More from Florencia: Regarding Tango's Cultural Difference

My very dear students and others,

I really need to thanks your presence in my classes. I want to thank all the attention that you put to my instruction and the effort that you do to get better in your tango every time you are in class.
I also want to let you know how proud I am of your progress and how happy make me feel when I heard that my own students are getting very good complements from the best dancers who came to the Festival last September about how good their dance, the same when they travel around the country for tango.
I always assume that you know that but may be you don't so I feel that I have to tell you this, I'm very proud of all of you.

I also want to express that I understand the effort because this country is very hard to accept other people cultures, americans like to be missionaries where ever they go and to who ever is acting different that they are, is almost in your blood, not all of you but many of you.

Then you see tango and you like it because you perceive something is different there, a beauty and may be some kind of freedom that you are not used to have, so you come to my classes thinking that learning tango is just learning how to dance and you feel frustrated because you find out that is much more than that. Guess what, you can not learn tango detached from our culture, I'm sorry to tell you this but I know that many of you by traveling to my country more than once already find it out but I see others struggling with continuous disappointment and frustration in classes because you are expecting fast and easy results and you get slap by a big cultural difference.

You know what? if you want to learn tango you have to be open to accept the cultural differences as well as we have to accepted when we decide to work here, is not an effort from one side, it has to come from both sides or it would never work.
I heard women mostly complaining: ... "She is not giving any individual feed-back"... OK, I listen to that and I ask you, did you ask your teacher to give you some feed back when you were in class????

At the moment I don't have I believe in classes people under 18 years old and I consider you are ADULTS and I understand that things here are served to you in a way that you don't need to work for, but this is here in US, nothing to do with our culture and less with tango.
I'm sorry but if you want to learn tango you have to be open to learn in a different way or you are missing the most important lesson.

Tango is not made for whimpies. You do have to work your way to get it and that's how we do learn in my country and you can not buy the dance without the rest of the package the same way you can not pretend us to teach it different because we don't know how to do it.
We could though make the necessary efforts to understand each other and that's why I need you to brake those barriers by coming and letting me know what do you need, because there is not way I can guess it.

In Argentina we do teach/learn very different than here, usually in a group class the teacher shows the material and give general corrections to the group and make some individual corrections when they are really urgent but we respect the process of learning by letting the student figure it out by them self, we don't want to bother so much with corrections and feed-back unless is requested, and then we are very happy to help if that happens because it creates an immediate communication teacher/student that start to make sense, so if you don't dare in asking for a feed-back you are wasting your class, is your responsibility to ask for and not the teacher.

Last week Kristin Helle was asking me if I could let her know which are the 5 more important ingredients in order to learn how to dance tango and I think I surprise her because she was expecting a more dance technical answer and what I said is: HONESTY, SELF CONFIDENCE, SENSUALITY, MISCHIEVOUSNESS and TEMPERAMENT, and then she said "but that's not what we learn in classes?" and I'm answering my self, she is right but are this people ready to work in a very deep psychological level in order to make those changes?? May be you can give me some answers, I hope you do but is not going to be any easy and that would not be my responsibility for sure, I'm not going to became a missionary trying to change such a deep cultural difference, you don't have to change but for sure is going to make the way you dance different.

Remember always, YOU DANCE THE WAY YOU ARE. Everything is expose when you dance, is impossible to hide it.

See you in classes,

with love,

Florencia