For all you guys out there embarking on the grand adventure to tango, I will relate to you how long it took me to achieve proficiency leading my first movement: the back ocho.
When I decided to learn Argentine Tango, I was enrolled as a student at a ballroom dance studio. I inquired about a course and they said, “Sure, that’ll be $1000.” Ouch! I couldn’t believe it but I paid it. It was late December and I began taking classes once a week. I also bought instructional videos by Fabian Salas, watched them at home and tried to ‘remember’ the steps. I put a solid month into DVD training.
In January, I discovered a three-hour tango workshop being conducted nearby. I attended and noticed it was nothing like my ballroom Argentine Tango lessons. Also, one of the girls from the workshop contacted me and asked me to be her partner. I agreed and it wasn’t two days before she found a tango instructor teaching classes in the basement of her house. I went to four of these tutorial sessions and, again, they were nothing like the workshop or studio classes.
In February, I took another afternoon workshop. The couple teaching seemed to have some structure and a goal in mind. When they danced, it seemed pleasing and uncomplicated. The leader told me he took lessons from an instructor in Allentown. Three days later I was taking a private lesson with that very same teacher: Sharon Hillman.
After the lesson, Sharon told me I needed to start from the beginning and advised me to join her group classes. These lasted six weeks and were conducted on Monday evenings from six to nine p.m. On Wednesday there was a practica. She taught many concepts but the only one I seemed to have success remembering was the back ocho, probably because we did it back and forth across a gymnasium about twenty times each session.
During this time I fired my dance instructor at the ballroom dance studio. She was devastated. I told the owner my teacher had no idea what she was doing. A month later, the owner defended her acolyte, saying the style being taught was a choreographed version of Argentine Tango called Fantasia, pronounced fan-tah-see-uh. So, technically, I was being taught the correct dance but not the style that I desired. I knew nothing then, I didn’t even know that I wanted to dance ‘social’ tango, which is a form of Argentine Tango.
By the end of March, my only tango instruction came from Sharon’s BA Tango Survival workshop, taught in the basement of the Unitarian Church in Bethlehem, PA. At the end of that course, I could move to tango music but I could not lead a woman to change direction and step backward successfully.
I kept going to practica on Wednesdays but I was getting pretty frustrated. Sharon offered another course and I completed it. After that, I felt somewhat comfortable leading back ochos but not every woman responded to my lead.
One day, I met a tanguera from the Stroudsburg tango community and she talked me into switching teams. When I went to the new group, I found they all could follow my lead for a back ocho and I felt proud of myself.
My new found friends talked me into attending a milonga. Once again, not every tanguera could follow my lead for this simple step: I was still doing something wrong.
It wasn’t until December, a year from when I started, that someone told me what I was doing wrong. When I led a back ocho to my right, I was using my head but not my torso. As I danced with better dancers, they noticed something missing and waited for me to show some ‘intention’ before they moved. My good friend, Olga, pointed out what I was doing wrong during a practica and I made the necessary effort to discipline myself to ‘animate’ my torso rotation more clearly.
Ever since, I have been able to lead back ochos for all followers:-) That only took a year!
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