To guide my actions today, it helps me to have an imaginary picture of the world I hope to someday see. So I wrote a vision of the future of tango that inspires me. I hope it is helpful as you consider how you might participate in the reawakening of tango happening this summer all around us.
In this paper I share what I imagine our worlds of tango might evolve into across three timescales. First I'll start with describing a long-range view. Then I'll share what I think this could entail for the next few years. Finally I'll offer a few things I think any of us could do today or tomorrow, to help bring this picture into being.
A long-range view of tango
I see a truly vibrant micro-local tango scene, supported and amplified by significant and high-quality multi-local (regional, national, planetary) organizations and initiatives.
In this world, a rich tango experience is walking or biking distance from everyone. Nobody needs to burn fuel to have a thoroughly satisfying tango life.
Using established and freely available best practices, combined with ongoing research into community maturation, small groups can set up lightweight self-organizing networks to facilitate the spread and practice of healthy, fun, intentional tango.
How tango is learned
Tango subject-matter experts (SMEs) are liberated from the narrow confines of the schoolteacher role and step into the fullness of their contribution: as facilitators, curators, learning experience designers, mentors, storytellers, authors, and researchers — and they will be richly rewarded for the life-force they have contributed to tango over decades of embodied practices.
Peer-to-peer learning — scaffolded, facilitated and managed by highly experienced practitioners — is the principal way people deepen their understanding and experience of tango. (This is the way it’s actually always been in great, well-run group classes.)
Structured practicas and learning labs are the backbone of a community's schedule. Live group classes/workshops with teachers/teaching couples are the exception rather than the rule.
Communities leverage clearly documented curricula and collaborate to evolve them with input from elders, experts, coaches.
Learning both roles from the beginning is the norm.
There are high quality, inexpensive or open-source learning materials that people can purchase, download, or even 3D print to augment their tango learning experience.
1:1 lessons are more accessible, available during practicas in increments of 15 and 30 minutes, from dancers of many levels.
We have a mature feedback culture with many safe, rigorous practices and tools for inviting feedback on one's dancing from fellow dancers, used by dancers of all levels.
There are multi-month and multi-year beginner tango immersion experiences, purpose-built for giving people a well-structured, intentional, rigorous introduction to tango aligned with an explicit set of shared values.
Learning facilitators participate in communities of practice that they engage in to share and evolve their approach. Knowledge isn't hoarded but rather openly shared, using easy-to-use tools and platforms.
How tango is priced
Tango is no longer paid for by-the-class or by-the-event, since these prices activate a consumption mindset, and also can never adequately capture the full cost of making a community experience available. Sliding scale monthly and annual memberships that include practicas, learning labs, events, lectures, etc. are the primary pricing model. People are generous in paying what they can and there is a widespread understanding of the functioning of the gift economy, different forms of currency, and the role of patrons/sponsors.
How communities are governed
Participants make decisions together using structured consent-based decision-making. Community agreements are explicit, applied, referenced regularly, a living and evolving part of the community.
New community members experience a thorough onboarding program that includes social/communication skills enabling them to meet community's agreements.
Restorative and transformative processes are used to when there is conflict, using each instance of conflict fully to fuel healing and change on multiple levels.
Tango events
Holding space. There is a widespread understanding that holding space for tango to happen in, in a thoughtful and loving way, is just as important, if not more important, than teaching dancing. There are forms of training for tango facilitators where they learn how to invite the "spirit of tango" and create a safe container for intense personal growth. Through this people start to more easily access the sacred, meet their intrapersonal and interpersonal challenges with curiosity, and find ways to dialogue about their journeys. When people come together to dance they explicitly articulate their intention to co-create a positive effect on multiple levels (individual, couple, community, and ecosystem).
Live music. High quality live tango music is part of the weekly tango landscape. Many social dancers are also learning to play tango music, especially on more accessible instruments like harmonica and guitar.
Events at different levels of federation. Local communities participate in regional and national online and offline convergences, such as graduations, recitals, dialogues, innovation sprints.
Appreciation. Appreciation is explicitly interwoven into our tango experiences. We have learned to move past our self-orientatedness, distraction, and shyness to loudly celebrate those who have contributed to our experiences. Communities acknowledge and celebrate those catalysts who have played source roles in nurturing the field of tango. As a collective we acknowledge and celebrate our mentors, our elders, our ancestors. When we gather, in pairs, tiny groups, or large scale events, we create time to appreciate those whose efforts have contributed to our experience, joy, learning. We intentionally make space for untold stories from the margins of our communities and society so that we can be more authentically inclusive. We uplift each other and we create the rising tides that lifts us all.
Tango across communities
There is a well-run participatory social network that tango practitioners use to share content, events, and learning opportunities, replacing Facebook. It has clear values, guidelines, and processes for addressing conflict and harm.
There is an established Ted Talks-style conference that serves as an engine to drive forward innovation in tango. It meets annually in person and is a hub for important and exciting content, insights, and research results that affect the community across the world.
There are many different kinds of creative tango showcases, some with competition elements, that celebrate individuality, creativity, authenticity, innovation in addition to technical excellence. Technique is acknowledged as interpersonal, not just somatic.
Tango in the wider culture
Driven by tango college alumni organizations working in collaboration with youth/pedagogical subject-matter experts and college administrations, tango on college campuses is exploding. Resources like curricula, best practices, marketing materials and strategies, community agreements are freely available to clubs, combined with mentorship from local practitioners and alumni. Campus tango programming includes community citizenship material on nonviolent communication, consent, and inclusivity.
There is a hit tango musical that captures the essence of social, improvised tango. It has toured all over the world. Every show ends with a participatory milonga which introduces new people to tango at scale, sort of the way Forever Tango did.
There are several high quality documentaries of different lengths focusing on the Tango Renaissance and the experience of social dance, which amplify social improvised tango as a cultural phenomenon and resource.
Shifts we can make over the next few years
In the mid-term, to move toward this reality, here are a few areas that I think investment would be worthwhile, if you like to organize tango or help people learn it.
Immerse in and support contemporary tango musicians
Articulate your values and express them clearly in multiple formats at gatherings you host
Develop processes for how decisions are made in your group, drawing on inclusive but efficient approaches like sociocracy, integrative decision-making, or adapted consensus
Use these processes to establish your community agreements and ensure people affirmatively accept them
Develop a restorative or transformative conflict-resolution process
Document your tango curriculum so everyone can access it
Shift some of your group classes into learning labs
Offer mini-lessons at public instead of private locations
Focus on building small (3-8 person) cohorts of learners who commit to 8-12 week programs that include group, pair, and individual work.
Invest in high quality multi-month/multi-modality beginner-focused programming.
Establish a buddy system in your community to strengthen peer-to-peer connecting and defocalize the "charismatic leader" syndrome
Teach everyone both roles from the beginning
Refresh your bio, highlighting those whose values are aligned with what you want to see in the world of tango. This may mean removing or deemphasizing those who are reinforcing patriarchal and competitive culture, and naming the women and community catalysts who have quietly contributed to your tango life
Raise the bar on professional courtesy
A tiny action you can take today or tomorrow
I think that if we want to bring any of these longer term or medium term visions closer to reality we need to begin by healing the dividedness we are experiencing now. There is a lot of dividedness.
There are so many ways we're broken apart by judgments of each other. We may judge others for their incompetence, their ungratefulness, their bad habits, their tone, their choices, their impacts, whatever. I believe that some kind of practice of lovingkindness could help us all. If we can reach inside ourselves to start to heal our broken relationships with our tango benefactors, frenemies, and even our tango nemeses — then maybe everything can change and everything can be possible. My wish is that each of us find the bravery and space to reconnect with the lost parts of ourselves embodied in those tango peers we have the most difficulty with, those who have disappointed us the most deeply — as we are able, in gentleness to ourselves and to all.
Here are two lovingkindness meditations you can use today or tomorrow to help be part of this change — one for an in-person event and one for an online event. You can read these on your own before going to an event.
In closing
For me all of this is motivated by my choice to experience tango as a vehicle for personal growth and collective change. As I write this I'm present with tandas I've experienced that are etched into my soul, forever. Those unforgettable moments when I've literally danced my ragged heart out — out into the arms of my partner, into the enchanted ronda, and beyond into the landscape of our planet. What does it mean to dance your heart out? It means to give concrete form to the love that moves you. Every inspired tango is a monument to co-creation and interdependence. Humans of all cultures have danced their hearts out as a prayer for peace and a healthy climate, for millenia. I see us continuing this ancient practice in a modern way. May all beings benefit from our yearning to dance and to connect.