I just can’t learn to dance this way

I had this dream that I was going to spend my month dancing and eating my way through Brazil and Argentina. I managed to do the eating part quite well. A little over a month, and I did not cook one meal myself.

The dancing part was more difficult.

I stopped taking dance classes in Brazil when I realized that the quality and authenticity of instruction in New York is at least equal, probably better, and more professional. They start on time, there are more classes of more variety offered more times during the day. The Salvador dance schools felt like chop-shop operations, only offering classes 2-3 hours per day, all at the same time at every school, and the rates varied so much that you didn’t know what to expect. One woman charged me 25 Reals, about USD$13, the same price it would be in the US. And I’d had better classes in the US. I was satisfied with what I did, but I didn’t feel I was really getting something special learning there versus learning in NYC.

On the contrarty, there are SO MANY dance classes in Buenos Aires, that it’s hard to focus. They’re practically all day and night, all over the city. It took me a week to get up the motivation (and to not feel badly dragging my friend to watch me suck at tango for an hour) to take a class. I finally settled upon Tango brujo, a store and dance studio around the corner from the hostel.

The class was a mixed basic-intermediate level. People were at all different levels, none too great but all seemingly more experienced than me. They taught one move, and we practiced the move over and over again. I could not get it. I’m not so sure too many others did either, but I defintely couldn’t do it. My body weight and position was all wrong, and they kept trying to fix it, and I just couldn’t do it. All these instructiors focus so heavily on technique, which is wonderful, but there’s so much going on at the same time just to take this one small step, it’s very hard to perfect.

After toying with this one move for about 15 minutes, we had to put it into practice. Unfortunately, I’ve never danced before outside the 3 private lessons I’ve had, so I don’t know how to do any of the other stuff, either. My partners are leading things I just don’t know how to do. And, nice as they were, they’re saying, “no, we’re not doing that move, we’re just dancing.” But I don’t know how to dance in the first place.

I need a progressive class, at least until I get a little more comfortable with the basics. I need a class where everyone is slightly better than me, so that I can understand what I need to do and I don’t have to figure out if what I’m doing isn’t working because of me of because of my partner. I have to dance with a limited number of moves that I am trying to perfect. Learning samba, I can jump into a class. I’ll pick some of it up, and some of it I won’t. But if I mess up, I only have to deal with me, not with someone else.

I just couldn’t function in a drop-in class. I’m not disappointed. It gave me more time to dedicate to the other side of the tango passion… the SHOES. So I left BA with not so much a better understanding of the dance, but I now have a 4-pair mini-collection of tango shoes to inspire me.