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Apart from the strong belief in the effectiveness of the eight-count basic movement, teachers of Tango deal with other issues that do not allow any modification in this beginner pattern.
When teachers attend some seminars or conferences, they find a very chaotic scene. With their best intentions, these events’ organizers want to form different groups of different levels. There are usually beginners, intermediate and advanced. Inexperienced or little experienced, dancers register in the beginners’ level, and so do some experienced humble ones who decide to go into a lower level. At an intermediate level, there are those who learnt some basic movements and think that they can do more. And at an advanced level, we find couples that are not so “advanced”, but they do think so, together with those really experienced.
This situation makes teachers search for a common content to begin with in this heterogeneous environment.
People attending the seminar dance a couple of tangos to warm up and, although teachers have new contents to teach, they do not take the risk because most of the students know up to step “five”, the cruzada, well enough or not. A lesson is then organized from this point or other that is considered as known by everybody. In this way, it is hard to incorporate new contents so that students can assimilate movement patterns better.
Teachers should look for basic patterns which facilitate the students’ task. I do not think that we can find basic steps for all possibilities as there will definitely be some patterns which teachers could not find any typical beginning movement for. However, for the great amount of patterns we usually perform, it is necessary to find the initial movements of the patterns with a similar beginning.
This study reaches up to contents I consider suitable for having an acceptable basic level. For this reason, we will deal with only two basic steps in these first classes and then continue with other basic steps, movement patterns and new dynamics learning.