What are the Tango Practices?

The origin of the prácticas belongs to a distant past, as dancers would get together to practice amongst themselves, or at the “academies”, since the early days of the tango.

The prácticas, as we know them today, emerged in the 90s when certain teachers organized lessons and people stayed after the lesson to dance and experiment. One of these is Gustavo Naveira who organized in Cochabamba 444.

Over the years others followed in his footsteps, organizing their own prácticas and maintaining the enthusiasm of the search and of creativity. For various reasons, however, the phenomenon has only recently been recognized as such.
Various factors generated the rise of the prácticas, a main factor being the economic crisis of 2001 that, despite all the bad, brought about an awareness in the Argentine population regarding the effects of the decade of the 90s, as well as a strong wave of tourism.

Since then, more and more people have become interested in culture and the arts, and in the tango, which in addition is part of our cultural identity.

The favourable exchange rate meant that a lot of tourists started coming to Buenos Aires, which began to generate a higher demand for services, among these, tango shows, milongas, tanguerías, classes and teachers, clothing, etc.
Job opportunities brought many young people to the tango. However, as the milongas are not the best spaces for receiving the newly initiated, they didn’t feel ready for this space. What’s more, the effects of tourism filled up the main milongas of Buenos Aires, and adding to this the closure, in December 2004, of various premises after the government of Buenos Aires had maximized the security laws for fitting out dance venues, the situation provoked that many people began to attend the prácticas.

Consequently, groups of dancers started getting together in different spaces, in order to practice, experiment, and develop their dance. Over time, these prácticas became more frequent and drew in more people, until they finally became what they are today and having their own characteristics:

The prácticas are characterized by being affordable places, dance halls where you can dance non-stop (i.e. without the break after four songs), they take place at more normal hours, it’s an accessible environment, easy to integrate into, there’s more space on the dance floor and you can dance as you like, it motivates a diversity of styles, it’s informal and this makes it easier to establish links.

Today a lot of people converge at the prácticas. Those who attend them are people who, because of their occupation or for other reasons, can’t go to dance at the milonga, since these begin late. Or they may be professional dancers who seek an environment of free play and exchange of ideas on the dance. They may also be intermediate dancers who need to improve their dancing skills, or tourists who come to visit and learn in Buenos Aires.

In response to public demand, they started teaching at most prácticas, which brought along more people and also allowed the student to continue practicing what had been learned in class. If we add to this possibility the technical and pedagogical development that the tango has achieved so far, the result is an increasing number of people who begin to dance in less time, as well as a boosting of the tango community in Argentina and abroad, since organizers from other countries visit these places and interchange ideas with local organizers.

Despite it all, the growth of the prácticas did not affect the development of the milongas, which continue to open more and all have people, partly thanks to the fact that more and more people can join the dance floors with greater ease. In fact, most of the prácticas are situated in the vicinity of the most important milongas, thus enabling the public to make the most of their dancing time every night by going first to a práctica and then a milonga. This práctica-milonga circuit is a symbiosis, as they strengthen each other and generate different and complementary opportunities, providing a valuable contribution to the tango.

''When you forget about technique, you will begin to dance!''

It’s common to hear this said to a dancer: “When you stop worrying about the technical your dance will appear…” This affirmation leads us to the question of why this occurs.

The tango has reached a high level of theoretical and practical development. The last two decades were crucial in that process. Nonetheless, defining one single technique for dancing it has not yet been achieved. Given the dancers’ incessant experimentation, it becomes necessary to know certain principles or technical codes in order to execute complex movements that require great bodily control.

Therefore, the teaching methods are being re-formulated and little by little it appears the tendency of many instructors is that of leaving the teaching system that focuses on structure and steps. Instead they opt for those ideas related to body awareness and the natural development of movements in dance.

Broadly speaking, two systems of teaching or transmitting the tango can be identified. The Traditional (which has nothing to do with tradition) and the Natural.

The Traditional is the one in which the teacher describes a certain movement or sequence and the student tries to repeat. It’s based on the following principles:

- The man “marks” in order for the woman to “follow”. This entails a certain passivity from the person who follows, and at times the excessive use of force on the part of the person who leads.
- It applies the idea from stage tango, of marking from the chest, which causes accidents on the dance floors of crowded milongas because the embrace exceeds the couple. It’s not practical.
- As a consequence of the movement descending from the torso, the transmission of the movement looses intensity insofar as it travels downward torso-pelvis-leg, and this causes instability.
- Relying on a structure of sequences means that when it comes to dancing the capacity for improvisation has not been developed; it delays the apprentice’s start on the dance floor and impedes his/her dancing, since it’s not possible to use any of the learned sequences because there’s no space.
- The learning of sequences means that the person often dances “from memory,” or mechanically, which sterilizes the feeling of the dance.
- The learning process is logical; a concept is explained, after which it is “brought down” from the brain to the body, often leading to a lack of awareness in the student as to how his/her body actually functions. This generates mental obstacles and the student may even end up injuring him/herself.

Because of all this, an idea of tango technique emerges, which is equally as complex and unnatural. Many of these technical ideas have not been anatomically substantiated, and therefore problems related to the bones and muscles proliferate.

For many years the tango was taught by means of an unnatural method; the system did not consider the learning process of those who danced the tango during the tango’s Golden Age. Instead of adopting this knowledge they sought to teach it as the European salon dances, developing a mechanical system of movements that would enable the dancer of other dances to do stage performances of tango. This system proliferated, but is now slowly revealing its shortcomings, as it’s not based on the actual functioning of the human body.


If we wish to dance until the age of 100, we need to begin to look after the body and become aware of what is organic and natural for our body and what is not…
The natural system is based on self-awareness techniques and anatomy, taking as a starting point that all bodies can carry out certain actions, but that bodies are different from one another, and respecting the basic principles of the human body: Balance, Economy, and Comfort (not pain).

What is sought for in this method is that each initiate discovers, through exercises especially designed for this purpose, how his/her body functions and becomes aware of how to use it to dance correctly.

The characteristics of the more modern focus are these:

- One does not “mark”, and the movement emanates from and ascending spiral, not from the torso. The adjustment of both bodies is sought in order to carry out a movement with as little force as possible.
- Rather than working on sequences, movement is analysed, after which each student seeks as many variations as possible and in this process rapidly improves his/her understanding of a given concept.
- This endorses the creativity of the initiated and develops his/her capacity for improvisation and adjustment to the dance space, which allows him/her to be part of the dance floor in less time.
- The correct use of the body improves the stability and confidence of the couple, while also reducing the use of excessive force and tensions.
- Both persons within the couple have an active role; the one who “follows” does so actively; it’s a dance done by two people.
- It’s an organic dance, in the sense that it does not move through action and reaction (mark-follow), but simultaneously in both bodies, which makes two people look like one.
- The only structure of this dance is that of the music; it does not have standard movements, and not two dancers will dance it in the same way.
- It develops one’s own and partner’s body awareness in order to optimise the connection.
- Through exercises one works more profoundly on how to dance to the music and on expressivity, from the first lesson.
- One operates with concepts of biomechanics, anatomy, and other disciplines, the value of which lies in taking care of the physique and being able to execute, with greater security, movements that until a few years ago appeared impossible.

Although it may not seem like it, this idea of technique, regardless of contemporary investigations and developments, does not at all depart from the way in which people learned to dance the tango in the 1930s and 40s. It seeks, precisely, that the dancer arises from diversity, not from typification or cloning. Rather, it seeks for the tango to return to what it always was, a partner dance, social, with an attitude, emotional, expressing feelings, and which had its splendour when people thought less about technique and put more of their hearts into the dance.

Translation Mia Helmer Jensen