But we are talking about vocabulary elements here, not the amount of space used. All the elements shown in the videos in this thread work in a social context by dancers with a good understanding of floorcraft who can simply reduce the size of the movements on a crowded floor.
Contradictions in teaching “caminar”
- Thread starter latinjazz
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But we are talking about vocabulary elements here, not the amount of space used. All the elements shown in the videos in this thread work in a social context by dancers with a good understanding of floorcraft who can simply reduce the size of the movements on a crowded floor.
In my experience what happens is quite different.
Your reduced movements are not reduced enough.
The pseudo show/nuevo dancers do their thing, often badly,
while using more than their fair share of available space.
Those who can dance small on a crowded floor avoid them
and/or work around them which enables the Nuevo dancers
to convince themselves that they aren't causing any chaos
because no-one is bumping into them.
It was described on Tango and Chaos as King Fu Tango.
The video clip shows the aware and careful dancers
ceding the space to Naveira in their own self defence,
literally backing away. The effect of such selfish dancing
is repeated at most mixed milongas.
We will have to agree to disagree.
What actually causes problems is erratic travel around the dance floor and encroaching on other couples, and the primary movement responsible for this is actually the walk
Don't address the problem, blame some others instead.
Nuevo is inherently erratic in its movement and influence.
For those who can only walk, walking on a crowded floor is not
such a problem to others, mainly to themselves because they cannot
walk nor do much else besides pausing. I don't subscribe to Detlef
and Melina's description of Tango: Tango is walking in an embrace
from here: https://www.tangodesalon.de/
Now an intensive mix of walkers and those who can actually dance
is another matter altogether, mainly because walkers who cannot
do anything but walk and pause cannot flow progressively.
But they are predictable, so some sort of co-existence is possible.
Nuevo dancers are erratically unpredictable and are best avoided.
I am not sure about this statement - i think that some nuevo dancers are erratic, but that is in my opinion not a inherently a function of the style. What i see is that nuevo vocabulary is sometimes a bit unmoored from a basic movement concept. The majority of the vocabulary is actually relatively conventional, just danced bigger and with more emphasis on flow. But because the vocabulary is thought about in a different context the setups become somewhat convoluted and create this feel of disconnectedness between the dancers and the ronda.
For example lets look at the backwards saccada - if you watch old performance and even social dance videos it shows up surprisingly often. In general it seems to have been used as a leaders adornment for the followers giro, often as the last step before the giro ends - "look at me, i can kick and step forward into the followers giro, and i can also step backwards into it". And if it is practiced and studied from that perspective it is quite a compact, inobtrusive move that fits quite nicely into the ronda. But if we do it as a separate piece of vocabulary first, then it becomes huge - at least the way i have been taught a long time ago as the basic technique requires two large steps to the left, and then a big step of the follower against the line of dance. Too many steps, using too much time and space.
But this does not make it inherently erratic - note that the ocho is generally taught in way that is similarly unsuitable for the dancefloor (step to the left, hidden weightshift of the leader, pivot of the follower, a second step to the left - and at that moment we are already in the adjacent lane). It just means that the way this vocabulary is taught and understood requires some tweaking to work for the social dance - and that is (sadly) true for most tango teaching.
I have a somewhat ambiguous relationship with this one, and with a few of the others from pathe that don't demonstrate the basics (which are often quite nice - it is quite interesting to see how different dance teaching and demos looked when people took it for given that a dancing couple would move around the dancefloor - i sometimes think that a beginner using these instructions would look less off in their first foray into social dancing than people starting with the 8cb
). I used to look at them as being somewhat comical and only having the vaguest connection with AT, but over time i have mellowed out - often the vocabulary they seem to have started out with when creating these performances is quite consistent with each other, and other early performances. What they did with it to make it big and stage friendly reflects a different aesthetic than what we do today, but in absolute terms it is probably not further away from the social dance.
ArbeeNYC
Forum Master
I don't think I would take this as gospel. There's a lot missing here. Not to mention the fact that we are in the realm of tango escenario.So based on these definitions (that he INSISTS on) we today are mostly tango liso, with the nuevo dancers being tango orillero?
ArbeeNYC
Forum Master
Soundtrack added later, obviously. I'm wondering if this is even tango, in spite of the claim being made that it was. I forget when the Valentino movie was from, but this is from 1928. Not B.A. though.
ArbeeNYC
Forum Master
The Valentino certainly does not work in that context. You can dance tango nuevo socially, but you need a lot of room to do it.
ArbeeNYC
Forum Master
Well, that is nonsense, of course. No dancer who knows how to walk is going to simply walk into the couple in front of them. A walk is simply an element, a small one at that. Most modern examples of social tango are danced on/in a baldosa. Circularly. You advance when you can, using short steps. Nuevo dancers, neo-nuevo dancers, proto-nuevo dancers, pseudo-nuevo dancers, however you wish to label them, always require more space, are more dangerous to be near, and threaten the flow and continuity of the ronda. Some simply stop to admire their wonderfulness. There is nothing erratic about a coherent ronda with the dancers moving in time to the music.
I am mostly amused at the authors strong language - he sounded like he posted here "I _insist_ that there are only two tangos"
. Even we are usually more circumspect when we describe our personal classification system, and if i were to write something "official" i would be even more so.....The more showy versions of these early performances are always strange, but i think it has at least the same base vocabulary:
Lots of cortes, but we know that they used to be important in the early tango - a lot of writing and interviews mention them (usually in the context of cortes not being danced by well behaved dancers - seeing how the (probably exaggerated) valentino version ends up with a lot of thigh-to-thigh contact i can see why), then a giro, more cortes, a hopped backwards ocho (again, there is much more hopping in early stuff, so this is not too strange). cut. lots of cortes. cut. a jump from a corte - a pure show move ( actually a neat technique, and virulazo in the video above uses basically the exact same technique to do a small jump from an enganche), another jump (performers just love jumps, don't they?), giro with variations of the walk and exit, more cortes, cut to drunk guy seeing fish, canyuenge style promenade, turn with a saccada, repeat, cut, cortes+piques, cut, more cortes, more piques.
Ok, watching this section by section i noticed it is strategically cut so that they dance only one piece of vocabulary. I suspect that they went off and practiced between cuts...
If i used a more current look, and aside from the cortes (which are really out of fashion) and the jumps i probably could dance the whole thing at a milonga, and it would not look too out of place. And I probably could pull off the cortes, too, if i warned my partner that i was doing a tango-bachata crossover *laugh*. It would probably look more natural if it was a milonga, though, but that seems to be true for a lot of that early vocabulary.
Fairly recently I was dancing in a crowded milonga between two skilled couples, we were all doing sacadas, volcadas, ganchos and other so-called "nuevo" moves, not using any more space than average, and none of us interefered with each other or anyone else; I remember it because it was actually one of the most harmonious ronda situations i'd been in recently. It's not hard to do either... these moves don't naturally travel, you just rotate around a shared axis between the couple, occasionally resolving a movement in such a way that it progresses slightly forwad in the ronda.
I've been walked into while standing still by people who should know better! More common is the version where one couple takes a large step into space that they thought was empty when they started, but someone else walked into it too (they don't always see each other because side and back steps are a thing, and also the leader blind spot caused by the couple's head position)
I've been walked into while standing still by people who should know better! More common is the version where one couple takes a large step into space that they thought was empty when they started, but someone else walked into it too (they don't always see each other because side and back steps are a thing, and also the leader blind spot caused by the couple's head position)
opendoor
Forum Master
It was announced worldwide as tango and Valentino himself explained repeatedly how he had learnt this dance.
ArbeeNYC
Forum Master
I read somewhere, in another thread (maybe here?), that what Valentino is doing is an imitation of an "Apache" dance not a tango. At a given point in time "les apaches" were something like the French version of guapos. Tango-bachata? That's close to what I mean. This is not tango (even for the time) but a mixture of steps imported from other dances and presented as tango. Not to mention his gaucho outfit, which is entirely inappropriate here.