Learning tango online is considered a substitution for real workshops this year, but does it work? What is it good for and what are the drawbacks of learning online? What is online learning good for and where it fails to deliver? For years, I’ve been working online with dozens of students and most of the time it worked well, but I’ve always guided my online students that learning online doesn’t work if you don’t have option to dance with someone who knows how it’s done. "I want to dance like those guys with more than 50 experience, those who danced in the Golden Age", I told her with naive curiosity. "But you already do!", she answered. Can you imagine how happy I was to hear … [Read more...] about Pros and cons of learning tango online
11 ways watching videos negatively influences your dancing
Watching videos of demo dances and performances can and should be part of the learning process, but we should always be aware that it influences our dancing. It influences us even if we don’t want to: our mirror neurons are helping our brain to sometimes learn just by watching… and they make no difference between good or bad – their job is to just imitate. “What happened? You changed your dancing. Do you take classes with different teachers?”, she asked me after the first dance. We haven’t meet for a while and this encuentro was first time we danced in maybe two years. I didn’t had new teachers and I was surprised by her remark. Than I remembered why: few weeks before that I was … [Read more...] about 11 ways watching videos negatively influences your dancing
Encouragement from the past
Past few months I went from disappointment to enthusiasm about tango. Social distancing is mortal enemy to social dancing and that brings up the question: will we ever dance tango again? How will it look like after all this ends? Asking myself these (and similar) questions made me do a little research. This was not the first pandemic humanity faced after all. We had much deadlier viruses attacking people and somehow life continued. People still danced and society didn't ended. Humans are social beings: they crave real connection with real human beings. We're not lonely islands. Looking back I turned my attention to one of the deadliest (and most recent) pandemic humanity faced: … [Read more...] about Encouragement from the past
Will we dance again?
Let’s talk about the elephant in the room. I imagine tango people around the world - dancers, teachers, school owners and events organizers scratching their heads with these burning questions… Will tango survive? Should I focus on something else? How would tango world look like after Covid-19? How to make it work again? Last week when I wrote this to my subscribers I had questions and almost no answers. I was frozen. Now there are still no definite answers, but there are at least some flags. After the survey we made with Alex, I have some data from the reality, so I can think. A little background: Last week me and Alex made a little survey in hope to get some data to know what can we … [Read more...] about Will we dance again?
Tango skills you can develop in isolation
It’s not that bad: the self-isolation might be even beneficial to developing some of the tango skills. We have a lots of time at hand; our bodies need some physical activity and our addicted mind crave anything connected to our favorite dance. This article is all about that – what can you do to use this COVID-19 to actually benefit your tango dancing journey. “I don’t understand”, she was telling me directly after almost every single one of my sentences. It was frustrating. I tried harder and harder. I used more words, describing with analogies – but it seemed with no effect. Than we tried dancing and the a-ha moment for her came almost as a magic. But, I had even bigger a-ha moment. In my … [Read more...] about Tango skills you can develop in isolation
Tango and self-isolation
The tango pandemic around the world was unfortunately stopped by another - deadlier pandemic. With tango, people lose their old life – with the corona virus some of us unfortunately lose life literally. Who knows how the world will look like after the end of this situation? One thing I am sure about – we, the tango people, will be among the first who will rush the dance floors and dance out what we have missed all these months. [Tweet "Nothing beats human interaction - Simon Sinek"] Many of us miss tango so much that they invent all kinds of things to keep it alive. Virtual milongas. Online festivals and who knows what. Nice try! But let’s not fool ourselves – it’s a poor substitute for the … [Read more...] about Tango and self-isolation
