Tango for blind and visually impaired.
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges since I started teaching tango. My first experience was at the Hospital de Clínicas (Argentina) around 2012.
I’ll try to summarize the overall experience.
Teaching people with different abilities focuses on bidirectional teaching, not directional. This is an essential aspect of didactics.
And as far as possible, a physiatrist or psychologist should accompany the class, so that they have a critical voice on how the group is progressing.
In general, depending on the rhythm that the group acquires, it begins to work on different main aspects, which are; kinesthetic empathy, contact, movement, space, emotions, rhythm, synchrony, the social role of dance, and codes, as large groups. Afterwards, aspects such as the hug, the head, the weight, the horizontal and vertical, individual and couple balance, listening and speaking with the body, etc. are entered.
The first thing you notice in the first weeks is that the students are gaining much more in terms of physical resistance.
Little by little they break the shell, unconsciously forcing them to free themselves.
From the first classes, the process of social skills and self-confidence is noticeable, along with greater balance.
Participants in the tango group showed significant reductions in depression and significantly increased self-esteem.
Rodolfo Dinzel in one of his classes, addressing a group of second-year students from CETBA (Buenos Aires Center for Tango Studies). I remember the words he said to a group of us who were selected to be assistants in a special class for a group of blind and visually impaired people.
We are all different, we believe and take the life of normal people, and people with disabilities.
Actually we are all disabled in something and we are all normal. Some are bigger, others taller, others tremble more than others, others see more than others…
Understanding this view of life towards the other helped me to teach those first classes, focusing in the class on getting the best out of those different abilities, and not from the disabilities…
