The History

Since the beginning of our full-time tango careers in 2002, Cristina and I have been very open minded about 'open sourcing' much of our material.  As a former engineer I believed highly in using technology to help us learn.  We realized that our students could benefit from video taping our class material as a means of remembering what they learned.

Starting as early as 2004, as the technology become readily available (Youtube, personal/club websites, etc), we gave permission to all of our students to post our review videos as well as our improvised performances online.  This way an entire class could benefit from one person's upload.

Then in June 2007 a local student of ours (Charles) approached us about starting a Youtube (tangostudent) channel to post our free review videos.  Here's a historical look at our first tangostudent video (taken at The Beat in Berkeley during the Monday Night Orange Practica):

                           
                      

You'll note that we did not start the video with a 'review quiz' but just jumped right into the didactic demo.  Approximately one year later, in September of 2008, another local SF Bay Area student (Anne) offered to take notes and post them, along with the tangostudent video, on her Tango Student Blogspot.  Anne's notes are very thorough down to the last detail.  Over the years, Charles, Anne, Cristina and I, have slowly refined this online didactic process.  You'll notice that in some of our most recent videos we provide a much more detailed review quiz.  Charles has also improved the quality and lighting of the videos while Anne has refined her note-taking approach.  Leo has recently joined the note taking staff.  We have also embedded the blog on this website under the heading free stuff!
 

Feedback

For students in the relevant 'open source' class, these review notes have been very helpful.  And, for some students who've watched our 'open source' videos but have not taken the relevant class we have learned that they have been helpful, none-the-less, to various degrees.  At a minimum, these 'open source' videos seem to inspire a wide range of tango dancers across national and international boundaries.  They also represent a historical evolution of our dancing technique/style and teaching strategy - and for that reason can be interesting and/or fun to watch.  Having said that, we have been inundated for several years now by requests to make full online didactic lesson videos.  Hence the creation of The Organic Tango School (yes, this website)!

Conclusions

We will continue to offer open source videos in conjunction with developing our online didactic lesson videos for sale via The Organic Tango School.   We encourage you to spend some time browsing the free material and let us know how we can improve the 'open source' process.