Marcelo Hector Solis on Facebook:
"There’s a strange cosmic irony. Tango — this unruly creature of music, embrace, memory, and shared presence, keeps attracting people who don’t really want to meet it. It’s like watching someone trying to teach poetry while loudly insisting they don’t care for metaphor. Something is off from the first syllable.
Many instructors are not teaching Tango. They are teaching a social-dance derivative constructed from whatever fragments they find comfortable. They don’t love Tango’s music, its embrace, its codes, or its cultural soil. When someone ignores the thing’s essence, the thing they’re teaching becomes a simulacrum — a cardboard cutout that vaguely resembles Tango’s silhouette but has none of its musculature, none of its soul.
Why do they do it? Usually because of a mixture of convenience, ignorance, insecurity, and the seductive simplicity of branding. They can market “Tango” because the name is recognized, while transmitting something that requires no deep study, no reverence for tradition, no humility, and no connection with Buenos Aires. It’s the fast-food version of a culinary tradition that was built over a century of craft.
Tango has a dense nucleus: golden-era music, embrace, walking, phrasing, tradition, and the códigos. You remove any one of these pillars and the structure wobbles. Remove several, and it collapses.
For someone who has not fallen in love with these elements, the authentic form feels restrictive, complicated, or “old.”
Today speed is rewarded over depth. An instructor who has not lived Tango deeply can invent shortcuts faster than they can study the real thing.
Students are often beginners in both dance and discernment; they can’t tell the difference between depth and superficiality.
A shallow instructor can gain students simply by being accessible, charismatic, or offering something branded as “easy.”
Over time, this produces pseudo-Tango ecosystems: classes full of people who think they’re learning the art, when they’re learning an abstraction designed to avoid everything that makes Tango to be Tango.
One could see these instructors as accidental gatekeepers, in a Darwinian sense. Anyone who is destined to fall fiercely in love with Tango will eventually feel the mismatch: the music doesn’t move them, the embrace feels disconnected, the dance feels like empty geometry. At that moment, they start searching, and they find honest teachers. The pseudo-teachers unintentionally act as the first filter. Their students either stay in placebo-Tango forever, or they break out and seek the real thing. In that sense, these misguided instructors play the role of “contrast”: without them, many students would never realize what they were missing.
Some of these instructors are simply unaware of their unawareness. They haven’t touched the living heart of Tango, so they can’t understand what they’re ignoring. They reject the elements most essential to Tango in the way a child rejects vegetables — without knowing what nourishment feels like.
We are witnessing the same paradox that happens in martial arts, yoga, writing, philosophy, and any tradition with depth. People teach the name without the content. It’s inevitable in a world that monetizes concepts faster than it cultivates them.
The important part is that true Tango remains untouched. Every night in Buenos Aires, the music of D’Arienzo, Troilo, Di Sarli, Pugliese, Caló keeps beating like a heart. Students who seek something real will feel the gravitational pull of that heartbeat. They always do.
Our role is to be one of the places where they land when they escape the simulacrum. We offer them the embrace, the music, the codes, the humanity — the real education that turns beginners into dancers."
