tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8035244062520832583.post7190393240007315382..comments2024-03-21T14:56:18.159-04:00Comments on Tango Therapist: No one can teach you to danceTango Therapisthttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12548118004604256736noreply@blogger.comBlogger6125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8035244062520832583.post-14759262935706445192015-06-03T02:54:10.272-04:002015-06-03T02:54:10.272-04:00Wonderfully written. Love the article.
www.kiransa...Wonderfully written. Love the article.<br />www.kiransawhney.comkiran sawhneyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/08719453823002698478noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8035244062520832583.post-88601225146026762862015-06-01T11:49:37.788-04:002015-06-01T11:49:37.788-04:00Mark, I don't know Veronica personally, not ev...Mark, I don't know Veronica personally, not even from the online discussions, I just respect her as a thoughtful and passionate writer about tango, both on fb and off. But her essays are wide open to every reader, not just for her circle of friends.<br /><br />Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if "dancing crazy" was our ancestor's biological norm :) Archaeology is largely powerless to resolve it, but perhaps paleogenetics might eventually shed light on the evolution of human abilities eons back. But as it with every cognitive and behavioral norm, it runs a spectrum of the degrees in the human population. Some may be innately super-endowed and some are barely capable or outright disabled. But the human mind is very flexible and can rebuilt lacking skills from the unusual materials. Even stroke victims come back together despite the brain damage. The two essays on tango learning discuss autistic children harnessing other abilities of their brains to grasp what they innately lacked. <br /><br />Research does show that several percent of the human beings are profoundly amusical. The core features of amusicality have to do with the poor ability to hear, reproduce, or appreciate tonal harmony. Amusical people generally prefer text or image to music in all contexts. But they still possess some abilities in the related spheres - they may have some skills in understanding rhythms, emotions, and textures of the music, they just usually don't develop these innate abilities because they, doh, don't enjoy music, and prefer to banish music from their personal worlds altogether. <br /><br />To start dancing tango musically, I had to harness my deep sense of the written word of poetry - rhythm and rhyme, alliteration and texture, pause and contratiempo are all there in the lines of text. To segway into purely instrumental pieces was a bit harder, also to get a good grasp of overlayed layers of rhythms and melodies since poetry tends to be monophonic ... but after a while I got it covered too. I have pretty good memories for verses, could recite thousands at any given moment, and now I found a use for the same skillset to remember tangos, which makes my job as a tango DJ so much easier. But I still barely tolerate any music to which I can't dance tango :)MOCKBAhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05150628026789690963noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8035244062520832583.post-84444307821901552402015-05-31T20:41:26.209-04:002015-05-31T20:41:26.209-04:00MOCKBA... hey thanks for sharing that article. In...MOCKBA... hey thanks for sharing that article. Interesting that we wrote on this subject at about the same time. She does not answer my friend request. I know that there are limited amounts of friends one can have; so perhaps that is the case. (Maybe put a good word in for me to her?) :-)<br /><br />I cannot know what your early childhood experiences are, but my belief is that event happen that make us dislike certain things. Unfortunately, you cannot know what many of your very early experiences are either. Emerging research is showing that the nature / nurture argument should be turned into "compromise." There's a good balance of both. Why are you dancing now? Somehow you are getting back to the little homosapien animal, I believe, who just is a dancing crazy guy! :-)Tango Therapisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12548118004604256736noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8035244062520832583.post-9239660870832252482015-05-31T20:34:05.298-04:002015-05-31T20:34:05.298-04:00Paul, I see that I have failed to express myself w...Paul, I see that I have failed to express myself well by your comments... or perhaps read it again?? I have no idea what you mean "teacherless learning." Perhaps, I can point out a few things that I did say that indicates that teachers are necessary for mastery and further uncovering latent talent. I said, " Teachers . . . teach and uncover. The best teachers know where uncovering starts and ends. They look for "talent" (latent abilities) rather than mostly focusing on every little error that a person may make." Find a good teacher, Paul. It seems you have.<br /><br />Where is the "teacherless learning" in this statement: "Those who are the best teacher-guides know (or at least intuit) that their role is to co-discover (the external world) and co-uncover (the internal world) of these primary human talents of dance and speech."<br /><br />You may have noticed that I quoted Mark Van Doren: "The art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery." There is a teacher in the room.<br /><br />I have a special end section just for your concerns. It is "GO TO SCHOOL" and the first line is, "Just because you have natural talents does not mean that you do not need to go to school."<br /><br />There must have been a psychological button that I pushed for you have to so missed the points so often repeated in my post. I think I know what caused this cognitive distortion from your words above: "I am not a 'natural' dancer." Maybe you are more than you know! Many people believe that schooling can change things that are not there. They cannot. (Now, this is where an infinite of monkeys with typewriters comes in). If there were no natural talent, you'd be a monkey or some other animal. <br /><br />I cannot know, but I think that your efforts with teachers are only partly responsible for your learning to truly dance. I think it was some kind women who embraced you and helped you return to the talents that were always there. Sure, it came a bit late, but it is the same process of a little kid, growing up in Cuba and learning to dance because it is all around him and so many moments were magical. When you watch him dance, perhaps you'd say he was a natural. Not really. He never left the child-who-dances as so many do in the US and England. Also, he had a great salsa teacher and a Latina girlfriend who loved to dance. What is "natural"? What is taught? That is what my blog post was about. May I suggest a very short post which may make things a lot clearer than my prose? http://tango-therapist.blogspot.com/2013/07/why-real-men-dont-dance.html<br />Tango Therapisthttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12548118004604256736noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8035244062520832583.post-90589889539307290012015-05-25T15:07:00.016-04:002015-05-25T15:07:00.016-04:00The first difficulty with the proposal for teacher...The first difficulty with the proposal for teacherless learning is that while children learn to speak unaided by teachers other than their parents, siblings, other family members, peers and in fact anyone in their environment, you correctly identify that that happens at a much earlier age and often 20-40 years earlier than most people decide they want to learn to dance. Secondly, the teacherless method is slower and less effective. Why don't we all learn to drive by just getting in a car and doing what comes naturally? Thirdly, the result of teacherless learning or learning by disengaging with teachers is painfully obvious. If you want to move around doing whatever comes naturally to music, that's fine. However, to engage with others in a more formal, stylised, communicative dance involving many people, I am not persuaded how your proposal has any more chance of working than an infinite number of monkeys and an infinite number of typewriters have of producing the works of Shakespeare. I am not a 'natural" dancer but was taught the vocabulary and technique to enable and allow the personal and individual expression that I now use in my dancing.Paulnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8035244062520832583.post-37815229391723848282015-05-24T15:40:06.551-04:002015-05-24T15:40:06.551-04:00Cool to see it just days after Veronika also publi...Cool to see it just days after Veronika also <a href="https://www.facebook.com/notes/10152958488222499/" rel="nofollow">published an essay</a> on inborn musicality, amusicality, and the ways to develop dance musicality in classes.<br /><br />I tend to agree with her that profound amusicality exists and can be ameliorated by teaching. It's just more rare to observe among the dancers because too few of the musically challenged people stick around. I am one of those people, who don't ever recall moving to music as children, but who do remember actively disliking most music for most of their lives :)MOCKBAhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05150628026789690963noreply@blogger.com