999  "All tango teachers are correct"

Date: Wed, 5 Feb 2003 14:07:51 -0700
From: Brian Dunn <Brian@DANCEOFTHEHEART.COM>
Subject: "All tango teachers are correct"

Dear list,

In the current style discussion, Robert Hauk described his frustration early
on in his tango career when traveling teachers contradicted each other with
vehemence. Perhaps these teachers said to him, as they said to me when I
raised similar points in private lessons long ago, "Well, this is my class,
so we'll do it my way." At the time this was not quite satisfying, but did
allow us to move on...

No doubt anyone on the list who has taught tango with any regularity has run
into the situation where a student says in a class "but so&so says to do
this, not that..." The class waits with bated breath to see how the
teacher responds to the bait...

The first time or two, I yielded to the temptation to launch into a
long-winded and time-wasting discussion/defense of my tango "position",
while all the students stood around NOT DANCING. Soon after this first
happened to me, it came to me to simply raise my hands heavenward and intone
solemnly, "All tango teachers are correct." That is, when you're in x's
class, x is "correct", and when you're in our class, what we say is
"correct". In similar situations, Daniel Trenner intones, "Welcome to the
world of Argentine Tango, where everybody seems to disagree." In a
non-judgemental approach like this, each teacher is the acknowledged master
interpreter of "tango-according-to-me," by definition. Each student gets to
choose which class to attend, based on the usual things: visual impression
of the teacher's style, interpersonal connection with the teacher,
word-of-mouth reputation in the community, effective marketing, etc.

This approach is useful both to handle occasional "troublemakers" seeking to
stir up controversy instead of actually continuing with the class, and also
usually mollifies the truly confused, who in their naivete mistakenly assume
that there is One True Tango. There's certainly ways to talk about
different kinds of locally popular styles in class without falling into
time-wasting right/wrong labeling. After all, most people don't really care
about tango dogma per se - they just want a pleasant and successful
introduction into the local tango community.

All the best,
Brian Dunn
Dance of the Heart
Boulder, Colorado USA
1(303)938-0716
https://www.danceoftheheart.com