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.

Im familiar with its inception ( Nuevo ) and all the roots of the dance , and maybe a bad choice of word, but, I was using it in the Spanish meaning of " New/er " .

As I stated, I have mainly recordings of the old " masters " which I do use, when the opportunity arises .

By the way... as to standardisation , are you aware that a very concise book was printed, with over 170 variations from basic foundation to more advanced work.

It was compiled by Paul Bottomer, a former World Champ. T/Arg dancer and teacher.. its now used for teaching exams .

I'm familiar with three attempts at standardisation, and the UKA one (Bottomer) is probably the least successful. The IDTA one, of more recent date, is little better, and the standard of charts in the technique are truly dreadful. The best, by far, (although that's not saying much) is the DanceVision one by Cote/Garcia.

The problem is that the serious tango community just laughs its collective head off at the very IDEA of standardisation. There ARE no figures in this dance: everything is led, one step at a time, based on the connection with the music and the partner, in the moment. There is a vocabulary of actions to acquire and master, and a generally accepted set of codes, which go beyond etiquette, by which the tango community collectively regulates itself. You'd probably never dance the same track in quite the same way twice (unless you were dancing a tango-pastiche 'routine' taught by a dance school, in which case THAT is what you would dance, again, and again, and again.) I want to establish a connection with my partner, and listen to her body and to the music, before I decide what I'm going to lead, and how I'm going to interpret the rhythm and style of the music. You can't put that in a book: it is pointless to try.

All of the published techniques are obsessed with the awful 8CB, but quite why ANYONE would think it acceptable to start a figure by stepping backwards against the line of dance beats me. It just about sums up the value of the attempt.

The IDTA technique has NOTHING to say about such fundamentals as how the cruzada is led (or anything else, for that matter), or how the follower walks backwards. Given that 'The Walks' are a compulsory syllabus question for the Teaching Diploma, the fact that the technique hasn't actually noticed that the follower does walk backwards, and says NOTHING on the subject, tells me all I want to know.

Pretty much agree with everything you stated, except one.. there are NO figures.. if there are NO figures, then what are you leading ?and why do they have names?.

I believe you mean that there is no set format ( salsa claims the same theory ).. I can deal with that

They don't really, except in teaching society's pamphlets. Probably the nearest thing we have to a figure is the Giro, aka Molinete or Grapevine. It is a predictable pattern of steps with pivots, but the thing that stops it from being a 'figure' and makes it 'just' a pattern is that it can start with either leader or follower (or both), to the left or the right, and with either a forward step, back step or side step. A particular pattern, within the Giro family, could be the Media Luna, but if performed by follower, the leader could be doing anything at all with his own feet (or nothing), the lead is entirely from the torso.

Otherwise, we have something much nearer to the concept of 'actions' taken from Latin technique. The dance has a vocabulary made up from the elements that it is possible to lead from any given position, but there are no other real 'rules' (who is there who could make them?): if you can lead it, within the broad limits of tango vocabulary, it is tango.

So no, I don't merely mean that there is freedom to build amalgamations out of standardised figures: I'll leave that to the dance school pastiche crowd. Tango is led, one movement (which is very often not a step) at a time, based on the quality of the connection between the dancers and the music, and always in the moment.

Ive been fortunate to have known some well respected teachers in T/A

( in the States ), and pretty much every one has Ochos, Boleos,La Salida ( among other common terms )in their vocabulary.

In fact, it would be impossible to teach without nomenclature ( unless you number everything ! ).

And, that does not imply that "A" follows "B", as should be the case in all teaching ,in genres where there are mutliple options .

From a teaching standpoint, there needs to be a basis from which people are able to communicate with a common dance " language " .

These aren't 'figures', though.

An ocho is an 'action' (my definition - others would use their own term) which can be danced on either foot, either forward or backward. What makes it an ocho is the marking of a figure eight on the floor by the free foot during two successive steps followed by pivots. The 'turning walk', as it is often called, is one of those fundamentals of the vocabulary, just as in a ballroom turn we have 'inside' and 'outside' turns, but they are not figures.

The action of a Latin forward walk, turning (as in a Spot Turn) is very similar, but again it is an action (and one which we will recognise when we come across it again). Tango is like this - the elements of the dance can be combined, adapted, and used in thousands of ways without the application ever becoming 'formulaic' (except in the hands of a novice, understandably).

Boleos are another action. They can be back or forward or continuous, high or kept on the floor. They are created by a contra-body action set up by the leader, and the follower's role is very nearly passive: she could only avoid the action if she resisted the movement of the free leg (which would have ceased to be free). They don't have to be set up from any particular preparation step, let alone a 'precede', nor do they have to be finished in any way.

If, for the purposes of instruction, you chose to 'standardise' the use of an action, you would have to select a context and then express the movement as best you could, through the imperfect language and medium of a 'chart', but you have failed to produce a 'figure' except for the handful who like this sort of thing. At best, you have documented one way of performing an action, but nothing is fixed: not foot positions, not timing, not amount of turn (if any) not even the type or style of embrace. What you have is of very marginal usefulness, and it is likely to impede, rather than assist the novice in understanding the range of options for the same action. Anyone with experience of both tango AND ballroom technique would probably take a highlighter pen, and mark the one line of the chart that contained the key action, and would dismiss the rest as padding.

As for the Salida, no one can even agree what it is: some say that it is the opening to the leader's left (step 2 of an 8CB, if you must), others say that it is the exit (which is closer to the literal meaning), so steps 678 of the 8CB, more usually referred to as the 'resolution', while others insist that the whole 8CB is the 'salida'. No one who dances tango cares: they avoid the 8CB like the plague anyway, and if some teachers want to package up the dance for their unsuspecting students, let them get on with it...



I can assure you that it isn't impossible to teach without nomenclature, at least any that goes beyond the immediate possibilities for movement/action. What's more, teaching (and by extension, dancing) by numbers is EXACTLY how the serious tango dancer refers the attempts of cross-over dancers from the ballroom world. They don't mean it as a compliment.

Tango teachers have two basic approaches: one teaches movement and the possibilities of movement within the vocabulary of the dance, and the other parcels it all up (destroying its ethos and most of the improvisatory possibilities in the process) into chunks, for teaching purposes, and 'sells' the dance along with all the others. There are shades, between, of course, but while the latter approach can yield seemingly impressive results in the first few weeks with beginners, they find that they have to abandon it, and learn tango for real at some point, or give it up, for no one else will either be able to, or want to, dance with them, except, possibly, the other members of their class.



What you say is true, but not in the sense in which you intend. You 'give away' your training background and approach, taking your post as a whole, and I felt much the same way when I first started dancing tango seriously. I always had one eye on teaching the dance too, so right from the start, I was thinking 'how' to present the fundamental principles, and much of my thinking revolved around some degree of standardisation. The trouble with that approach is that it just doesn't work with tango - you will only ever produce tango pastiche.

Writing as a trained ballroom dancer turned teacher, I got serious indigestion eating the large slice of humble pie that came with having to admit that the tango lot were right, all along, and that I had been wasting my time in the attempt. It set back my development as a tanguero by at least a year, but I'm over it now!

If you've actually read the ISTD Argentine Tango pamphlet intended for teachers, it's really fairly respectful of the concept and values of the dance, and very clear on the ultimate goal of improvisational flexibility.

At the same time, it's useful to have some starting point ideas as a context for training the body and a home from which to depart in improvisational adventures. While students are trying to build communication skills, it's helpful if those ideas have some degree of commonality, and are sufficiently distinct from ballroom patterns to avoid confusion about which mode one is in. This lets them concentrate on choosing between familiar movements, instead of immediately having to invent everything on the spot. As they gain more experience, they can experiment more.

While there is not a lot of technique covered, that's true of the society's ballroom publications as well - most of the detail of execution is left to the live teacher or trainer. Probably the difference is that there's enough specificity in the ballroom figures for the appropriate techniques to be deduced. In tango, trying to avoid specificity leaves it all open to interpretation.

So its not so much the content of the tango pamphlet that can be faulted, but more that it's utility is limited to sharing a few starting point ideas that are sufficiently far from ballroom in character.