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Before any figure is taught, regardless of how accessible it can be to beginners, it will always be more beneficial and necessary learning displacements. Some are absolutely essential in order to structure figures.
The apprentices move across the floor with the basic contents that we have provided them with, making their way to dance between couples, following the dancing line.
When moving around, movements are wide, without syncopation, each step at a time. In this manner, they familiarize with tango beats. They can freely elaborate. They learn to turn the hip, to dissociate, to position the body in a smart way, so that the partner can move to the proper places and step where we want.
Figures are important and must be taught, but on the dance floor, it is evident when there are people who did not learn to move through it since they do not respect the ease of people that walks through the dance floor surroundings, they shut themselves in an accumulation of interconnected figures, and obstruct the dancing line.
From my personal experience, I recommend frontal changes, which are two: to the left and to the right; and steps to the sides in two modes: crossed and mirror.
Of those, the step to the sides has strictly necessary information for structuring figures. In this movement, we learn the tango constant in which, when moving to the side, if beginning with a crossing forward, there follows an opening and a crossing backwards. If movement continues, a new opening and crossing to the opposite side would follow, and thus crossings alternate with the corresponding opening in the middle.
In that continued movement, the leader marks the beginning. After the first movement, the follower already knows which structure will have the following steps; as a result, the leader stops marking, allowing a foreseeing from the leader to know that after a certain number of steps, a crossing forward, or backwards or an opening will take place.
The figures are performed in the place, in four blocks with both dancers revolving around at the time like in an orbit, or one revolving and surrounding the other. The follower, most of the time, revolves around the leader.
Now, when a figure is performed, and regardless its basics origin, at a certain moment a continuous movement will need to be done by the follower which is not connected to the leader, but has a fixed structure allowing a prevision by the leader. In this way, an action like a sacada, or a gancho can be performed since it is clear that, in a section of the displacement a follower does around the leader, one of the three variants is involved.
Teaching a figure that covers the concept of this continuous movement (that the follower can not modify) without studying it in the side basic footstep will either lead to the leader marking each follower's movement, or the follower resorting to the memory to remember how the movement is for each figure.
For instance, in a simple sacada, the leader leads the follower to the cross, and indicates to advance with the right leg and makes the follower to revolve around the leader. The leader confident enough to know that the next step would be an opening and then will come a step backwards and so on until the leader stops or changes the figure.
If the follower knows the side step displacements step as a basic content, will be used to this structure and, by applying logic of movement, be able to repeat it in each figure will performs in the future.