What do you think improvisation is? What defines it?
Improvising the Dance
- Thread starter UKDancer
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What do you think improvisation is? What defines it?
If tango is an improvisatory dance, then can you be the perfect dancer if your ability to improvise is poor? Perfect at what?
But improvising isn't really my term - I don't think I feel comfortable with it at all. And I don't think if you were moving randomly I could recognise that you were still dancing, at all. So interpreting? Yes, and I think that it would be perfectly possible to dance nothing at all except a series of 8CBs, but still do it in a way that fitted the music (depending on the music, of course).
Almost every VU dancer I have ever seen starts with the first five steps of an 8CB. As BTM said the other day, they take that big side step, having first waved their legs around, and then, after a big dramatic pause, they move on into a cross and work from there. Sure, they do it with skill and musicality, but they nearly all do the same thing. They're not improvising either - they're dancing an 8CB. I'm not daft!
I'm still at the stage when I have to think about almost everything I do in tango. Sometimes I do lead figures, just so that I don't have to think for a second or two. But I don't want a boring dance, and I don't want to bore my partner.
But in my BR dancing, I have decades of experience. I just dance - and I'm not thinking, consciously, about what I'm doing now, or what I might do next. I haven't needed to do that for twenty years! I expect my tango to become more and more like that. And that certainly doesn't mean that I will just churn out figures, any more than I just churn out figures on the ballroom floor.
Oh yes, I know what you mean. You can improvise anything you like, but not that, or that, or that - they are not tango. Tango is what we say it is, and you must dance like this.
Hmm.
No, you misunderstand what I meant. I was suggesting that if you were really free to improvise, then just like monkey # 7,854,459 (who has just typed the first Act of Hamlet with only two typos), I might 'improvise' what, coincidentally, is identical to an extended advanced BR tango amalgamation. If you were to observe at the milonga long enough, it should be a mathematical certainty that someone will - except that very probably it would never happen. We are not free to 'improvise', except with the tango vocabulary, of necessity, that vocabulary is made up of short and mostly simple patterns. The building blocks have to be bigger than just single steps in any available direction, because they could produce BR tango, and that would never do.
It prompted me to look up 'improvise' in my Concise OED. I found:
- Create and perform spontaneously or without preparation.
- Produce or make (something) from whatever is available.
Hmm.
I would agree that the small, interchangeable parts do provide a vocabulary to work with. I think that it would be a good thing if a certification path existed that could fairly evaluate the right set of skills (ie that the syllabus and assessment criteria fitted the dance and not the other way around).
Defining the right skills is another question, though, but it was my experience that doing the necessary work for a tango exam with a figure-based syllabus was both a complete waste of my time, and a most unwelcome distraction to the serious business of learning to dance tango.
Hmmmm.
Seriously, though, I stayed out o the previous discussion about a "syllabus", but basically, I agree that it list of "moves" that expose students to basic techinique would have merit.
I'm going to use Skippy Blair's West Coast Swing 101 as an example. Now, Blari has tremendous credibility in the world of WCS because she's been around since the early 50s, and WCS started in the Los Angeles area.
A real problem is the AT is after all from Argentina. I think I wouldn't take kindly to someone from "overseas" setting up a basic West Coast Swing set of standards, unless they were only doing it for "their own" us, if you get my drift.
So, who among us AT newbies has the cred to make it work and not be seen as somewhat pretentious?
And you know, the "eight count basic" may not be so evil.
That said...
At my second WCS "Intensive" with Skippy, she was satisfied with our basics as a group, and she began introducing variations we could use. WCS has the benefit too, though, of basic patterns of limited duration (pretty much 6 count and 8 count), which AT doesn't have.
Note credible authors list WCS and AT as two of the dances where improvisation is most welcome.
I hope you can put "permitted" in quotes. The more you learn about the history of AT, the more you begin to realize that the vocabulary is very board, and that those you think certain things aren't "permitted"... Well, they can think what they want.
Tried to dance milonga with someone I used to enjoy dancing with. Her idea of what is "permitted" has shrunken as she has been... I don't know, indoctrinated. Instead of her vision becoming more broad, it has shrunken.
And, (whew!) in music you can play anything you want, and there is a huge variety of chords and progressions, and techiniques for how you play them, too. But, you are sort of restricted to it sounding like ... music, unless you are Phillip Glass, etc.
May look for some things on improv this PM (but have a bunch of other stuff going on...Janis Martin anyone?)
Subliminal
Well-Known Member
Just a thought UKDancer, but maybe try thinking of the dance in terms of the follower's perspective. Or as the partnership as a whole. It seems that your definition is very leader-centric.
When I'm following, I don't think in terms of patterns. I move in ways that take the shape of whatever seems most appropriate for that moment. If I recognize a pattern, it's usually two steps past the point where the pattern happened.
From my understanding, this is how it works for followers who are taught from an improvisational standpoint for ALL dances. But AT very much tries to push this perspective from the beginning. When a follower learns to move freely, anything is possible... if the leader understands that himself. Thus the tradition of the milongueros learning to follow as well as lead.
That's my definition of improvisation. Anything is possible with the right connection and the right partner. But of course, on the social floor, just because anything is possible doesn't mean you want to do it.
When I'm following, I don't think in terms of patterns. I move in ways that take the shape of whatever seems most appropriate for that moment. If I recognize a pattern, it's usually two steps past the point where the pattern happened.
From my understanding, this is how it works for followers who are taught from an improvisational standpoint for ALL dances. But AT very much tries to push this perspective from the beginning. When a follower learns to move freely, anything is possible... if the leader understands that himself. Thus the tradition of the milongueros learning to follow as well as lead.
That's my definition of improvisation. Anything is possible with the right connection and the right partner. But of course, on the social floor, just because anything is possible doesn't mean you want to do it.
Maybe I shouldn't get too hung up on this, but how is this possible? There are dozens of combinations of steps you can lead that start with a pivot and a back step for the follower, only one of which is the sequence you describe.
If you and your followers have an expectation of the next 4 steps when you initiate a back pivot, well, to put it bluntly, you're doing it wrong.
Perhaps I do have the wrong perspective, here, but it seems to me that it has to be the leader's overall responsibility to orchestrate (I won't say choreograph, for obvious reasons) the partners' movement. I fully accept that the follower's role isn't passive, but she can't respond to my invitation to take a backward step and pivot by pivoting the other way and stepping forward. Her role to signal pauses or timing changes to accommodate decoration or to embellish the dance and to be active in the partnership is necessarily subordinated to the overall shape of the dance, and the leader has to be responsible for that.
One of the limitations of the idea of improvisation is that the follower genuinely has an opportunity, each time the lead to next action occurs, to respond to the lead creatively - that would fit the second definition of improvision that I quoted from my dictionary very well - but the leader is being a little more calculating.
Until his experience allows him to be just lost in the dance (without being lost, if you see what I mean), he is thinking about what they both might do. For me, the biggest single difference between tango and BR is that there I know that for every figure I might lead, the follower has a predictable and complimentary action to respond with, and I can assume that she will do what she needs to do, as long as I have given the appropriate lead for it. In tango, things are more fluid: there are so many possibilities, that the lead is much more granular - I have to have a very good idea of what it is I am asking the follower to do, and there is a sense in which I am actually dancing the follower's part, myself, but vicariously. I don't mean that to sound as though the role of the follower is diminished in any way: quite the reverse, but it does place an overhead on the leader to be sorting out the movements of both members of the partnership that is just absent in BR.
I may be improvising in the primary sense that what I perform is spontaneous and without preparation, but in the moment, it sometimes demands more capacity to organise than I have. That is when I fall back to a safe pattern: I give the mark for the first action, and then do nothing that would disturb the rest of that pattern (but that doesn't stop me leading the elements as they occur). I'm off the hook for a moment or two, and we are still dancing tango, and what capacity I have can be devoted to shaping the pattern, to make it best fit my response to the music, and to do some very short-term planning as to what we might do next. Even that short-term process has taken the edge off true improvisation, but then, how many of us can honestly say that we have the skill and experience to improvise our tango 100% of the time?
You're right, of course, but that wasn't really what I had in mind. Rather, that if I have decided that here, now, I'm going to lead an ocho (or two) then while the decision to do so may have been spontaneous, the pattern itself will determine the course of things for a few moments. I already know that, and my follower will be finding out very soon. If she is focussed on our connection it will make no difference to her whether I depart from or vary the pattern, but I won't. I have thought ocho, and I'm going to dance ocho.
If this is the first dance of the tanda with a new partner, I am much more likely to lead standard patterns to see how they go. Some followers, bless them, will dance an ocho (or two) in response just to the very first impulse to step, and it can be difficult and awkward to stop them. In such circumstances, I will very quickly cease dancing in a predictable way, but equally, try to be very, very clear in my leads. If I can alert my partner to the need to listen and respond, we will both have a better dance.
If I find that I have a naturally responsive partner, I am actually more likely, rather than less likely to use patterns. They give me more capacity to think creatively about nuance and musicality (ironically), because I don't have to think about the steps and the lead to lead them. That paradox had me stumped for ages, until I realised that it was my own personal response to having relatively little experience.
Dave Bailey
Active Member
Forward ocho, not back - back ochos without the leader doing accompanying sidesteps are nasty.
Yup. Jargon doesn't help.
Dave Bailey
Active Member
As far as "improvisation" in general, I'd say that personally, I improvise the most when I'm dancing in close embrace, to traditional music, on a step-by-step basis.
I think it's much harder to improvise many "figures" (ochos and giros included) because they're obviously longer movements and often more difficult to match to phrases of music, especially music you're not familiar with.
I also agree that most social dancers I see don't improvise much and have a limited repertoire of moves. And that's in all dance forms, not just AT.
I think it's much harder to improvise many "figures" (ochos and giros included) because they're obviously longer movements and often more difficult to match to phrases of music, especially music you're not familiar with.
I also agree that most social dancers I see don't improvise much and have a limited repertoire of moves. And that's in all dance forms, not just AT.
Agreed on all points, particularly the last. I was at a milonga last Friday, preceded by a visiting couple's workshop, and they taught a (very nice) amalgamation of nameable patterns, and the majority (not all, of course) of the dancers then danced nameable patterns for most of the night. I like the idea of the improvisatory character of the dance, but I don't see it much in practise.
sixela
Well-Known Member
Steve Pastor wrote:
It's one of the endearing myths of Argentine Tango.
Of course we all have patterns, things we dance on autopilot; these are the things that come easy to us.
But the more you dance, the more you can cut things up and reassemble them at will, until the list of patterns becomes much more like an alphabet than a dictionary and what you dance is dictated by subtle cues in the music and the response of the follower.
When I dance with a follower and lead back ocho, she's got about a 60% chance of guessing the next step but probably only a 5% chance of guessing four steps (at least if she's a good follower, as some followers like their leaders to be predictable as the plague, the dance serving only as an excuse to show off impeccable posture and all the adornos they know; if you dance with one of these you will not be very improvisional if you want to remain popular).
An improvising tango dancer doesn't come fully formed from the head of Zeus, but he does evolve organically. All that happens is that he'll recognise the position of leader and follower and say, 'hey, I've seen this bit somewhere else' and a genetic algorithm will do the rest.
I've tried that in ballroom dances in Manchester briefly while living there, and things were different, with followers stopping in the middle of a dance because you were combining the start of figure 23 with the end of 12b, and that was simply Not Done. If you have followers like that, of course a common syllabus of figures common to the entire inhabitable universe becomes of paramount importance, but it certainly isn't in AT, even though people dance some combinations more often than other possible alternatives.
It's one of the endearing myths of Argentine Tango.
Of course we all have patterns, things we dance on autopilot; these are the things that come easy to us.
But the more you dance, the more you can cut things up and reassemble them at will, until the list of patterns becomes much more like an alphabet than a dictionary and what you dance is dictated by subtle cues in the music and the response of the follower.
When I dance with a follower and lead back ocho, she's got about a 60% chance of guessing the next step but probably only a 5% chance of guessing four steps (at least if she's a good follower, as some followers like their leaders to be predictable as the plague, the dance serving only as an excuse to show off impeccable posture and all the adornos they know; if you dance with one of these you will not be very improvisional if you want to remain popular).
An improvising tango dancer doesn't come fully formed from the head of Zeus, but he does evolve organically. All that happens is that he'll recognise the position of leader and follower and say, 'hey, I've seen this bit somewhere else' and a genetic algorithm will do the rest.
I've tried that in ballroom dances in Manchester briefly while living there, and things were different, with followers stopping in the middle of a dance because you were combining the start of figure 23 with the end of 12b, and that was simply Not Done. If you have followers like that, of course a common syllabus of figures common to the entire inhabitable universe becomes of paramount importance, but it certainly isn't in AT, even though people dance some combinations more often than other possible alternatives.