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LöschenMy short review, in retrospect: The real blind spot in your book lies before the theory itself: how do you actually know that tango in Buenos Aires was learned in the way your model describes? After a comparatively short period of personal experience there, it is difficult to judge whether these learning processes were really the historical and cultural basis of how tango was transmitted — or whether you are retrospectively applying a learning theory to what you observed.
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LöschenTom, I agree with you on one point: I recognise a distinct somatic quality of movement in many good dancers in Buenos Aires, but also in good dancers elsewhere. I have often wondered where they learned it. My own experiences, however, have been very mixed. Some people seemed to bring an exceptional quality of movement with them, while I have also known poor dancers who never took lessons and learned exclusively at milongas. For example, I once met a 16-year-old exchange student from Buenos Aires who had never learned tango, yet was immediately able to lead a partner closely and surprisingly naturally. That is interesting, but it does not prove that he learned according to a Paxton or somatics model. It only shows that his movement could be described in those terms.
LöschenThere is another factor: someone who dances at milongas several times a week, often with familiar partners and under similar conditions, is training intensively even without formal lessons. I have also experienced milongas outside Buenos Aires, for example in Spain, where the level of dancing was extremely high. Nor does observing the quality of experienced dancers provide us with a learning model for beginners, because it does not explain how beginners actually get there.
So this is where my main objection lies: where is the independent evidence that somatics and Paxton actually describe how tango milonguero was learned and transmitted in Buenos Aires, rather than being a retrospective theoretical interpretation of what you observed? Could this movement quality not equally be the result of years of regular practice, familiar partners and constant adaptation to the same social and spatial environment?
And I am also not convinced by the idea of a “teacher cartel”. Teachers normally compete with one another and have to survive through the quality of their teaching, their dancing and their ability to retain students. That looks much more like a competitive market than a cartel.
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LöschenHi Tom, I have now published my detailed review of Somatic Milonguero.
LöschenThe text is in German. If you would like to read it, please simply have ChatGPT or another translation tool translate it into English. After all the work on the book and the review, I currently do not have the energy to produce a complete English version as well.
The review tries to examine your argument as a whole model rather than just picking out isolated passages.
Best regards,
Klaus
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AntwortenLöschenI guess you are talking about your own stupidity and ignorance. Yes, indeed, this is truly depressing to see.
LöschenJa, der Diskussionsstil von Tom ist etwas widersprüchlich: Einerseits verlangt er bei Widerlegungen eine wissenschaftliche Herangehensweise, andererseits benimmt er sich wie ein trotziger Schüler. Letzteres macht ihn nicht gerade glaubwürdiger.
LöschenPS:
LöschenPerhaps part of the problem is that Tabaczynski understands his book differently from the way many readers perceive it. On the one hand, Somatic Milonguero reads like the outline of an alternative approach to learning tango; on the other, it also seems to be an attempt to bring together different ideas from linguistics, somatics, and learning theory and put them forward for discussion. If the latter is his main intention, that is perfectly legitimate. But then the discussion should be especially open to counterexamples, practical experience, and objections from other fields.
A theory does not gain scientific weight by treating only those with the same academic background as competent discussion partners. On the contrary: if it aims to say something meaningful about how tango is learned, it must also stand up to the reality of dancers and teachers who have been working with precisely these learning processes for decades.
Perhaps what is meeting here is not simply theory and practice, but two different ideas about how theory should allow itself to be tested by practice.
See, this is exactly where we differ. I have yet to see someone here in Europe who dances convicingly and has not had professional teachers. This may be different for people who dance in some specific club in downtown Buenos Aires. But why would I care about that? I live in Europe and I dance in Europe.
LöschenI had a discussion once with your new buddy Gerhard Riedl about that. He claimed that he knows quite a number of ladies who dance in the champon league (his wording) of tango.
I checked some ladies I consider to dance in the European champions league and here is what I found out: All of them have received 20+ years of dancing lessons, cf. https://helgestangoblog.blogspot.com/2024/08/kurznotiz-20-in-der-champions-league.html
With that in mind, I keep my position that teachers are neccessary. Therefore, we should honor (and not despise) all of these teachers who care about their students and provide a complete learning environment, i.e.
- teach classes
- give private lessons
- organize practica
- organize milongas on a regular basis
The thing you like to call the "teacher cartel" is just common sense to everybody who is not driven by ideological furor.
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LöschenHere we agree: Tango milonguero is also completely irrelevant for me (and every other tango dancer I know). I won't miss anything if you guys imprison youselves in some ghetto in downtown Buenos Aires. Go ahead. Good luck finding enough co-fighters to preserve the tango milonguero culture.
LöschenI just don't understand why you are making such a fuss aboout it.
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LöschenCan you be a little more specific on that discussion, please? I have found Daniel's account on Facebook but I don't see any discussion going on there.
LöschenOn the number of dancers: He lists thousands of events over a period of 17 years. But how do you know how many people attend these events? As dancers usually attend several events each year, there could be just a few hundred different people to fill that number of events.
Just a few words about Tom's last comment above:
LöschenThe Investiture Controversy of 1076 already displayed an astonishingly modern pattern of debate: "You consider us ignorant and illegitimate? Then we no longer consider you legitimate either."
Some 950 years later, there is no need to go to Canossa anymore. A comments section will do.
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LöschenHello Tom,
Löschenyes, I have read your book several times, had it translated, checked sources and questioned individual claims. My problem is not that I failed to read it, but that I consider some of your basic assumptions questionable or simply wrong.
What I find remarkable is that you publicly accuse me of not having read the book, while you yourself refused to read my response to it.
I do not question your academic qualifications. What I do question is your style of discussion, which in my view damages the very credibility you keep appealing to.
And one simple question remains: if you are now asking whether I read the book, why did you previously state publicly that I had not?
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Löschen• Nachdem ich nun Tom Tabaczynskis eigentlichen Motive hier deutlich gelesen habe, ziehe ich nun folgende Schlussfolgerung aus seinem Kommentar…
AntwortenLöschenSpart Euch dieses Buch!
• Having now read Tom Tabaczynski’s actual motives here quite clearly, I draw the following conclusion from his comment…
Save yourselves the trouble of reading this book!
Deutsche Version: https://www.tangocompas.co/spart-euch-dieses-buch/
Englische Version: https://www.tangocompas.co/save-yourself-the-trouble-of-reading-this-book/
Ein kleines Resümee zum Schluss:
AntwortenLöschenIm Nachhinein muss ich Gerhard Riedl fast dankbar sein. Mit seinem großzügigen Angebot an Tom Tabaczynski hat er uns ein hübsches Kuckucksei ins Nest gelegt. Und wie Kuckuckseier das so an sich haben, sah es zunächst ganz harmlos aus: Good Will, ein bisschen Austausch, eine Buchrezension. Bemerkenswert war allerdings schon damals, dass Riedl einem Autor Platz für eine weitgehend KI-fabrizierte Rezension einräumte, obwohl dessen Vorstellungen von Tango und Unterricht seinen eigenen Positionen in wesentlichen Punkten geradezu entgegenstehen.
Tom suchte offenbar Zustimmung und Reichweite bei Bloggern, die er für kompetent hielt. Auch mich hatte er zunächst freundlich angesprochen. Als sich dann herausstellte, dass ich sein Buch nicht einfach lobend begleiten würde, sondern seine Thesen tatsächlich prüfen wollte, änderte sich der Ton erheblich. Aus einer Buchdiskussion wurde schließlich ein langer Kommentarstrang, in dem Tabaczynski nicht nur mich, sondern große Teile der internationalen Tangoszene als „fake“, „garbage“, „clueless“ oder gleich als eigentliches Problem bezeichnete.
Ich habe mich dabei bemüht, seine Argumente und sein Buch zu kritisieren, nicht seine Person. Dass ich seinen öffentlichen Diskussionsstil irgendwann ebenfalls zum Thema gemacht habe, halte ich für legitim: Wer ein Buch mit weitreichenden Thesen veröffentlicht und sich anschließend in der Diskussion mit persönlichen Abwertungen verteidigt, beeinflusst nun einmal selbst, wie glaubwürdig seine Argumentation wahrgenommen wird.
Und Riedl? Der stand während der eigentlichen Diskussion bemerkenswert sicher hinter dem Zaun. Obwohl viele meiner Einwände gegen Tabaczynskis Vorstellungen vermutlich sehr viel näher an Riedls eigener Auffassung vom Tango liegen als Toms Positionen, beschränkte er sich weitgehend darauf, die Zahl der Kommentare zu bestaunen und das Geschehen als eine Art öffentliches Spektakel zu kommentieren. Sinngemäß: Schaut mal, wie sie sich prügeln.
Das kann man machen. Ein wenig schäbig finde ich allerdings, was danach kam. Als meine Rezension schließlich veröffentlicht war und damit eine ausführliche sachliche Grundlage vorlag, setzte Riedl sich nicht etwa mit deren Argumenten auseinander. Stattdessen sammelte er sorgfältig die persönlichen Beleidigungen, die Tabaczynski im Verlauf der Diskussion gegen mich ausgestoßen hatte, übersetzte sie und präsentierte sie genüsslich seinem Publikum. Nicht weil sie, wie er selbst einräumt, „inhaltlich etwas bringen“, sondern weil sie „Spaß machen“ Er wollte nur nochmal eben damit ein Schlammbad nehmen.
Das ist ein bemerkenswerter journalistischer Maßstab.
Wer eine Auseinandersetzung offensichtlich nicht inhaltlich führen konnte, kann natürlich trotzdem darüber berichten. Aber zwischen Beobachtung und Gaffen gibt es einen Unterschied. Wer sich während einer schwierigen Diskussion in Deckung hält und anschließend die herumliegenden Beschimpfungen einsammelt, hat sich eben auch entschieden, welche Rolle er spielen möchte.
In diesem Sinne war die ganze Angelegenheit immerhin aufschlussreich. Über Tom Tabaczynskis Buch habe ich viel gelernt. Über seinen Diskussionsstil ebenfalls. Und über manche Blogger vielleicht sogar noch ein bisschen mehr.
Gut, dass ich das jetzt einfach so stehen lassen kann.
Zum Thema "Hat er [gemeint ist Riedl] uns ein hübsches Kuckucksei ins Nest gelegt":
LöschenIch glaube nicht, dass das von ihm so geplant war. Woher hätte er wissen sollen, dass ich seinen Gastbeitrag in einem Blog Beitrag verspotten würde?
Ich denke vielmehr, dass er nach dem Motto vorgegangen ist: "Der Feind meines Feindes ist mein Freund." Und nachdem er seit vielen Jahren auf einsamer Flur steht mit seiner Behauptung, dass man Tango auch ohne Unterricht lernen kann, kam ihm Tom gerade Recht. Dass Tom sich auf einen winzigen Ausschnitt des Tango Universums bezieht, hat er dabei elegant unter den Tisch fallen lassen. Das erwähnt er in keinem einzigen seiner Beiträge.
Als die Diskussion hier dann hochgekocht ist, hat er sehr schnell gemerkt, dass er inhaltlich nichts beitragen kann. Was bleibt ihm dann anderes übrig, als über den Stil der Diskussion zu schreiben?
Bevor hier die Legenden überhandnehmen: Das Ganze begann damit, dass ich vor über einem Monat Toms Buchwerbung veralbert habe: https://milongafuehrer.blogspot.com/2026/07/unplugged-tango.html
LöschenAls der Autor sich dann wegen einer Buchrezension an mich wandte, lehnte ich ab, da Englisch nicht meine Muttersprache ist. Ich hielt ich es dann für aber fair, Tabaczynski wenigstens mit einem Gastbeitrag zu Wort kommen zu lassen.
Auf solche Artikel nehme ich inhaltlich keinen Einfluss. Wer halbwegs sachlich bleibt, ein interessantes Thema wählt und mehr als 500 Wörter (aber weniger als 1500) hinbekommt, ist willkommen.
„Feind“ ist für mich keine Kategorie. Etwas Respekt darf auch da sein – „Gegner“ reicht doch!
@Riedl – jetzt wird also schon über den Stein des Anstoßes diskutiert, der die Lawine ins Rollen gebracht hat. Riedl möchte also wenigstens für den Beginn der Lawine Anerkennung. Gut, die sei ihm gegönnt.
LöschenAn der Rolle, die er danach gespielt hat, ändert das allerdings wenig. Während die eigentliche Diskussion längst inhaltlich ziemlich komplex geworden war, blieb er lieber am Rand stehen und kommentierte Zahl und Heftigkeit der Beiträge – ungefähr wie ein Gaffer, der sich an der Prügelei erfreut, solange er selbst nicht hineinmuss. Am Ende sammelte er dann noch den „Unfallschrott“ ein, nämlich Toms Beleidigungen, und verwertete ihn erneut als Munition für die nächste kleine Schlammschlacht.
Das ist vielleicht tatsächlich das ökonomische Prinzip seines Blogs: eine Art Abfallverwertung der Internet-Fails, aufbereitet nach dem Motto „BILD dir eine Riedl-Meinung“. Das funktioniert gut, solange sich etwas zuspitzen, verspotten oder personalisieren lässt. Schwieriger wird es offenbar dort, wo eine Diskussion so komplex wird, dass sie möglicherweise auch das eigene Mindset infrage stellen könnte. Dann steigt Riedl gedanklich lieber aus und macht aus dem Inhalt Unterhaltung.
Mit „Feind“ hat das übrigens nichts zu tun. Dafür müsste ich ihn viel ernster nehmen. Gegner wäre schon fast zu viel. Zuschauer mit Kommentarfunktion trifft es besser.
Sie haben es erfasst: Mein Blog dient der Unterhaltung, nicht dem Rechthaben.
LöschenDer Eiertanz, den Sie mit zig Artikeln zu Autor und Buch aufgeführt haben, war wirklich eindrucksvoll. Da schreiben sich Satiren fast von selber.
Wenn einem eine Rezension angeboten wird, schreibt man sie halt oder lässt es. Punkt. Aber warum einfach, wenn es auch kompliziert geht?
Vor allem aber – wir ahnen es – bin ich nun wieder schuld. Da sind die Rollen klar verteilt.
Herr Riedl, offenbar haben Sie trotz jahrelanger Auseinandersetzungen den grundlegenden Unterschied zwischen unseren beiden Blogs immer noch nicht verstanden.
LöschenSie schreiben nun ausdrücklich, Ihr Blog diene „der Unterhaltung, nicht dem Rechthaben“. Das erklärt tatsächlich einiges. Nur sollten Sie diesen Maßstab nicht auf meinen Blog übertragen. Ich habe nirgendwo behauptet, Unterhaltung sei dessen Zweck. Ich schreibe über Dinge, die ich im Tango für fachlich, pädagogisch oder kulturell relevant halte – und zwar so ausführlich, kurz, einfach oder kompliziert, wie das jeweilige Thema es verlangt. Ob das besonders unterhaltsam ist, interessiert mich dabei herzlich wenig. Auch Zugriffszahlen sind für mich kein redaktionelles Kriterium, obwohl sie sich im Vergleich mit Ihrem Blog durchaus sehen lassen können.
Mein Blog ist ein Fachblog über Tango. Genau deshalb habe ich mich mit Tabaczynskis Buch nicht nach dem Schema „Rezension schreiben oder lassen. Punkt.“ beschäftigt. Während der Auseinandersetzung entstanden Fragen über Unterricht, motorisches Lernen, Somatik, Improvisation, Milongakultur, soziale Lernräume und die historische Entwicklung des Tango. Daraus wurden mehrere Beiträge, weil mehrere unterschiedliche Themen entstanden waren. Man kann das kompliziert finden. Man könnte es allerdings auch schlicht Diskussion nennen.
Bei Ihrem Blog sehe ich inzwischen einen anderen Schwerpunkt. Tango liefert häufig nur noch den Anlass, während die eigentliche Attraktion in Zuspitzung, Personalisierung und möglichst skurrilen Fundstücken besteht – von „Hüpfburg-Keilereien“ bis zu den immer neuen Beiträgen über mich oder Stefanie Stenzel. Das dürfen Sie selbstverständlich machen. Nur ist es dann etwas merkwürdig, ausgerechnet einem Fachblog vorzuhalten, er beschäftige sich zu ausführlich mit seinem Fachgebiet.
Und genau deshalb halte ich auch Ihre Vorstellung vom „Eiertanz“ für aufschlussreich. Wo Sie eine möglichst einfache Pointe erwarten, versuche ich einen Gegenstand zu verstehen. Wo eine Diskussion komplizierter wird, schreiben Sie offenbar lieber die Satire dazu. Das ist Ihr publizistisches Konzept – inzwischen haben Sie es ja selbst bestätigt.
Dass hohe Zugriffszahlen dabei ein Qualitätsbeweis seien, würde ich übrigens nicht annehmen. Boulevard funktioniert seit jeher hervorragend über Neugier, Empörung und die Lust am Zuschauen. Oder, um bei meinem letzten Bild zu bleiben: Auch bei einem Unfall stehen meistens mehr Gaffer als Gutachter herum.
Sie dürfen also gerne weiter unterhalten. Ich werde weiterhin über Tango schreiben.
PS: Und noch etwas: Sie schreiben, Ihr Blog diene „der Unterhaltung, nicht dem Rechthaben“.
LöschenAusgerechnet Sie sagen das? Sie haben die Rechthaberei über Jahre geradezu zur Blog-Kultur erhoben. Mir fällt jedenfalls kaum ein Fall ein, in dem Sie einen eigenen Fehler offen eingeräumt, eine Behauptung zurückgenommen oder eine Position aufgrund besserer Argumente ernsthaft revidiert hätten.
Schauen Sie dagegen ruhig einmal in meinen Blog. Dort finden sich immer wieder Reflexionen darüber, wo ich meine eigenen früheren Positionen verändert habe, wo ich etwas heute anders sehe oder wo ich mich fachlich schlicht geirrt habe. Ich halte das nicht für eine Schwäche, sondern für einen selbstverständlichen Bestandteil ernsthafter Auseinandersetzung.
Und ausgerechnet Sie wollen mir nun erzählen, bei Ihnen gehe es gar nicht ums Rechthaben?
Da lachen ja die Hühner.
I deleted my comments to stop receiving this annoying conversation in my email box and go back to working on my book. I still get a digest.
LöschenGerhard is correct: why not just write a proper review of my book, and then add your objections at the end?
Klaus's policy: why write 200 words when I can write 2000? Utterly incapable of writing in a concise and succinct way. Loves to talk and teach.
I realised what his two mistakes are about my book: confusion of process and product, and working with students who went through the salon style training and now he needs to solve their 'problems'. All his objections trace back to the fact that they already have dysfunctional movement and mental habits acquired in the tango lessons. So the argument circular.
Also Helge's argument is circular: why bother with a 'tiny' community of tango dancers. The tango milonguero community is the major group in BsAs but is a minority outside because all the teaching is salon style tango which limits the development of tango milonguero.
That is why it is essential for us to get rid of the salon style teaching as 'foundation'. It's the opposite of the foundation.
Salon style and tango milonguero are different dances and have absolutely nothing in common.
This is my argument in Tango Unplugged, this conversation helped me to clarify it:
Löschen- The foundational training for tango is the salon style syllabus.
- This is training in performative dancing, derived from stage dancing.
- It establishes two things in the students: a mental attitude to learning and dancing, and certain movement habits (like the tango walk, crossing with the heel, extending the leg out, and separation)
- Then close embrace tango is taught as a technical add-on on top of that foundation.
- The foundation contradicts the close embrace and makes it 'difficult'
- Then teachers of close embrace tango like Klaus have to deal with the problems in many privates with a lot of explanation and correction, which would not be necessary if the students were not subjected to salon style training to begin with;
- This leads to close embrace tango being even more cumbersome and difficult than salon style tango; it is close embrace tango classero;
- Also, close embrace tango classero imports the culture of salon style and not the codes of tango milonguero in BsAs, such as judging people's dancing based on how they look, dancing in an overactive and exhibitionist way, inadequate attention to music, and direct invitation;
- Salon style tango teachers 'flood the zone' with their images and videos, to prove that their dancing is the most common way of dancing tango, when really it is just learning and practicing, no one actually dances it, they always study it and perform it, same as ballroom dancing.
- All of this limits the growth of genuine tango milonguero and causes it's marginalisation.
- The solution for tango milonguero to completely separate from salon style by clarifying in its promotion that these are completely different dances, and creating it's own separate recruitment and beginner training system that does not involve salon style at all at any point in the process.
- Tango milonguero organisers make it clear in their promotional material that social tango milonguero is a completely different dance, and not just a different 'style', because the culture and the movement have nothing in common, and the movements and attitudes of salon style cannot be imported into tango milonguero but have to be left behind.
- Klaus believe that what he is teaching is continuous with what Helge is teaching, which means that he is not teaching tango milonguero, but close embrace tango classero.
Na ja, besser die Hühner lachen als sie enden am Spieß!
LöschenKlar, ich stehe zu meinen Ansichten und muss nicht immer wieder Artikel verstecken. Allerdings überlasse ich meinen Leserinnen und Lesern ihr eigenes Urteil und beschimpfe sie nicht als Gaffer und Bildzeitungs-Konsumenten.
@Tom - (the penultimate comment)
LöschenSo far, I have deliberately kept a moderate tone in my comments. But if you prefer your own tone, let me put it more directly:
Tom, this is bullshit bingo.
You are once again inventing things about my teaching instead of dealing with reality. I mainly teach people who have never danced before, and I have been successful with that for years. So your claim that my objections come from having to “repair” students damaged by salon-style teaching is simply fantasy.
You still owe the essential proof: where are the people who demonstrably learned according to your theory?
Show them.
And send me a video of someone who, according to you, clearly dances tango milonguero. Because despite all these pages, all these distinctions and all these grand claims, nobody seems able to explain concretely what the actual difference is from what you call salon style.
This is exactly Brandolini’s law in action: it takes vastly more effort to refute bullshit than to produce it. I spent a great deal of time reading your book carefully, thinking through your arguments and writing detailed objections. And now I am told that all of that was supposedly unnecessary because I should simply have written a short review.
Until you provide us with any visible evidence, my review comes down to a very simple conclusion: you are writing about a fantasy product. “Tango milonguero” is simply whatever you imagine it to be.
If that was what you wanted, why didn’t you say so?
I could have saved myself the work.
Not 2,000 words. Not 200.
Two words would have been enough:
Biggest bullshit.
And here is my counter-question: why did you need 58 pages to explain something that can apparently be summed up in one word?
Bullshit.
And with Gerhard, you seem to have found exactly the right person to talk to — the two of you are arguing on much the same level. Gratulation!
Herr Riedl, Sie verdrehen wieder einmal den Punkt.
LöschenIch „verstecke“ keine Artikel, weil ich meine Meinung nicht mehr vertreten könnte, sondern weil ich meinen Blog thematisch aufräume und bestimmte Auseinandersetzungen nicht mehr dauerhaft auf der Startseite haben möchte. Das habe ich ausführlich erklärt.
Aber es gehört offenbar zu Ihrer recht miesen Strategie, längst widerlegte Behauptungen immer wieder neu zu streuen und mich damit zu zwingen, sie jedes Mal erneut richtigzustellen.
Und ich habe auch nicht Ihre Leser pauschal als Gaffer oder BILD-Zeitungs-Konsumenten beschimpft. Ich habe beschrieben, dass Boulevard und persönliche Konflikte Aufmerksamkeit erzeugen – und dass hohe Zugriffszahlen deshalb für sich genommen kein Qualitätsmerkmal sind. Das ist etwas völlig anderes. Interessant ist allerdings, dass Sie sich mit Ihrer Reaktion offenbar selbst dieser Kategorie zurechnen.
Aber genau diese Umdeutung passt wiederum ganz gut zu dem Unterschied, über den ich gesprochen habe: Ich schreibe über Inhalte. Sie machen daraus möglichst schnell eine persönliche Pointe.
Ditto. The teachers are teaching bs.
LöschenThey've never had to prove anything other than all the bullshit videos of their bs dancing and bs lessons: bs steps and bs techniques on facebook and youtube and its OBVIOUS THAT NOBODY DOES THAT STUFF AT SALON CANNING OR EL BESO OR ANY OF THOSE MILONGAS.
If the don't have to prove anything I don't have to prove anything either.
If you haven't danced at those milongas then maybe it's time you go there because nothing could be more OBVIOUS.
Why you don't you tell us exactly what it is that you are teaching to beginners, you never specified and instead talk in generalities:
My video based on Paxton (and decades of his research) is OBVIOUSLY closer to Salon Canning dancing than what any teacher is teaching, including Miller or Paz.
PS. Klaus wrote to me:
Löschen"From the beginning, however, I was interested in something beyond steps and figures. I was interested in how movement is organised, how perception changes movement, how balance functions between two people and how communication within a couple can arise without being reduced to a catalogue of signals.
For this reason, my work was influenced quite early by movement approaches such as Feldenkrais and the F. M. Alexander Technique. I worked with Bruce Fertman, founder of the Alexander Alliance in the United States. In 2002 he invited me, together with the Contact Improvisation teacher Gabriele Koch, to Philadelphia for an experimental workshop in which we attempted to bring together Alexander Technique, Contact Improvisation and Argentine tango as an improvisational dance.
One reason Bruce was interested in working with me was that, according to him, I was the first tango teacher who had explained to him a principle of leading that did not begin with the idea of producing predetermined movements in another person.
And this brings me to Teté Rusconi.
I had invited Teté in 1989 and reunited him with Pina Bausch, whom he knew from Buenos Aires. I was present when he attempted to convey tango to dancers from Pina's company. It was a fascinating experience, partly because it was almost a pedagogical disaster.
Teté could dance wonderfully, but he could hardly reproduce or explain what he was doing. If someone asked him to repeat a movement, he often simply did something else. His answer was essentially: rhythm and feeling."
This gives an impression that Klaus understands somatics and Contact Improvisation. But after a few more emails I realised that Klaus actually knows very little about either.
He seems to have none of the theoretical framework either from Paxton or CI even if he worked with people from those disciplines: he himself never read about it or has done it.
He uses unusual categories that do not appear in either somatics or CI.
Instead, his claim to fame is that he worked with some famous choreographers and was able to transmit to them what he thinks Tete does.
But Klaus admits that Tete "could hardly reproduce and explain what he was doing".
How does that not prove my position? I'm on Tete's side!
PPS. Even if my book does not 'prove' that this is how the BsAs dancers learned, at least I am very clear what it is that I am proposing.
LöschenCompare what CI teaches, what I propose, and Klaus's teaching:
1. CI teaches: finger dance, following a point of contact, the small dance, weight sharing
2. Material for the Spine basic forms: walking as spiralling/turning, Aikido exercise, pointing with the sitz bones, pointing with each finger to release the shoulders, releasing the spine with various movements.
3. My adaptation to tango couple dancing: the Paxton material plus following the point of contact at solar plexus (any embrace), weight sharing at solar plexus.
4. Klaus: Differentiation, setting a task without prescribing the solution, contrastive prompts on the follower's path, perceptual guidance in the embrace, error diagnosis, variable reduction, question-asking, re-examination over addition, regular low-input sessions.
The questions that Klaus needs to address with regard to his teaching techniques are:
1. What is the movement being explored (walking, turning, crossing)?
2. What is the task being assigned (waking in a close embrace, turning in an open embrace, etc.)?
3. How do you decide what is an error vs. correct execution:
- e.g. looking, asking how it feels, how do you know that it is wrong if it feels ok,
- how do you know that correct execution will lead to long term competence rather than merely regurgitation on a test that gets forgotten?
4. What sort of embrace is being instructed:
- open, close, how close, leaning/weight sharing,
- how do you account for dancing with people with different body types or levels of experience?
5. how many of these lessons and what is the reasoning behind the length of the training?
6. Could learners simply guide themselves using your tasks after a handful of these lessons?
The fact that Klaus cites choreographers as his claim to fame tells us a lot: the system seems designed primarily for choreographers who use improvisation to create choreography.
But choreography is ultimately designed for visual appeal and is evaluated by visual criteria, even if they utilise somatics/exploration to generate the movements.
Social dancing is different in that only the feeling of the dancers is the benchmark, and if a dancer can get partners even when some teacher thinks that their dancing is boring, wrong or whatever, the teacher has no say in the matter.
By contrast, people who pay to see a performance, even if it's based on improvisational techniques, want to see something worth watching.
Hello Tom,
LöschenI have no intention of continuing this discussion. I have taken the time to read your work carefully and to engage with your ideas, even where I fundamentally disagree. I cannot say the same in return. You repeatedly expect others to understand your position in detail, while showing little interest in understanding theirs. Under those circumstances, a meaningful exchange isn’t possible.
What finally convinced me to step away was your decision to publish excerpts from a private letter I sent you and use them as part of a public argument against me. I wrote that in confidence. I consider that a breach of trust. My position has been stated in my articles. Yours in your book. Readers can draw their own conclusions. I wish you well, but this conversation ends here.
Klaus, I have no idea why you would want to keep that information private if it is true. You didn't write 'for your eyes only'.
LöschenSeems like something to be proud of, other than that in the context of my book it gave a completely wrong impression.
The problem is that(and what the other discussants should know) you implied in the emails that (a) you have good knowledge of somatics and CI, and (b) you are a dancer and/or teacher of tango milonguero, or at least understand what it is.
You implied this by dropping names.
Both of these assumptions are clearly completely false.
I have decided to have a look at your dancing on your Youtube channel.
Not only do you have little understanding of somatics/CI, you do not dance tango milonguero.
So how can you be at all qualified to provide a critique something that you do not really understand?
You have a performance from the 90's which is a competent performance of a style typical of that time (eg., from the Osvaldo Zotto instructional videos).
Completely choreographed, nothing to do with either improvisation, somatics, milonguero or, more importantly, with Tete.
Your more recent performances have some close embrace moments of the V-hold variety, the woman to the side, but you open up the embrace and your partner never raises her arm above your shoulder.
So your entire critique is based on a misrepresentation (aka bs)
My book is entitled Somatic MILONGUERO.
You could not dance your dance at Salon Canning.
Compare your dancing to Tete or Vidort: there is nothing in common.
Vidort doing performance milonguero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t47Wk9spgpU
Tete doing a performance exemplary of milonguero: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ir2fXp6V8WI
Social milonguero at Milonga Parakultural: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Xt7ApHKi4s
As you can see, you can only turn on the spot at these milongas. Your movement would not work.
It's a different dance. We absolutely nothing in common. Milonguero is not a style or some personalities, it is a social context and an approach to tango culture and tango movement, which you clearly do not understand.
So, you can dance at Salon Canning. Great news! Just that 99.99% of the tango universe (including Buenos Aires) would consider this to be pretty boring.
LöschenI wonder why you are making so much fuzz about it. It reminds me of watching the first steps of a toddler. Of course, it's a great achievement. However, all of us know that there still is a really loooooong way to go.
Hallo Tom,
Löschenich beende diese Diskussion jetzt endgültig. Dass Du inzwischen private Korrespondenz veröffentlichst und daraus Material gegen mich konstruierst, ist für mich eine klare Grenzüberschreitung. Ich hatte Dir diese Dinge persönlich geschrieben. Dass Du daraus nun öffentlich eine angebliche Selbstdarstellung ableitest, sagt mehr über Deinen Diskussionsstil als über meine Qualifikation.
Deine Behauptungen über mein Tanzen sind ebenso anmaßend. Du erklärst anhand einiger Vorführungsvideos, ich könne im Salon Canning nicht tanzen. Tatsächlich habe ich dort oft getanzt, kenne das Canning noch aus der Zeit vor Parakultural und war seit den 1990er Jahren mehrfach in Buenos Aires. Ich habe dort völlig unterschiedliche Milongas, Generationen und Tanzweisen erlebt. El Beso und Canning zu den maßgeblichen Orten zu erklären, an denen sich der „richtige“ Tango entscheidet, ist nicht nur herablassend, sondern historisch ziemlich an den Haaren herbeigezogen.
Auch Deine Versuche, meine Kenntnisse über Somatics, Contact Improvisation und Tango nachträglich für „falsch“ zu erklären, sind absurd. Du kennst meinen Hintergrund kaum und hast mehrfach erklärt, meine Texte gar nicht lesen zu wollen. Gleichzeitig verlangst Du von anderen, Dein Buch, Deine Begriffe und Deine Theorie bis ins Detail zu verstehen. Du kannst nicht etwas als falsch verwerfen, das Du selbst gar nicht kennst.
Am Ende bleibt von Deiner großen Theorie für mich erstaunlich wenig übrig: Tango ist ein sozialer Tanz, der sich mit Partner, Musik, Raum und anderen Paaren auf einer realen Tanzfläche bewähren muss. Das weiß jeder regelmäßige Milonga-Tänzer. Daraus eine weltweite Trennung zwischen „genuine tango milonguero“ und angeblich „fake“ Tango zu konstruieren, halte ich inzwischen schlicht für absurd.
Ich bedaure, so viel Zeit in diese Auseinandersetzung investiert zu haben. Der treffendste Untertitel dafür stand bereits in einem meiner früheren Artikel:
Much Ado About Nothing.
Und noch etwas: Bitte unterlasse künftig weitere Kommentare auf diesem Blog, die meine Person, meine angebliche Qualifikation oder Deinen Eindruck von meinem Tanzen zum Gegenstand machen. Wenn Du über Deine Theorie sprechen willst, dann sprich über Deine Theorie.
Noch ein Rat zur endgültigen Bewertung Deines Buches: Stell es doch einmal bei der Academia Nacional del Tango und beim CETBA – dem Centro Educativo del Tango de Buenos Aires, der früheren ‚Universidad del Tango‘ – vor. Dort sitzen Menschen, die sich seit Jahrzehnten systematisch mit Geschichte, Musik, Tanz und Vermittlung des Tango beschäftigen. Mich würde sehr interessieren, wie Deine These dort aufgenommen wird.
Verzeih mir aber noch, wenn ich Deine vermutlich schon feststehende Antwort vorwegnehme: "Academia Nacional del Tango und CETBA gehören selbstverständlich ebenfalls zum Tango-Kartell.“
Für mich ist jetzt Schluss! Lass mich in Ruhe!
Helge: Ditto.
LöschenKlaus & Gerhard, FYI: https://www.unpluggedtango.com/p/salon-style-tango-teachers-are-clueless
PS. Klaus, I make very clear in Chapter 1 what my preferred definition of tango milonguero is.
LöschenI never claimed that my definition is somehow 'objectively true', but anyone who previews my book before paying USD$48 can see how I define it: the dancing at downtown milongas like Parakultural.
Therefore they accept that this interest them unlike Helge and 'most people' whatever that means (did you take a poll Helge or are you pulling this out of your you know what?) do not find it "boring".
Btw. Helge is proof why we really need to go our separate ways. I have no desire to be in the same room with people like that.
Some examples of fake (according to me) tango milonguero:
1. old (Daniel Trenner) : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ozC8aV6lo0 ... really awful, shocking that they learned from Tete.
2. new (Miles): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AEZVeiO4o8Q ... blah blah blah blah
3. new: (Milonguero method) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwTMhP4tPnQ ... not the worst but several problems: back step, crossing, close embrace as process, the idea of 'method'; could be adapted if it's not delivered as 'correct method' , which is the problem with all fake milonguero teaching; the teaching makes it fake.
Absolutely hilarious! Thank you so much for your article on tango unplugged! I haven't laughed that hard for quite a while. Keep going, please!
LöschenKlaus has explained to you a zillion times how movements in tango have developed on both crowded and not-so-crowded milongas. But apparently you are too stupid to understand even the most basic mechanics of social dancing.
Anyway: As you request to watch the videos of other dancers: Where can I find videos of your dancing? I am always eager to watch true maestros like yourself dance.
Helge. I'm only interested in tango milonguero, and no one disputes that close embrace dancing developed on crowded floors.
LöschenSalon style could not develop on crowded floors, obviously; nothing worse than a crowded milonga full of salon style dancers.
The basic mechanics of salon style are obviously different from milonguero; the basic mechanics of salon style are based on performance dancing, esp. Laban Movement Analysis.
Why teaching milonguero as an add-on technique on top of salon style fundamentals cannot work.
Milonguero needs to have its own starter system, and people who went through salon style 'fundamentals' (tango walk, paso basico, cruzada) need to unlearn all of that.
As a rule milonguero dancers don't make videos of their social dancing because we do not evaluate the quality of the dance in terms of visual appeal, only being able to get partners and 'feeling'.
Visual inspection can only identify pragmatic considerations:
- can you step backward at a crowded milonga?
- can you walk at a crowded milonga?
- can a woman tell whether the man is leading a cruzada? etc.
Preview of my movement release video based on Paxton's Material for the Spine: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9NvvfGCZIJc
Different movement and different culture => irreconcilable differences => divorce.
It seems that Klaus is upset with me and blocked me on email after I told him off for quibbling about my book, as he does.
LöschenOn reflection, his point was reasonable, even if delivered in the typical German sledgehammer to the head manner (reminds me of my experience with Lufthansa, never again).
So I added the following paragraph to the introduction to Tango Unplugged to respond to his objection:
"Some people will ask whether my proposals are grounded in 'reality' and what is my experience teaching and organising tango. I first tried my hand at teaching and organising tango around 2002 and have run lessons and milongas several times since that time, making every mistake in the book. Also, over nearly three decades I have danced tango in many cities around the world, including Sydney, Seoul, Madrid, Barcelona, Istanbul, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Rio de Janeiro, Tokyo, Taipei, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Bali, Bangkok, Warsaw, Krakow, and probably some others. So I have seen other people also make every mistake in the book, and some (much fewer) people getting things right. This book is really in the genre of the things I wish I had been told before I wasted valuable time and money making all those mistakes, advertising and teaching lessons which did not go anywhere. Individually, each proposal will make your efforts more fruitful, and collectively can make real difference between success and failure. Whether they work depends on your individual circumstances, in particular, the resources available to you, and competent execution of each individual element. Some of my proposals are unorthodox in the tango world, but that is precisely the point: doing what most people are currently doing in teaching and organising tango is more likely than not a recipe for failure."
Response to Klaus's critique of my book: https://www.unpluggedtango.com/p/tango-teachers-critique-of-somatic
LöschenTom,
Löschenich glaube, wir müssen die einzelnen Einwände gar nicht mehr Punkt für Punkt durchgehen. Der entscheidende Grundsatz liegt für mich inzwischen woanders:
Je komplexer ein alternatives soziales Modell wird, desto schwieriger wird seine praktische Umsetzung. Solche Systeme scheitern oft nicht an der Idee, sondern an Organisation, Ökonomie, menschlichen Eitelkeiten, Gewohnheiten, lokalen Bedingungen und daran, dass freiwillige Mitwirkung nie dauerhaft planbar ist.
Je mehr Menschen beteiligt sind, desto stärker verändert sich ein Modell. In jeder Stadt entstehen andere Prioritäten, andere Regeln, andere Gewohnheiten und schließlich andere Formen. Dann stellt sich zwangsläufig die Frage: Wer entscheidet eigentlich noch, was dem ursprünglichen Modell entspricht?
Ohne Kontrolle zerfällt das System in lokale Varianten. Mit Kontrolle braucht man Standards, Autoritäten und letztlich wieder ein System, das genau dem ähnelt, was Du am bestehenden Tango kritisierst.
Für mich ist das der zentrale Widerspruch:
Ein freiheitliches Tango-Modell kann seine Reinheit nicht erzwingen, ohne seine Freiheit zu verlieren.
Deshalb halte ich weitere Detaildiskussionen für wenig sinnvoll. Nicht die Analyse des Problems trennt uns, im Gegenteil – das stimme ich mit Dir in vielen Punkten zu –, sondern die Frage, ob Dein Gegenmodell praktisch tragfähig ist.
PS: Vielleicht solltest Du Dir noch einmal Animal Farm ansehen – oder besser noch Orwells Buch lesen. Es geht dort nicht darum, eine gute Idee zu verurteilen, sondern darum, was menschliche Unzulänglichkeiten, Machtinteressen und Eitelkeiten aus einer guten Idee machen können. Vielleicht bin ich durch meine Erfahrungen inzwischen zu pessimistisch geworden. Deshalb brauchen wir Idealisten wie Dich – aber eben auch ein gesundes Misstrauen gegenüber jeder Idee, die zu viel Disziplin und Selbstlosigkeit von Menschen voraussetzt.
LöschenHave the other people noticed how Klaus keeps changing ground? His lates move is 'complexity' if I understand the German translation correctly. I am still waiting for his book to get the simple linear way to tango. This proves beyond any doubt that he never intended to do anything other than a hatchet job on my book.
LöschenYou are being quite contradictory: first you complained about my “wall of text,” and now I am apparently supposed to write an entire book.
LöschenBy now I have devoted five articles to your theory — three of them as a favour because you asked me to — plus a detailed review of Somatic Milonguero and a total of 16 comments, many of them quite long. So I have already spent more time on you and your theory than, in my view, it really deserved.
What you actually want, you could simply say openly: you want a largely positive assessment. You are not going to get that from me.
Why not do what you originally suggested yourself, and what you did with Gerhard? Have Claude write a review and then find a blogger willing to publish it as a guest post.
By now, I can in fact only warn any blogger against getting involved in this game. Not because of your book, but because of how aggressive and demanding you have become. You do not leave it at a review or an objection; you keep demanding ever more engagement with your texts, and when someone disagrees with you, you increasingly make it personal.
Tom,
LöschenNo matter how you phrase it: Klaus is a living example contradicting your main thesis. He has learned tango through what you call "Tango classero" and still has danced in both Salon Canning and in El Beso. And as Klaus also has explained, El Beso themselves offer tango classes.
So, no: There is absolutely no sense following your ideas. Tango classero will also enable you to dance in the downtown BsAs clubs.
Regards,
Helge
Klaus:
Löschen1. You need to write your book to organise your ideas and have other people test them. AI can be useful to turn verbose and rambling prose into pithy, concise and succinct writing.
2. Your objections were often useful to help me sharpen my arguments against people like you, but I did not expect such hostile and highly biased delivery.
The main problem is repeated fallacies of argumentation: strawman arguments, arguments from authority, etc. and that you did not evaluate the book within its stated scope which is: how tango milonguero movement likely emerged.
On your blog your wrote in response to me:
"You keep replacing arguments with insults, motives and conspiracy-like claims. ...
However, your aggressive response makes me wonder whether you really are just an idealist, or whether you have a tendency to turn your ideology into a kind of “Tango Stalinism.”
3. The support for salon style tango by Argentine government in order to promote tourism, in terms of financing and infrastructure, is well-documented and not a conspiracy, and I give additional sources in Tango Unplugged. Milongueros have been basically sidelined and marginalised in this.
4. Support from the Argentine state is more akin to Stalinism (technically it's Peronism) than a free market situation in which salon style needs to compete on an equal footing with tango milonguero, which is my actual goal. Elon Musk defunded USAID and rap disappeared from the top of the Billboard charts. Salon style might go the same way now that Javier Milei is cutting the money flow.
Helge,
LöschenI already addressed the issue of the classes offered at milongas. Correlation does not mean causation.
About Klaus dancing at downtown milongas, here are some questions I have about that:
1. Did Klaus dance the classero stuff on the crowded floor or did he have to adapt?
2. Do other classero dancers have the benefit of working with Tete and travelling to BsAs to see how people dance there?
3. If classero involved practice and correction, how do the teachers communicate which techniques can be adapted. Eg., if the correct technique is driving the hips by pushing through the frame (arms and hands) and this is 'correct' how do the teachers communicate that it is not 'correct' at downtown milonga, and if it is not correct there then when it is correct?
4. If a person is interested in dancing at a crowded milonga like El Beso, what is the purpose of learning the salon style material and technique if in the end they have to adapt it anyway because they can't execute those movements as taught?
I never claimed that classero cannot be adapted, I just question why you need to enter tango via classero if you want to dance milonguero which means not dancing 'correctly'.
Tom, a well-meant piece of advice: the more you try to impress with supposedly typical “classero” techniques, the more it creates the impression that your theoretical constructions are more complex than your practical understanding of tango.
Löschen"your theoretical constructions are more complex than your practical understanding of tango."
LöschenNot my theory. There are two sorts of ways of understanding movement:
1. Kinesthetics and biomechanics
2. Somatics
The question is: which one is more suitable to understand salon style on the one hand, and tango milonguero on the other.
When teachers talk about axis, balance, weight, separation, frame, A-frame, to me that is kinesthetics. I don't find these concepts in somatics. Tango teachers think about dancing in terms of kinesthetic and biomechanical terms well exemplified in Essential Biomechanics of Yeleziveta: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPiXlqxqw28.
She's right: people can't keep their balance. But Paxton never mentions balance and does not identify it as a problem. In somatics standing on one leg and trying to balance is not a thing.
How do you define "practical understanding" if what I have is not practical understanding? i didn't start dancing tango last year. 1998 in fact.
PS. Correction: kinesiology, not kinesthetics.
LöschenChatGPT: "Somatics and kinesiology both study human movement, but they approach it from different directions. Somatics begins with the first-person experience of movement. It emphasises bodily awareness, sensation, perception and the subjective experience of inhabiting one's body. Somatic practices such as Feldenkrais or Alexander Technique often use slow, exploratory movement to improve coordination and discover more efficient possibilities for action. Kinesiology, by contrast, generally approaches movement from the third-person perspective. It studies the mechanics, anatomy and physiology of movement: muscles, joints, forces, biomechanics and motor performance. Its emphasis is more analytical and objective. The distinction is not absolute. Both are concerned with improving movement and can draw on anatomy and motor learning. But somatics asks, “What does this movement feel like, and how can awareness change it?” Kinesiology asks, “How does this movement work mechanically and physiologically?” In short: somatics prioritises lived bodily experience; kinesiology prioritises the scientific analysis of movement."
Examples of classero that I provide in my book are Miguel Zotto in a workshop in the early 2000s lining women up and then asking them to hold their arm very stiff and then he went one by one to get their hips going. This was standard way of teaching at the time by Argentinians and this was never advertised as performance training. Separation is commonly observed in videos of teachers on YT and FB. I'm not sure how you can execute that technique without pushing off hands: the man signals it through the hands and the woman executes it by resisting at the hands. Since you are still to publish your book we are yet to find out how maestro Wendel would teach it.
Not my theories and not my understanding, just what everyone can see.
Tom,
LöschenI really hope that you are not serious here. No, you never ever push your dancing partner around using your hands. You always want to have a soft embrace.
There is no need for Klaus to publish a book to explain that topic. The Dinzels have already written an excellent book on the movements in Tango back in 1994.
Regards,
Helge
I'm against separation so the point is moot. I doubt that the average teacher of salon style have read a little known book from 1994 much less applied it's principles.
LöschenThat "little known book" is so famous that you can get it in virtually any language you want. You can even find a (probably illegal) Chinese translation on the web.
LöschenSo, the only thing you are proving here is that you don't even know the basics of basic Tango theory.
Claude:
LöschenThe institutional lineage is stage and studio. Dinzel was a professional performer and choreographer with a company, and the Estudio Dinzel was a training academy producing dancers for exhibition and teaching careers. The notation project only makes sense in that world: you write choreography down so it can be reproduced, taught, and set on other bodies. Nobody at a milonga needs a script.
The qualification is that the book does not present itself as stage tango. It presents itself as a theory of the dance as such — what happens when a couple dances tango, full stop. It claims improvisation as the essence, insists the codified figure is a degradation, and treats the embrace as constitutive.
You have not heard of it because it was published in Spanish by Corregidor in a small run, the English bilingual edition came out through a minor imprint six years later and never circulated, and the milonguero literature — McGarrey (Tango and Chaos), Tango Voice, Jantango — has no reason to cite the theoretical wing of stage tango except to attack it, which it does not bother to do. It is invisible in English for the same reason most Argentine tango scholarship is.
Comment: sounds like he's on my side, at least on improvisation and degradation.
@Tom
AntwortenLöschenSeparation is not an ideology of salon-style tango, but simply one movement option. Whether it works depends on whether the follower can organise her rotational axis in a stable way, and also on how much freedom of movement she has in the shoulders within the embrace. In a close, leaning embrace, the same movement task can therefore be solved without a pivot, simply as a cross-step. Whether a follower uses separation or not also depends on how large the forward or backward crosses are being led.
It seems to me that you have basically conceded the argument to me (I know you won't admit so much).
LöschenIf separation is not a 'correct' technique, and can be executed without a pivot, and if (what looks like separation) is executed depends on the situation, then it logically follows that it is not a technique at all, but instead a natural swing of the hips that can be observed, and which is emergent within an integrated movement style.
It will happen because tango requires turning and especially women will develop a natural observable hip swing when turning.
It follows (by inference to the best explanation) that probably all the problems students report associated with the pivot in terms of balancing are the product of teaching the pivot (which requires separation) as a 'correct' technique in salon style dancing.
Just replacing this technique with Paxton's walking as spiralling concept would solve 99% of the problems and initiate a new age of tango milonguero.
The pivot + separation concept is a stage technique unsuitable to social dancing in high heels.
Eliminating this technique from teaching of tango it will eliminate the need for all the technique workshops that deal with balance, strengthening, alignment, axis, etc. including Yelezevita's Essential Biomechanics.
Tom,
LöschenI do not fundamentally disagree with you — quite the opposite. There are many things on which I fully agree with you, and separation is one of them.
But there is something you need to know about my own approach. I have always tried to trace tango movements back to the question of how an untrained dancer might originally have developed them. Any movement that requires particularly extensive training can hardly have originated in an environment in which, for example, it takes two years to learn how to dance an aesthetically pleasing ocho — possibly without ever really understanding the movement itself.
One of my guiding principles has always been: “The way the pivot is normally taught is the death of the natural ocho.”
That is why I need about half an hour in my classes to introduce the ocho adelante, and after a short time most women dance it more naturally, and often better, than some professional dancers. It is introduced so casually that the movement does not appear as a complicated technique, but develops largely as something self-evident.
I have approached other characteristic tango movements in much the same way: always asking how they might originally have developed and how they can be explained through natural, somatically understandable movement principles. That was one of the main reasons why your book interested me in the first place.
Where I do disagree with you is your theory of how this knowledge can be transmitted and spread. From my own experience, I know that it can work very well through teaching. What is needed, however, are people who genuinely understand somatics and are able to apply that understanding to characteristic elements of tango. And such people are indeed very rare.
" trace tango movements back to the question of how an untrained dancer might originally have developed them."
Löschen"Where I do disagree with you is your theory of how this knowledge can be transmitted and spread."
You see, this is where your system breaks down: tango movements and knowledge.
Tango milonguero dancers do not accept that there is such a thing as "tango movements" and by implication that there is "knowledge" to be transmitted.
This is what milonguero dancers mean when they insist that tango is improvised.
You are a salon style dancer and refuse to understand this basic concept.
Find me anywhere any milonguero persona: Tete, Vidort, Janice Kenyon, or the others, who specify that there is a thing that is a "tango movement".
Exemple: the ocho is a salon style construction that is then imposed on tango milonguero.
But I can teach tango milonguero without ever identifying any movement as an 'ocho'.
You give some movements a name, and then assume that its a thing.
But in our world, we do not accept your classification.
There is no "natural ocho" because ocho is an artificial construction and a choreography by its very nature.
This is the problem: you are critiquing my position from a framework that neither I nor the other milonguero writers accept.
PS. I got Claude to research and summarise what various milonguero authorities say about "tango movement":
LöschenKlaus's premise is that there are characteristic tango movements, the ocho among them, which can be derived and transmitted. What the milonguero sources propose instead:
McGarrey (Tango and Chaos):
- Walking, forward and to either side of the woman [I call this 'cross walking']
- Pausing [step?]
- Nothing else. The ocho is not on the list.
Tango Voice:
- Walking in all directions, plus corridas [would you do any of this at a downtown milonga? can you walk there or do these corridas? Marcelo Solis also teaches this stuff, but it's teacher tango.]
- Back ochos — but unpivoted when walking in a straight line [is this different from cross walking?]
- Forward ochos limited to a single pivot into the cruzada [is this different from cross walking?]
- Rock steps, in place and turning [very old school, never seen this at Salon Canning]
- Turns, entered from back ochos or rock steps
- Ocho cortado to close a clockwise turn, changing direction [I consider this to be a dysfunctional movement that is difficult to communicate, that I have not seen at downtown milongas, Tete performs is in ealry performances, but it is not visible in his later performances, undeniably it is common in older milongueros, not necessary IMO]
- Occasional calesita, parada [these can emerge naturally, no need to teach them]
- Absent: voleo, gancho, volcada, colgada, sacada, separation
Jantango:
- No movement inventory. Movement is whatever comes out of the embrace and the music.
- Cacho Dante's progression: twenty steps when you cannot dance, ten when you know more, five when you really know.
Ricardo Vidort
- Walking in short steps, changing direction
- Rock steps, ocho cortado, simple turns — his own, not proposed as anyone else's
Tete Rusconi:
- Continuous turning: giros and back ochos as one movement
- Suspension inside the turn
- Walking that becomes turning when space closes
The pattern is that the ocho, where it survives, survives as an artefact of walking and turning rather than as a movement in its own right. The forward ocho — the one Klaus teaches in half an hour — is the one Tango Voice records as nearly absent from the downtown floor, reduced to a single pivot into the cruzada. So Klaus is deriving naturally a movement that the sources say the milongueros barely use.
Comment: I disagree with Tango Voice on most things, but even his syllabus is extremely narrow compared to salon style and could be reduced to what is basically the slow dance and cross walking without losing anything. I classify him together with Miller, Paz/Solis and Lapadula.
Tom,
AntwortenLöschenyour theory becomes problematic when terms no longer serve communication but are used as a test of belonging. Anyone who uses words like “ocho”, “tango movement” or “knowledge” is simply classified by you as a “salon style dancer”. That is not clarification; it is categorisation.
I am describing an observable movement sequence: front cross – change of direction – front cross. In the tango world, this is commonly called an ocho adelante. The name does not create the movement; it simply makes it possible to talk about it.
Your Claude summary does not refute my point either. On the contrary: if, in Tete’s dancing, ochos emerge from walking and turning, that is very close to what I mean by a natural ocho. You simply turn this into the rule that one must no longer call it an ocho.
Even more striking is that your own “authorities” seem to count only as long as they fit your theory: rock steps suddenly become “old school”, the ocho cortado “dysfunctional”, and Tango Voice is reclassified as “teacher tango”.
Your definition therefore becomes circular: milonguero is whatever you decide to recognise as milonguero.
I had just explicitly agreed with you that we are very close on pivot and separation. Your response was not to build on that common ground, but immediately to draw the next boundary: I still do not belong, and I still have not understood the “fundamental concept”.
That is not an exchange. It is a closed system in which agreement is only accepted if one also adopts your entire conceptual framework.
And that is exactly why I find your approach highly confrontational rather than constructive. If this is how you work, then the only thing you can really do is build an entirely separate new tango world alongside the existing one. It sounds rather like the creation of a new tango state.
Have fun with it. I am checking out of this discussion now.
PS: I actually checked McGarrey. He does not say that there are only walking and pausing and ‘nothing else’. He explicitly discusses giros, pivots, half ochos, inside ochos and ocho cortados, and even traces the historical development of the ocho cortado. So Claude has reduced McGarrey’s argument much further than McGarrey himself does.
AntwortenLöschen1. Claude agrees with you:
AntwortenLöschen"Klaus is right about McGarrey, and I overstated it: McGarrey covers giros, pivots, inside and half ochos, and even traces the historical development of the ocho cortado through Petroleo and Todaro. But his pivots are derived from walking, not dissociation — corridas curved tighter until they become giros, and the enrosque as a two-footed pivot. Tango Voice reduces it further: back ochos unpivoted in a straight line, forward ochos limited to a single pivot into the cruzada, and no pivot at all in fully apilado dancing. So the vocabulary exists, but the studio pivot does not."
It makes little difference to the argument.
2. "terms no longer serve communication but are used as a test of belonging."
The problem is that you started by critiquing my book by setting your system as a benchmark: you can teach something which is practical, whereas my system is 'not practical' and 'just theory'.
The benchmark for my book is tango milonguero: I am addressing and responding to the other milongueros as well as somatics people interested in tango milonguero. Both groups are biased toward improvisation rather than choreography. They are my primary audience.
You gave the impression that you are in that group by citing your experience with Tete and somatics, but your arguments just sound like salon style choreography-light or choreography minimalism within salon style. Your bias is towards teaching forms and you show no interest in improvisation at all.
That makes you similar to milonguero choreography maximalism like Marcelo Solis. What is minimalism within salon style is maximalism within milonguero.
I can agree that your approach is better than choreography maximalism while still insisting that
1. These movements are emergent out of turning and walking, and do not need to be taught as forms. You teaching them is neither here nor there.
2. That they can be reduced down to walkng-as-spiraling, slow dance and cross-walking, and
3. These pedagogical movements can suffice to support improvisational learning.
Your argument that your method is either necessary or more efficient is neither here nor there because no one exept you knows about.
Your argument has been that my position is untenable because it is nothing more than my theory that I thought up in my head, that is not based in any practical understanding.
3. "milonguero is whatever you decide to recognise as milonguero"
For the purposes of writing a book it is necessary to define the scope of the argument.
Some people define milonguero as any old person who dances at milongas. That is not a useful definition for a book such as mine.
"I still do not belong, and I still have not understood the “fundamental concept”."
The point is that even if you're a choreography minimalist, you are biased toward teaching forms, whereas the milonguero perspective as I define it is biased toward seeing the movement observable at milongas as emergent out of improvisational practice.
My book merely provides a somatic framework for what is already accepted among milonguero people, but you keep insisting that this is my 'theory' and not 'practical'.
Withdraw those claims and we might compare and contrast (well, I think we've already done that).
PS. By now there is general consensus about what tango milonguero looks like. Anyone looking at a video can tell that your dancing looks nothing like Tete's or Vidort's.
AntwortenLöschenI did not define it into existence, and there is a commonly accepted set of features of milonguero dancing, and it is not just any old person who goes to milongas.
Maybe we can avoid the need for a definition of what or who is a milonguero, by reducing the question to this:
Q: Given your approach to teaching the forward ocho, will this facilitate dancing at a crowded milonga?
So here are some questions:
1. As the man leads the forward ocho, is he standing in place or walking backwards?
2. Would walking backwards be viable at a crowded milonga?
3. If he is not walking backwards, can the woman execute the ocho in front of a standing man without pivot + separation + frame?
4. If it requires pivot + separation + frame, are we not back to square one of powering through the frame and balance issues?
5. Could you help us understand this by linking a video showing a forward ocho led by a man standing in place (or at least not walking backwards) without the need for pivot + separation + frame in the woman?
6. If there is no pivot and separation that the woman needs to learn as a technique, why would we not regard it as just a kind of walking? Eg., how does the mental image of a figure 8 help, as opposed to the mental image of walking?
Tom,
Löschenit is remarkable how confidently you assess my dancing in crowded milongas on the basis of a few public performance videos. One of those videos, for example, dates from 1996. It documents only one of three choreographies that we created at the time in honour of Antonio Todaro. We were among the last couples to study with him before he had to stop teaching in Berlin because of his cancer and severe pain. Todaro died in 1994. The material for those choreographies was explicitly drawn from his step vocabulary and was intended as stage dancing. My social dancing looks quite different, and to my knowledge there are no public videos of it. So you cannot seriously assess either my dancing in a crowded milonga or my teaching on the basis of those recordings.
After I put considerable effort into translating your texts, following your arguments and comparing them with my own experience, I think it would have been reasonable for you, in turn, to engage at least once with one of my texts as a counter-model to your approach:
https://www.tangocompas.co/gedanken-ueber-tango-unterricht-64-teil/
You would, however, have to translate it yourself. I have, after all, done the same with some of your texts.
As for your repeated movement descriptions using terms such as “turning”, “spiralling” and “walking”, I am also left with the impression that you are not very familiar with the analytical research tradition in tango that emerged in the 1990s.
At that time, a research group formed in Buenos Aires around Gustavo Naveira and Fabián Salas, including, among others, Dina Martínez and Luciana Valle; Mariano “Chicho” Frúmboli joined later. What matters here is that this group did not primarily examine tango as a repertoire of ready-made figures, but as a system of relational movement possibilities. Their approach was to analyse existing tango practice structurally and to derive general movement principles from the relationships between the partners.
This is precisely where the quasi-scientific quality of the approach lies: the figure is not the central object of analysis. The focus is instead on which positions, transitions and changes of direction are possible between two bodies in partnered dance.
At the elementary level, the step relationships can be reduced to three basic categories: Front Cross, Open Step or Apertura, and Back Cross. When the positions of both partners are combined, this produces a system of 36 possible step positions.
If changes of direction and transitions between these positions are added — for example Front Cross to Front Cross, Front Cross to Back Cross, Back Cross to Front Cross, or Open to Open — a much larger field of possible movement sequences emerges. In theory, a great many combinations can be derived from this, although in practice, of course, only a fraction of them are actually danced.
The crucial point is that this is not choreography and not a collection of show figures, but a formal analysis of movement relations. That is why I find it striking that you use considerable theoretical effort to redescribe matters through concepts such as “walking”, “turning” and “spiralling” that were analysed far more systematically within this research tradition decades ago.
Perhaps this research tradition has also escaped your attention because you tend to classify names such as Naveira or Salas rather quickly as “commercial”, “performative” or “teacher tango” and therefore remove them from the frame of reference you consider relevant. The problem is that, in doing so, you may be discarding not only certain dancers, but also analytical work that is directly relevant to the very questions you are asking.
We're talking Naveira now? Seriously? That clown?
LöschenExactly my point, Tom. I referred to an analytical research tradition and its structural model. Your response is: “That clown?” You are not engaging with the analysis at all; you are dismissing it because of the person associated with it. That is precisely the filtering mechanism I was describing.
LöschenTom,
Löschenthroughout this entire discussion, it has become increasingly clear to me that you are not really interested in understanding or in finding common ground. You classify, categorise, draw boundaries and dismiss anything that does not fit your own understanding of tango.
You do not judge people by what they actually know, can do, or have contributed analytically, but by the drawer you place them in. “Commercial”, “teacher tango”, “performative”, “salon style”, “clown” — for you, that seems to settle the matter before you even have to engage with the substance.
At the same time, you increasingly present yourself as if you alone had understood what tango really is and who belongs to it. For me, that is the point at which you are no longer a serious discussion partner.
I will therefore not continue this discussion.
And I would also prefer to be spared any further outpourings of your theories. If you feel the need to keep fighting these battles, perhaps take them up with some actual milongueros.
What happened to the ocho and separation: we're bored with that now? I want to know what your system is. I recognise systems like somatics, Laban, and kinesiology. So I understand Yelizaveta's Body Mechanics. It's kinesiology. I don't know what Nevaira's stuff is other than that plus name recognition he got thanks to Sally Potter, and a tonne of Argentinian Chutzpah. I don't like tango nuevo, I think it's garbage, it's not relevant to me. It's about a filter. I have to suffer this stuff because I like tango, just as I have to suffer the salon style stuff. It pains me just as it pains a lot of people. It's as painful to look at as ballroom, or a turd on the street.
LöschenTom,
Löschenwhat I now find genuinely disturbing is that you seem to judge both Naveira and me almost entirely on the basis of film footage and public performances. You hear “Naveira” and apparently think immediately of Sally Potter, tango nuevo and show dancing. In doing so, you reduce people to images and categories instead of engaging with what they actually analysed, developed or taught.
Your tango knowledge now seems so deeply embedded in your own mono-theory that you no longer perceive large parts of the real tango world. At the end of this discussion, I unfortunately have to conclude that, in my view, you are unfamiliar with essential parts of modern tango movement analysis — especially those approaches based on structural analysis, movement relations and, ultimately, traditions such as Laban and movement notation.
Instead of broadening your perspective at such points, you retreat behind prejudices and superficial classifications. Out of a few tango-touristic impressions, your observations at El Beso and Canning, and your very narrow definition of milonguero, you have developed a tunnel vision in which you can no longer see the wood for the trees.
Many of your complicated descriptions drawn from kinesiology, somatics and similar frameworks would become considerably less necessary if you were willing to take other analytical traditions seriously instead of dismissing them in advance because of names, stylistic associations or public image.
You have just confirmed my point: you are filtering people and methods through your personal dislike before examining their analytical content. That is exactly why I am ending the discussion.
So how does Naveira help you teach the ocho without separation? Nuevo is obviously all separation and pivot, and it obviously suffers from all the balance issues. I mean, they don't seem to hold a frame and instead the man turns his back to the woman when he does those wild sacadas. Is that your solution? Is that what people are supposed to do at El Beso? Is that the 'analysis' that is supposed to make my approach 'less complicated'? How is Naveira less complicated that my approach? Is the milongueros never turning their back on the woman a 'tango touristic impression' based on watching videos? Seems like you're confusing El Baso with that hipster bar neolongas that is nearby. You might have been drunk on the night and got the wrong address.
LöschenPS. I took a closer look at your recent dancing and I can see what you're doing now.
LöschenVideo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p81Lnpct-Qs
There is no separation. Instead the woman swings the whole body around.
So 'simplicity' here could be defined in this way: no separation and no frame, just a whole body swing.
To call this an 'ocho' is to make the concept meaningless bc without separation its a different sort of movement.
It also becomes indistinguishable from the giro, so like what I teach there is not real difference but (a) you want to maintain the nomenclature, which is your choice to make, and (b) you choose loss of connection at the upper body to gain freedom of movement.
I actually address this in the first chapter of my book, but you didn't read properly: Lapadula vs. Miller.
I argue that the choice needs to be made because of the process.
My process overcomes this problem, but it is the only way to get to freedom and connection, which is Rusconi and Vidtort.
My approach is 'complex' because I propose Paxton's 'walking-as-spiraling' which I teach in a 10 minute video as opposed to taking a Naveira's workshop and enduing with the woman slushing from side to side.
I can accept your argument in this sense: I want to dance facing the woman and not have her swing around like that.
Other people at Salon Canning can dance in your way and do OK. I have no problem with that.
If people want the woman slushing from side to side like that then they can follow Naveira and you
But it is not what I am interested in and so my book is for people who do not want to dance like that.
Carozzi-Artikel:
Löschenhttps://periodicos.uff.br/antropolitica/article/view/41485
Direkter PDF-Link:
https://periodicos.uff.br/antropolitica/article/download/41485/23619/139096
Tom, again, you are treating a public demonstration as evidence of how I dance in close embrace on a crowded social floor. It is not. The video was a demonstration for an audience, not an example of my milonga dancing.
LöschenKlaus,
Löschen1. I asked you for a video to explain your teaching, and you did not provide one, so I go on what you publicised.
Either upload a video of yourself, or link a video of other people whose dancing resembles what you teach as social dancing, so we at least know what you're talking about, instead of gesturing at Naveira. How are we supposed to know what you're talking about?
Your performance video that you uploaded presumably as a sample of your dancing style supports my thesis: you sacrifice the embrace for freedom of movement, which I address in my book and which my approach seeks to resolve.
2. Carozzi's article you linked also supports my thesis completely:
- The old milongueros transmitted individually, to selected disciples, outside any school.
- They would not teach unknown men at all, so the confitería dance was never taught in the 1980s workshops.
- Tete Rusconi is her one exception, and he failed because he lacked a vocabulary to explain his own dancing to students who expected verbal analysis ... your experience with him.
- That gap is what produced Naveira and Salas, whose method required breaking the facing and closeness of the couple ... this is my argument in Chapter 1: the process of teaching requires choosing between connection and freedom, Naveira opts for freedom.
- The lexicon used to codify tango milonguero did not exist among milongueros and was imported from ballet, contemporary dance, and school anatomy classes ... again supports my argument.
- Teaching fixed sequences produced a crystallised orthodoxy in which most dancers reproduce the same combinations.
- The secret knowledge moved from how to dance to how to teach, which acquired exchange value ... this is my argument in Tango Unplugged.
This article provides further support for all of my arguments across both books, written by an anthropologist.
You sent me the strongest ethnographic evidence for the teaching economy I have seen which I address in full in Tango Unplugged.
Very useful stuff. Thanks!
Tom,
LöschenCarozzi’s article may well support parts of your criticism of institutionalised tango teaching, especially the professionalisation of teaching, the emergence of a pedagogical vocabulary, and the transformation of teaching knowledge into something with economic value. On those points, I have no problem saying that the article is relevant to your argument.
But you are going much further than the article itself warrants.
If older milongueros transmitted their dancing informally and often lacked a vocabulary for explaining what they did, that does not show that analytical terminology is therefore false or harmful. On the contrary, it helps explain why people like Naveira and Salas began to develop such a vocabulary in the first place: to make implicit movement knowledge explicit and analysable.
Likewise, the fact that some terminology was borrowed from ballet, contemporary dance or anatomy does not invalidate it. Terminology is useful if it describes observable relationships clearly. Its origin is secondary.
The same applies to your claim that Naveira’s analysis necessarily sacrifices connection for freedom. That is your interpretation, not something established merely by the fact that a movement system was analysed and codified.
So I would put it more cautiously: Carozzi provides strong ethnographic material for parts of your critique of the teaching economy and the professionalisation of tango. She does not thereby validate your entire theoretical framework, nor does she disprove the analytical work of Naveira and Salas.
In fact, one could read her article in exactly the opposite way: it explains why such analytical work became necessary once embodied, implicit knowledge had to be communicated beyond a small circle of selected dancers.
Tom,
Löschenfor the same reasons that you yourself hardly present videos of your own social dancing, I would first have to find suitable recordings or ask friends whether they have any and would be willing to make them available to me. But even then, such videos would say only a limited amount about how I teach tango.
I have now published more than 65 articles in my series Thoughts on Tango Teaching. In them, I discuss problems and possible solutions in teaching, didactic tools, ways of practising more effectively, and also terms from tango terminology that have often been taken out of their functional context and therefore need to be clarified in terms of what they actually mean in tango. What these texts are not is a complete teaching manual or a coherent textbook.
Your suggestion that I should eventually organise this material and turn it into a book is entirely reasonable. I may well do that once I have enough material and feel that it can be shaped into a meaningful whole.
The crucial point of my approach, however, is something else: I use the analysis developed by Salas and Naveira not to produce figures, but to teach spatial ad hoc improvisation in crowded milongas. In other words, I do not use the analysis as choreography, but as a tool for responding spontaneously to space, partner and situation through relational step positions and changes of direction. That is where its practical value lies for me.
I'm not against a teaching economy. If you read Tango Unplugged, I argue that in BsAs the teaching economy runs in parallel to the milonga economy, and the purpose of my books is to restore the independence of the milonga economy so that it does not have to depend on the teachers for recruiting people. This is in the final section of Chapter 6, Parallel Systems. How about you actually read my books instead of canning them for stuff you can critique? Or at least use AI to get a proper summary and read that. There is also a section on Naveira. I mean, you clearly failed to understand Somatic Milonguero. I guess you're interested in your stuff, but I'm not interested in your stuff, like, at all.
LöschenTom,
Löschenanother demonstration, but a little bit more how I dance in a Milonga
https://youtu.be/RcDaHZWiYQo?si=SPEqP912bmuJYfwO
Fair enough: I accept your correction that you are not against a teaching economy, but argue for an independent milonga economy alongside it.
LöschenBut your final sentence actually settles the larger issue for me. You expect me to read, translate and understand your work, while explicitly saying that you are “not interested in my stuff, like, at all.” That is not an exchange between two positions. It is a one-way demand for understanding.
So there is really nothing left to discuss.
If you read Tango Unplugged, the basic point is that tango consists of two populations that find each other profoundly uninteresting. When I look at your stuff I don't feel that it is at all what I do. I believe that I could dance with your women and I believe that they'd prefer to dance with me. I believe that what I do is a better way to dance, and that what you dance is clunky and unaesthetic. But I can't persuade you, and generally tango needs to split up, and that is the purpose of my books. There is no dialogue because we inhabit profoundly different ways of understanding tango. I have no idea what purpose you believe this discussion serves since we cannot reach agreement. Your 'review' of my book was a total joke because you're incapable of objectivity. I could probably review your book given what it is that you do and your goals, and be objective about it. But you're incapable of accepting that there are people who do something very different from you, and have different goals, but still call it tango. I call this the Two Tangos Philosophy. Your system and your dancing is boring to someone like me. I do not like looking at it and your solutions are not solving any problems that I recognise, they are actually the source of the problems. Therefore, we should not inhabit the same space, intellectually or physically. I believe that I have developed a system that overcomes the problem of transmitting the ideas of Rusconi et al, but you are incapable of contemplating that this is possible, and insist that Naveira's analysis, which created a lot of crap, including his own awful dancing and awful behaviour towards his partner, is the only solution. Teachers are generally insufferable buffoons and you're a really good example of that, as is Naveira and co. I like tango and I don't worship teachers or Argentinians. If you have a book to write then do that and stop using other people's books as a sounding board for your own ideas.
LöschenEven after your very first comment, I thought: just fuck off into your self-constructed fantasy world. After everything you have written since, I see no reason to revise that impression. Quite the opposite. Stay there, keep explaining to yourself what “real tango” is, who belongs and who does not, and spare me any further outpourings of your theories. I am completely done with this.
LöschenPS: By the way, “my women” don’t particularly enjoy dancing with assholes. So I rather doubt they would prefer dancing with you.
LöschenI guess you haven't heard of your hero's recent debacle where he started berating his partner in the middle of one of his awful and overrated performances. So I'm the asshole?
LöschenNaveira defined the idea his analysis is universal to all the different styles of tango, as I understand.
Did he ask the dancers of tango milonguero if they agree? Or is his analysis imposed on them from above by the maestros?
People are starting to see that the lessons and the analyses don't work. Sorry.
Tom,
Löschenyour latest comment only shows that you have finally left the factual level of the discussion and are now simply trying to take another personal swipe. Naveira’s public outburst at his partner was unprofessional, but it does not invalidate a movement analysis.
And by the way: there is more than one asshole in the world. With your now quite impressive series of outbursts, you have made it pretty clear where one of them can be found. I have rarely encountered arrogance like yours anywhere in the tango scene — and that scene is hardly short of it. You really take the prize.
As for your question whether Naveira ever asked the milongueros whether his analysis was allowed to apply to them: I am meeting him next Thursday in Wuppertal (Germany). I will ask him.
Until then, you are welcome to continue your personal crusade against teachers, Naveira, tango nuevo, and everyone else who does not fit into your system — without me.
The question was purely rhetorical. I have zero interest in what he says. Here is a key sample from Tango Unplugged that explains my position on the differences on the tango scene, although the entire book is devoted to explaining the differences and developing strategies for dealing with them:
Löschen"Adherents to global tango have argued from the early 2000s for evolutionism: the idea that tango is a living culture which continually evolves. Tango evolutionists have consistently argued that the codes of the milongueros are outdated and closed-minded, and that they constitute an unnecessary obstacle to entrants. The proposal that follows is assimilation to the street Latin dances — salsa, bachata, zouk, kizomba — on the grounds that people simply want to dance and that tango needs to be more open. Donzello's position is nothing more than another iteration of a position which is highly desirable to teachers who want to get as far away from the milonguero culture as possible.
The two views belong to two distinct populations, and each population has a material interest in its own account. On the one hand, the experienced dancers who have left the lesson material behind, who have turned their attention to the music and dance in a closer embrace, consider the community to be the dancers on the floor, and hold that the traditional codes are what make conviviality and community possible. On the other hand, the teachers and organisers, whose product is performative movement — because performative movement is the only kind that warrants lengthy courses and technique workshops — consider themselves to be the community. They agree that people just want to dance, by which they mean that their students should be able to execute the taught movements at a milonga unencumbered by outdated rules of politeness. So the teachers and organisers should coordinate in order to bring more people into lessons, retain them there, ensure that the lessons are enjoyable, and to remove any interest in the codes that stands in the way of their students executing the lesson material.
These groups have been at permanent loggerheads because they are opposing centres of power which have divergent and incompatible interests. The milongueros retain the cultural cachet of the authentic, grassroots, naturally emergent form, and the image of a packed Buenos Aires milonga remains extremely compelling. Outside Buenos Aires, however, the first thing a newcomer encounters is almost always a performing couple, and therefore tango lessons tend to select for people attracted to this kind of eye-catching movement. A person drawn in by tango music will either lose interest, because what is on offer is not what attracted him, or will persist and find himself opposed to the teachers and their students, and if he does eventually reach the point of dancing socially, he does so by discarding the lesson material. The result is a floor occupied by two mutually hostile camps: people interested in the music and in simple convivial dancing, and people interested in active performative movement for whom the music is merely the rhythmic background to their choreography. This is visible in any video of a large milonga or festival, where both groups are on the same floor regarding each other with derision, and where the teachers' contribution is to characterise milonguero dancing as boring and outdated, and to always return the discussion to beautiful dancing and to who looks good doing it."
Tom,
Löschenich reagiere nicht mehr direkt auf Deine Texte. Ich habe schon zu viel Zeit mit dieser Diskussion verbracht. Zum Abschluss möchte ich aber noch eine Bestandsaufnahme Deiner bisherigen Kommentare machen. Dabei gehe ich bewusst auch auf Dein Verhalten ein, weil Du die sachliche Ebene selbst längst verlassen hast. Für mich steht und fällt die praktische Umsetzbarkeit eines theoretischen Modells auch mit der Persönlichkeit, die dahintersteht.
Wenn ich Deine Kommentare, Deine Argumentationsweise und Deinen Umgang mit Widerspruch betrachte, ergibt sich für mich ein ziemlich klares Verhaltensbild – ausdrücklich keine psychologische Diagnose.
Begriffliche Kontrolle und binäres Denken. Du erklärst nicht nur Deine Auffassung von Tango, sondern versuchst zugleich festzulegen, welche Begriffe gültig sind, wer als Milonguero gelten darf und welche Bewegungen überhaupt anerkannt werden. Deine Welt zerfällt dabei auffällig oft in Gegensätze: Milongueros gegen Lehrer, natürliche Bewegung gegen Technik, Musik gegen Performance, soziale Tänzer gegen Showtänzer. Für Zwischenformen bleibt wenig Platz.
Hohe Identifikation mit der eigenen Theorie. Wer Deinem Modell widerspricht, wird schnell selbst Teil des Problems: Lehrer, Salon-Tänzer, „performative“ Tänzer oder Vertreter der anderen Population. Dadurch wird Widerspruch nicht mehr als möglicher Einwand behandelt, sondern als Bestätigung Deiner Theorie.
Deutungshoheit und geringe Toleranz für Ambivalenz. Du ordnest Menschen, die Du teilweise kaum kennst, sehr schnell ein: ihre Motive, ihre Interessen, ihre Tanzqualität. Dass jemand komplex tanzen und trotzdem sozial sein kann, Unterricht gibt und dennoch Milonga-orientiert arbeitet oder Bewegungen analysiert, ohne Figurenunterricht zu betreiben, passt nur schwer in Dein Modell.
Statusdenken trotz Kritik am Statusdenken. Du kritisierst Exhibitionismus, Lehrerautorität und Prestige, formulierst aber selbst ausgesprochen hierarchisch. Dein Tanzen sei besser, meines „clunky“, Naveira ein „clown“, Lehrer „buffoons“. Damit reproduzierst Du genau jene Rangordnung, die Du angeblich ablehnst.
Geringschätzung und Provokation als Mittel der Diskussion. „That clown“, „awful dancing“, „garbage“ sind keine Argumente. Auch der Satz, meine Tanzpartnerinnen würden lieber mit Dir tanzen, hatte keinerlei sachliche Funktion. Solche Bemerkungen dienen eher der Abwertung und Provokation.
Asymmetrischer Umgang mit Kritik. Du nimmst Dir große Freiheiten bei der Bewertung anderer heraus, reagierst aber empfindlich, sobald Deine eigene Theorie scharf beurteilt wird. Du darfst kategorisieren; andere sollen Deine Kategorien erst einmal verstehen und akzeptieren.
Mein Gesamteindruck ist deshalb: Du wirkst auf mich wie jemand mit einem starken intellektuellen Ordnungsbedürfnis, erheblicher Selbstgewissheit und geringer Bereitschaft, konkurrierende Deutungen gleichberechtigt neben der eigenen stehen zu lassen. Deine Theorie scheint inzwischen eng mit Deinem Selbstbild verbunden zu sein. Deshalb wird aus einer fachlichen Differenz schnell eine Frage von Zugehörigkeit und persönlicher Wertung.
Genau darin sehe ich die entscheidende Schwäche. Nicht darin, dass alle Deine Kritikpunkte am Tango falsch wären – einige halte ich durchaus für berechtigt –, sondern darin, wie Du mit der Möglichkeit umgehst, dass Deine Schlussfolgerungen überzogen, unvollständig oder schlicht falsch sein könnten.
Für ein mögliches Scheitern Deiner Theorie sehe ich deshalb das Hauptproblem nicht in der Theorie selbst. Die ließe sich anpassen und moderater vertreten. Das größere Problem ist Deine Unfähigkeit, sie konstruktiv zu vermitteln, ohne bei Widerspruch immer wieder persönlich zu entgleisen.
Klaus,
LöschenThere is no argument here because there is nothing at issue that evidence could settle.
The differences are differences of interests, tastes and incentives, not of fact.
It is the debate Ford owners have with Chevy owners: the two groups are constituted by different preferences, so there is no external standard either could appeal to.
Teachers will always resist that framing, because they are the gatekeepers to new dancers and it is against their interest to let the question be defined clearly — so you will always try to muddy the waters.
That is what your response does. It moves from tango to my personality, which is not a subject on which either of us can be shown to be wrong.
The substantive point is that the encuentros milongueros emerged precisely to get the teachers material out of the room.
That strategy has limited success, and my work is an attempt to explain why and to describe a solution that would actually work: an independent milonga economy and recruitment outside of your system, and your analysis of dancing.
Encuentros milongueros are not interested in Naveira's analysis.
The goal itself was never up for debate and does not need my defence. It was settled by the people who built those events, and the message they sent was unambiguous:
YOU ARE NOT WANTED.
Everything else — styles, vocabulary, whose ocho is more natural, who dances better — is downstream of that, and makes no difference.
What you dance and what you teach is not interesting on the milonguero scene.