Method
How we do it.
We are a group of professional dancers — specialists of the body, from different artistic backgrounds — who share the study and teaching of tango, as a dance and as an expression of human connection.
We approach learning from several perspectives at once, on the assumption that we are as we dance, and we dance as we are. Integrating different approaches and methods lets us explore that process at its fullest, understand the very different needs each person arrives with, and offer tools that serve both individual and collective development.
From our teaching approach, four aspects are involved in the learning process.
Technique
The individual bodily organisation that favours the biomechanics of a movement. It lets us coordinate the inner music of a movement with the music in the room, and widens the range of what we can do with confidence.
Connection
Our channel of communication — the better it is, the better we understand each other. Dancing tango is having a conversation. Some of those conversations run deep enough to change a life; others pass without leaving a footprint.
Structure of movement
The grammar of the dance. Steps are the words and the elements are the letters: work the letters and you can write clear words, and then clearer sentences that are unmistakably your own.
Musicality
Every movement has its own musicality, because it happens over time. Musicality is where that inner time meets the music you are hearing — and meets your partner inside it.
The focus is on one. The work is on all four.
Each aspect plays its own part, but they are strongly connected. A class is focused mainly on one of them while the work quietly involves the rest: technical work makes for a better connection, and a better connection clarifies the structure of a movement.
Connection, on a structure of movement, supported by its technique, expressing musicality.
Why do we dance tango?
Whatever we do while dancing has to lead somewhere — an expression, a direction. A dance without a motive is a house built without foundations: sooner or later it falls apart.
The school works across Buenos Aires and London, so that the exchange of knowledge and experience enriches both sides of the Atlantic. The ethos of Tango Integral, and of its classes, is the same in both places: creative, informative and dynamic explorations, every time we meet.