If you don’t know anything about Argentine Tango apart of the tons of cliches which many people have in their minds, you really might ask yourself “What the heck is that guy talking about?” Just give me a minute and I will explain. Maybe you know Tango only from movies where obscure figures on dim lighted dance floors do strange movements, chewing wagon loads of roses. Maybe you made up your judgment about Tango having seen ballroom dance competitions, frozen smiles, rigid moves, heads twisting unnaturally with every movement… Could be you went to a Tango Show, spectacular, technically brilliant sensual and maybe most impressive.

Yet, what has all this to do with social competence? To answer this questions we have to go back to the origins of Tango. Tango started in Buenos Aires and Montevideo at the end of the 19th century. Immigrants from all over the world came to the Rio della Plata hoping for a better live. At the same time native Argentineans from the countryside came to Buenos Aires and Montevideo as well. They had lost their jobs on the big haciendas, the kingdom size cattle farms, and were trying to find work in the big city. As both groups competed for jobs, housing and often mere survival tensions were inevitable. On the other hand the clash of the cultures was the cradle of one of the most successful music styles and dances, the Tango.

Tango in its beginning was (and still is) a social dance, at that time danced mainly by the ordinary people, craftsmen, workers, small merchants… Tango was danced a little differently in the different quarters but in order to dance together all the dancers had to agree upon one common code. One crucial part of this code, which is still valid among real good Tango dancers, was the respect for each other. Though of course there have been always more and less talented dancers, the most important thing among milongueros (the Argentine name for Tango dancers) was by no means showing off, demonstrating what a hell of a dancer somebody was. More important by far was to dance in harmony in the “ronda” the round of all the dancers. No one would intentionally dare to disturb the dance of the others, let alone kicking or pushing them.

If you wanted to be a great dancer you had to find strategies to dance better while remaining in the harmony of the “ronda”. Tango dancers had to develop the mindset to move on with the flow of the music, in harmony with everybody else, instead of fighting each other for every little patch of the dance floor. Given the fact that dancing Tango was not simply a pastime but a complete lifestyle this meant in consequence that they developed strong social competence. One aspect we certainly can learn from. In this article I can not go more into detail.

Yet I have to say that I myself experienced that the mindset I have developed dancing Tango helps me a lot, be it in business or everyday life. I strongly recommend everybody to give it a try. Important however for real self improvement is to find teachers who really know about the essence of original Argentine Tango instead of teaching only sequences of steps.

Two hearts beat in Wolfgang’s breast, and it is difficult to say, whether his bigger passion is sculpture or tango. In any case he is an excellent teacher, who imparts to his students with patience, artistic creativity and a lot of humour the joy for those things, that fill him with enthusiasm. Wolfgang has been dancing tango since 1994. For him it is important not to teach figures and steps, but to impart to his students the ability to recognize the structure of the dance and its different elements, thus giving them the ability to invent playfully their own, always new “figures”. Consequence of this is a concept for a “dialogue of the dancers “, where there are (almost) no “wrong steps”.

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