“Since we had little feet we have known the essential steps of tango”

Left

and

Right

Try it out this weekend! It’s easy to remember: Left and right.

Tango was much more difficult before humans developed the ability to walk on two feet. Because of your humanity, tango is the easiest dance to learn in the world. It takes a lifetime to master, but left and right are pretty easy steps, ¿no?

I don’t mean to brag, but I started doing essential tango steps while even in diapers. Chances are, you did too.
Two other essential things:
Hugging. I did that before the tango walk! Chances are, you did too. This is primal stuff, mis amigos. My mother was my main tango-embrace teacher. Damn, she was good and got better all the time! Even in my teen years when I wanted to do open embrace with her, she knew how to lean into the embrace and remind me of who I am. She also gave me my first drum lessons by drumming out a song she called, “Burping the Baby,” which my siblings tell me was a real jam session. Hugging and percussion go well together, which leads me to the last essential thing for tango. . . .

Music. No one told me how to move to music. Chances are that no one told you either. You just did it without instruction. My mom and sister told that I went wild with Elvis Presley’s “You’re nothing but a hound dog.” I even had grinding hips, they say. I didn’t have to pay a dance studio to get this down. It’s all part of what homo sapiens uniquely do! Later, when people suggested how I should dance and because of peer pressure and the anti-dance culture in America,* I forgot what I already knew about tango. Thank God I found it again!
Different Strokes (or steps) for Different Folks
In nearly every tango community, I think one can find two opposite ways of teaching or thinking about tango. One is social and the joy of dance, and the other is analytic/performance-focused. In a competitive and performance-focused scene, the community is in jeopardy of dying out in one or two generations. Social dance is very much focused on the quality of dance but also the person with whom one dances. I knew a very picky, excellent dancer who danced with all ranges of ability because some were friends and others were fun to dance with because of their natural abilities. Even if a person is a stranger, the social dancer is looking for clues of an interesting person.

On the other hand, performance-based dance has teachers who announce: “Tango is hard”; the unabridged Encyclopedia of Tango Steps has 3 million cool moves, so let’s begin. “Tango is ‘technique, technique, technique.'” There is room for all sorts of teaching methods. However, I would posit that making tango a technical dance is a turn in the opposite direction of the fact that it is natural and ultimately very human. Eventually we find its simplicity after becoming poor dancers for a while. Eventually, when no one is looking we dance who we are rather than what a teacher has told us what to be. Then it happens–one finds the three M’s of tango. Once we find this place of owning the dance, THEN I believe we should start taking classes for advanced dancers. Once we have the two essential steps of tango down, excellent hugging and truly listening and responding to the music, it is time to take some “beginner/intermediate/advanced” classes. Find a teacher who will help you do this.

What is truly hard to learn Reading, wRiting and aRithmetic (the so-called three R’s) are infinitely more difficult than the three M’s of tango: Movement, Music, and eMbrace. I have told this to students, and then they make very fast progress NOT thinking about multiple steps but instead shaping the things they already know or feel as homo sapiens.

Please go be a Master Beginner. Return to what you have long known deep within yourself – your own natural humanity.

UNIMPORTANT FOOTNOTES:
*Regarding anti-dance culture: Multiple times in my life in America I have had friends and neighbors for whom dance was forbidden. That American culture grew up in this puritan environment. It still has its effects. The best therapy to counteract this disconnection to our basic humanity (in my opinion) isTANGO, the simplest dance in the world.