Tango has been my passion and the center of my life for 25 years, and tango education my full-time profession for 19 years. I’ve developed many tango learning systems and online courses to solve the problems of social tango dancers around the world. The most important of these systems is “Tango Musicality Mojo.”
Today, as a tanguera, I have the confidence to dance in milongas with any tanguero, milonguero, or professional. . . and I know that the more they understand the music, the more they’ll love dancing with me because I can dialog with them through my tango.
What really matters to me and I think to YOU is how my musicality students are becoming the most fulfilled and desirable dancers in their communities. They’re super confident and relaxed on the dance floor and they’re in love with their tango lives.
But it wasn’t always like that for them or for me.
When I started to teach, it pained me to see my students focusing on their steps and not knowing what to make of the music. I expected it to come naturally to them, as it had to me. I did my best to help them, but I was winging it back then, explaining by intuition, and that didn’t always work.
In my big tango school in Italy, I regularly brought in top Argentine instructors who were traveling in Europe. One famous teaching couple I invited was Jorge and Marita Dispari.
I was very proud of my students, who were admired in other tango communities, and were generally successful in local and out of town milongas.
However, during Jorge's first teaching week in my school, around 2007, he remarked, "Your students are good, but they're missing something critical." My ego flared up inside, because I had a lot invested in being recognized as a good teacher. But I humbly asked what it was they were missing.
Jorge said, "They don't know how to dance the pauses." I felt like a jackass. Up to that point, I had not taught anything about pauses in the music. I had worked with my students on phrasing, but did not identify the pauses. I wasn't sure I could figure it out myself.
It hurt to hear my teaching criticized, but that criticism turned out to be one of the biggest blessings of my career.
In the weeks that Jorge and Marita were with us, Jorge "dripped" bits of his precious musicality knowledge into our classes. I was hungry to know it all and booked a private musicality session with him just before they left Italy. I received a 3-hour, private lecture of demos in which Jorge snapped his fingers to tangos he played on the stereo, and then tested me. What Jorge taught me felt so right. It immediately gave me clarity about the structure of the music in a way that went way beyond my innate feeling!
Jorge told me I did very well and that I should continue doing this kind of listening exercise daily. I started creating a structured method to teach my local students and to continue my own exploration of even more aspects of the music than Jorge had the time to teach me. This work had a big impact on my teaching and, through that, on my students’ dancing.
But I still wasn’t a musicality expert.
A second painful moment came when I organized a workshop in my Florida, US town for a group of my online students from around North America.
When we got to the musicality segment, I taught my group the way Jorge had taught me. In the evaluation survey after the event, one of my serious workshop students wrote “I don’t want to watch Helaine stand there snapping her fingers.”
That was like a knife in my gut, yet deep down I was grateful to know the truth. So when it was time to build my online musicality course, I wanted to give my virtual students something much more precise and concrete than watching me snap my fingers in a video.
I created a detailed notation system. I did excruciating levels of analysis on the tangos we studied in my online course. It was excruciating at first to implement the super-accurate system I had created. But at the end of each analysis it was so satisfying and empowering, and it was the same for my online students who went through the progressive modules of my course. They reported that all their frustrations in milongas had vanished!
My detailed notation system became a way for tango dancers who are not musicians to read tango music from the dancer’s perspective. It put my students and me in total control of any tango. Mastering tango musicality in this way gave them confidence they hadn’t known before and opened the door to their free expression and to deeper connection with their partners. This mastery put them among the most desirable dancers in their tango communities and wherever they traveled. They continue to report that tango in their lives is now a total joy, they’re attracting more interesting dance partners, and they know that many tanda partners are eager to dance with them in milongas. For many of my students this has been a 180 degree turnaround.
And me? I’ve learned from my students around the world who have been seeking a comprehensive way to study musicality, some for years, that I am now truly one of the tango world’s top musicality experts and that my system is the most comprehensive any of them have ever seen.
I continue to explore the music and to create new tools to make tango musicality easier and more useful to both analytical thinkers and intuitive thinkers who are tango students, teachers and professional dancers. I didn’t know that it was possible for me to enjoy dancing to tango music more than I had been for years, but for me personally, it gets better and better and better.