Closer embrace = free floating hand

[UKDancer]

Her book is interesting in a confusing sort of way.

Yes, and I think that its best sections are on the general history of the dance, and those tabular sections setting out some principles of basic technique. There are ideas to question, but certainly food for thought. For all its faults, it is well worth the modest cover price.

 

[Steve Pastor]

Why, for example, is there almost no film of ordinary people dancing?

Same is true for swing/lindy hop.
I think the answer is that no one wants to watch mediocre or average dancing. At least until way after the fact.

Frame?

The frame is about attitude. It's like you're... look down at your watch only with your eyes, but you are this English gentleman, who cannot move, and you have a cup of tea on your head.
Julianne Hough explaining frame in fox trot Dancing With The Stars - Season 20 Week

I'm going to look at Denniston's book, just for kicks.

 

[JohnEm]

I believe that some of what goes on here (and on other internet forums) is a result of people sometimes forgetting that many words/terms in English have multiple meanings. "Embrace" is an example of this.

Jan likely is referring to embrace in the more literal sense of the word, (a hug). If using the term in this way, one could conclude that the term "open embrace" is an oxymoron (makes no sense). From that perspective, one could reasonably state that there is no embrace if there's space in between the couple.

However, if one was using the term to mean something more like "frame" (for example), then the term open embrace (which is commonly used) makes a lot more sense.

My two cents.

I just do not see your logic, as in meaning I see none.

There is a well-known saying that words can mean whatever
we want them to mean (Lewis Carroll: Humpty Dumpty in Through
the Looking Glass) but that means that we have no means
to communicate meaningfully. Do you understand what I mean?

And why would you use one word with a perfectly clear meaning,
and in its Castellano equivalent. to mean something entirely different
for which there is another perfectly clearly understood word?

In fact, if you continue down this avenue, this forum (any forum?)
can have no effective meaning at all.

 

[UKDancer]

... but you are this English gentleman, who cannot move, and you have a cup of tea on your head.

But he could move ... (from 0:30).

 

[JohnEm]

I agree that some of her comments are perplexing (and some of the photos rather odd), but as I said in my earlier post, her interest was not in the dancing of 1996, but of the 40s. It's a real shame that many aspects of the golden age are lost to us. Why, for example, is there almost no film of ordinary people dancing?

Filming of social dance in the 30s and 40s is scarce of any social dance.
It isn't for viewing, it's for participating and tango is the most extremely
inward dance of all because of the intense and often intimate connection.

From what I have read (rather more widely than Denniston, I might add) the dance of the tango revival was almost reinvented. The 'stars' and early teachers of the revival were not dancing in the Golden Age - although their parents might have been. Just because we personally don't see much appeal in the style that she describes (and no doubt it does represent a sub-set of all possible styles prevailing at the time) doesn't mean that her sources were making it up, or that she distorted or misunderstood what she learned from them. I don't know: I wasn't there.

There are others with critical views too. In fact so far I have seen no evidence
to support her explanations and posed photographs. Note there are no photos
in the book of anyone dancing like that and photography was available to her
even if video was not: see her pic on page 94. I have seen no old (meaning really old)
porteno couples dancing in the way she describes. There are certainly
variations from what we commonly now call milonguero but not her variation.

Personally, I have adapted the basic setup to be as parallel as practical, and to have my right arm protectively around my partner, but not necessarily actually touching her, except perhaps very lightly. I like to dance on my own axis, but be in close embrace. A hug doesn't have to be a bear hug.

The common criticism by some portenas is that foreigners do not embrace,
they tell me because I am excluded from that. In BA, your portena
partner would be wondering where you are and why are you so afraid
to dance in a proper and meaningful embrace.

I only posted this, at all, in partial answer to the OP's issue: perhaps the arm shouldn't flap about, but there's no need to be concerned about a lack of contact.

I don't agree: the most intensely connected way of dancing
is thereby reduced to a something of a sham.

 

[sixela]

but of the 40s.

There's ample video evidence that also doesn't really corroborate her views (not to mention that it's pretty clear that even in the 40s there was stylistic variance even in the way people embraced).

 

[UKDancer]

There's ample video evidence....

Is there? Where?

 

[sixela]

Plenty. OK, this is the 1930s (before the D'Arienzo/Biagi revolution), but from 3:30 onwards you can briefly see people who dance pretty much like more modern-day milongueros do. There's even obvious stylistic variation within the movie, things like variable amounts of "Vee" in the embrace, and people like El Cachafaz who're obviously granted the right to their own idiosyncratic style.


In the 1940s you have a lot of movies with tango in them; some of them even have versions of songs by orchestras that haven't been released on shellac or vinyl at all. I've seen my share of them, but I don't have links at hand right now.

 

[ralf]

Keep in mind that there is relatively little movie footage of any area of every-day activity in the 30s/40s. Film was expensive, why waste it on something mundane? It wasn't until the home video camera became ubiquitous in the 80s that we got to see lots of everyday activities.

 

[Tango Distance]

I did, but in a roundabout way. Here on DF I read the man presents his left hand first, right arm doing nothing, the lady then determines the closeness of the hold, and then the man does the right hand. I was doing right and left hand at the same time. Maybe that gave rise to the followers not knowing what to do with that moving arm and grabbing my shoulder. Anyway, I was happy to stumble on this graceful solution to the problem. With my wife her hold was leading to flapping right hand, she needs to hold my forearm just below the elbow and that works great.

So... Tango Distance... did you ever figure out the solution to "The Dilemma of the Follower's Left Hand"?

I think I'll write a mystery series, and that will be my 1st title!

(advance copies available at discount to DanceForums members, haha)

 

[UKDancer]

Plenty.

You may be right: although I'm not familiar with it. However, I don't think that you can credibly claim to cite the dancing in a commercial film released before the Golden Age as evidence to discount a style of social dancing in the 1940s.

I am not strongly of the Denniston party, and have no personal interest in proving her right or wrong. She describes, in detail, a way of dancing - and even if it only represents the way that a small group of broken-down old men ever did dance and were still dancing in the 1990s (and are now gone), it is still of interest.

She says, at various points in her text, that there was always a wide range of styles (but that they were mainly founded on a common technique) and that for all the inventiveness of the tango nuevo period, nearly everything that emerged could have been found in the 40s too, if you new where to look. I have no evidence for that either way, but given the time and effort that men put into the practica system, it would be remarkable if it were not so.

Inevitably, we all look to a model that suits us as being normative for the dance we adopt. For some, it is the dancing in their favourite milongas in BsAs, and they, in particular, burn with a missionary's zeal for the dance that they love. The trouble with that approach is that just around the corner, a very different style of dancing is normative for and is loved by others, and across town, everything changes again. Some of the better known guides to dancing in BsAs state the rather obvious point that every style under the sun is represented in that large cosmopolitan city, and when it comes down to it, the preferred style of any individual may only be found in a handful of milongas and be practised by so small a body of dancers, that in the worldwide scheme of things, it is no more relevant or normative than Denniston's particular take.

The same guide books take great pains to suggest that to find a certain style of dancing, care must be taken as to where you go, and the company you keep. By extension, you might reasonably conclude that the default style of tango is commercialised and predicated on the requirements and preferences of the tourist trade, that if you go to the wrong milonga, rather than the right one, the only people you will dance with are other tourists, or those caught in the tourists' net. Perhaps 99% of the teachers (who claim, perfectly truthfully, that they come straight from BsAs, have studied with a representative selection of the current 'greats') are peddling something other than the pure and only real tango danced by, perhaps, 250 people? If they wrote a book, under a pseudonym - let's say, Dennis Christianson, there'd be no shortage of candidates to shoot 'em down in flames.

I suppose, at least we no longer settle our tango relates differences with knives.

 

[sixela]

evidence to discount a style of social dancing in the 1940s.

I'm not "discounting a style" - and while commercial films aren't the end-all and be-all of tango in the 1940s, not all dancers in these films are pros -- some dancers are extras. There are also tons of photos of very large milongas that are perfectly consistent with it. But:

-her description doesn't work (or I'm not understanding it correctly)
-there is plenty of evidence embraces used by the older milongueros still alive in the '80s, 90s and 00s were also present in the 30s and 40s.

In other words, what you quoted from her earlier still has scant evidence (absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, though) as a description of what was "normal".

On the other hand, I'm the last person to be normative: everyone is perfectly free to develop his own style and tango is a broad church (I pointed out the El Cachafez was _very_ iodiosyncratic, _and_ successful).

It's only when you present a certain style as historically more correct than another that the onus for presenting evidence falls on your own shoulders, of course.

the pure and only real tango danced by, perhaps, 250 people?

There's no such thing as "the tango" defined very narrowly, since it is and always has been a dialect continuum. And if the majority are dancing something you aren't, then you're even less well placed to call your particular variant "the tango".

 

[UKDancer]

There's no such thing as "the tango" defined very narrowly, since it is and always has been a dialect continuum. And if the majority are dancing something you aren't, then you're even less well placed to call your particular variant "the tango".

I agree with you completely.

 

[Gssh]

She says, on the subject of physical relationship:

• The dancers are directly opposite each other with parallel shoulders,
• The man's right arm extends straight forward, at right angles to his shoulders,
• He doesn't attempt to touch the woman's back (but turns the hand in, at the wrist, so that his palm faces his chest),
• The woman places her left hand on the man's back (and only around his neck to signify more than a dancer's relationship).

The woman dances with a forward intention, bringing her 'heart' towards that of the leader, so there is no need to 'hold' her with the arms - and certainly not with pressure on the back - the man leads from his chest. The outstretched arm maintains the alignment of the bodies, so that the woman does not tend to slip to the man's side (like a ballroom hold).

The man brings his 'heart' (chest) towards the woman, but she chooses the distance between them, but that distance it is then maintained, so that the 'hearts' always move together, regardless of the actual distance between them.

I think i have to buy this book - has anybody here danced with her?
This is really interesting to me because while this is not what i think of as an embrace for social dancing this is almost exactly what i use when i am trying to show a follower how i understand "BA downtown style" to work. It is a bit less exaggerated, but i would describe it like this:
1) the dancers are directly opposite each other with parallel shoulder
2) the leaders right arm extends straight forward, at a right angle to his shoulder
3) I am even doing this - except that after the follower has chosen their distance i fold the embrace around them, and don't keep the arm sticking out (but if the follower goes into open embrace it looks pretty much like this) - when the follower is between my wrist and elbow i drop my elbow and so that my hand is on their back, if they are between my elbow and shoulder i drape my arm around them. But that mainly feels better than sticking the arm our - the point that the leader embraces/hugs the follower, and doesn't hold them is the same. The arm is a reference, not something the leader uses to move the follower.
4) The followers left hand is mostly decoration, and where she puts it is about how she feels about the dance, the embrace, and the leader.

And then it is the followers responsibility to maintain the connection by moving herself to maintain the distance and geometry between them - it is perfectly possible to dance without the leaders arms (though more work - having a touch reference makes things easier).

This description will keep an inexperienced leader from trying to establish a "connection" by pulling the follower towards himself and holding them there.

In "real" dancing 1 through 4 meld into each other into "setting the embrace", which is some ways already tells you everything about what the dance is going to be like (except for a few followers that seem to have practiced "setting the embrace" as a separate skill -they set a wonderful embrace, and then as soon as we start dancing they break it and dance in a completely different embrace - which is a very strange and disconcerting experience)

 

[Zoopsia59]

rather than quote the whole thing, I'll just say I like Gssh's last post.