terence,

I think that some dancers can't seperate out illusion from reality and overcomplicate things, or conversly oversimplify.

A lot of beginning student are taught the hip thing to simplify teaching the technique and I don't suppose it hurts anything at the beginning levels of dance aside from teaching lousy technique. The problem comes when no one corrects the bad technique as the dancer matures.

(I know you already know this)The point is that as you dance the woman should never be in front of the man down the line of dance. A few steps force her there for a split second but she must get back to position almost instantly. As the dance moves the position of the lower body must change. If the woman is moving backwards, her hips actually pivot slightly back and away from the man (without losing connection which happens higher on the body than the hip) to allow for greater movement across the floor. Then they must instantly come back and as a top coach explained to me, imagine the left hip closing the zipper on my partner's trousers. It gives the repositioning an upward and curving motion that it needs. At this point his body should not be in a position where my hip runs into any of his 'parts.'

People can and do take things too literally on this board, but then to be good at ballroom dancing you do have to be a little obssessive and nitpicky.

Its kinda ironic that Len made that statement... sic "easiest"..
( which holds true ) but... as he would be the first to say, understanding the dance conceptually, is much more complex.

The number of people over the yrs that I have coached ( even Pros ) do not realise, or were never told, that tango is danced from the LEFT side.. Hip and leg drive the fwd action ( no hip contact due to body position/ alignment ) and the right leg and body, continue the fwd progress.. the hip obviously, being part of the body, is used in conjunction with leg/body.

As len pointed out, Tango is a BODY dance.. NOT legs.

Even ,and especially when creating a Prom position from a walk , the position of the mans body should bring the lady into Prom with her body position slightly behind, again proving that the 2 hips do NOT connect.

The lack of rotation danced into Prom. by Man, can/may cause the unenviable position of a side by side action thus causing an untenable position from which to move thru the Prom.

Incidentally, I wonder how many realise, that there is a very slight " Hip lift " of the L side man, R side lady,as the Prom position is achieved .

"I've never struggled with the Foxtrot "

Then you've never really danced it.


It won't remain a struggle after thorough training is accomplished, but no one is able to do the ultimate form of this dance without some period of learning struggles.

anymouse,

I'm not saying it wasn't work or I didn't have frustrations...heck...still have frustrations with this and every other dance I have ever worked on. I don't always get the footwork 100%, I sometimes don't like the way footwork flows and I have to fight with myself to make my feet do what my head knows is correct. My head may sneak the wrong direction, I might be having a bad day and not have enough tone in my arm or enough stretch in my torso. Heaven forbid, sometimes I don't even pull/roll myself backwards...I just step and wonder what the hell is wrong with me when I know better. I do all of these things...yes but I have indeed truly danced a foxtrot.

Learning ballroom is a matter of degree of struggle...degree of frustration and natural ease of picking up a particular dance. My grandfather has danced foxtrot with me since I was five. Because of this I had a super smooth learning curve and I would never pretend I'd gotten to the ultimate form of this or any other dance.

It would be very funny to post THAT on Dance Forums' Tango board and see what response you got!

Actually, its comeup in the past , and most will agree.

even in T/Arg, not all songs are written the same, tempi varies considerably over the range .

Add to that, the new styles of music which are becoming acceptable in some quarters ( not by traditionalists ).

Wow, and I thought nobody knew one thing about tango here...Anyway, here is my understanding. I believe modern (Argentine) tango refers to the music started by Astor Piazzolla in the late 50s. As opposed to the tango my parents used to dance back in the 30s when Carlos Gardel was the biggest tango star. Then in the middle came the "orquestas tipicas" such as D'Arienzo, Biaggi, De Angelis, Troilo, D'Agostini, Stampone, Pugliese, Firpo (to name just a few). All these tipicas would feature a singer famous among which were Polaco Goyeneche, Alberto Moran, Jorge Vidal, Susana Rinaldi, Lydia Borda, Lalo Martel, Alberto Marino, Ribero and hundreds more. To understand the lyrics would be difficult as all these sing Lunfardo - Castellano (Spanish)with strong Italian (and other languages) influence. Piazzolla almost eliminated the singer and composed beaufiful tango which is not made for singing or dancing. Or, if you try to dance it, you'd better have ballet training.
I have been looking for a female tango partner of any age. Drop me a note if interested.

Hernan

My goodness. You certainly know your AT!

I'm looking forward to terence's response whenever it comes.

Thanks for dropping all of those names. Gives me research material.

Good luck finding a partner and don't stop dancing while waiting for one.



jj

I suppose it depends on one definition of " Modern ".. in an academic sense, yes, your thought as to the 50s being a new paradigm is probably true ( I have several of those artists on CDs ).

However, I tend to place my idea of " Modern ", more in the camps of Nuevo styles.. even the music ( Gotan ) reflects another shift in Tango evolution.. not my taste.. I tend to be more of a traditionalist in ALL my genres that I dance and teach .

Tango, as a dance, and musically, is now more diverse, in its aproach as to music and style, as any other form of partnership dance, and has become the most contentious among its devotees .

You're mixing up your 'labels', although there is a trend to apply the label 'tango nuevo' to the style of dancing that emerged from the various stage tango shows of the 1980s, but it already had an established usage, and confusing them is common.

Tango nuevo was a musical style, led by Piazolla and others more than half a century ago. To some extent, the leading orchestras of the Golden Age followed him into the concert hall after the 1955 upheavals brought a sudden end to all that dancing, but their music-making followed a different path.

There never really was a tango dance that embraced the 'new music', and it was not uncommon to hear said that "if it is by Piazolla, it is not tango", by which the old school meant that the music was undanceable. They weren't far wrong, but it had never been intended for dancing.

Much, much later, along came the electronica-fusion music, by the likes of Gotan Project (and gotan is the lunfardo word for tango - its tango backwards) and the others that jumped on that particular bandwaggon. Gone was the gentle pulse, coming from piano & bandoneons in the orchestra tipica, and in came thumping bass and huge PA systems. Neo-tango, as it has come to be known (usually) has about as much to do with the Golden Age of tango (and therefore the dance) as nuevo had.

There is a real 'modern' tango: but social dancers are, for the most part, happiest dancing to original Golden Age music, so it is no longer the big business it once was. Tango can no longer make you rich, as it did Canaro and Gardel.

There is now a huge range of Golden age music available on CD, and often in very good transcriptions, using all the benefits of modern technology to clean up the sound (with recordings often more than 75 years old). More recent orchestras, like Color Tango, have kept up the tradition of tango music. The leader of that orchestra, Roberto Alvarez, was Pugliese's principal bandoneonist, and it shows in the style of the orchestra playing. Their recording of La Yumba, for example, is almost a clone of the original, but with good modern sound. You couldn't really call this 'modern' (as a style), merely of relatively contemporary date. The music making is really a pastiche of an older style, but it is good to have modern recordings of many of the classics of the earlier age, all the same.

Argentine Tango, the dance, has never been standardised, so its range of styles cannot be easily compartmentalised, but interest in it has been growing for many years. However, in BsAs these days, the young go clubbing instead, just as they do everywhere else. The dance has developed in a variety of directions, and there has been a modern trend to incorporate aspects of stage dance (Fantasia), with lots of flamboyant, choreographed moves, with high boleos and ganchos which couldn't possibly have been led, and which would be downright dangerous on a social floor.

The rest of us are content to dance the tango of the Golden Age, and to its music. It is an essentially improvised dance, often in close embrace, and with a new partner more-or-less for every tanda (group of songs). As a social dance, tango was always essentially simple (but the dancers were highly skilled), and with a foundation of rhythmic walking, with embelishments, and a focus almost entirely on the partner and on the music.