Musicality trouble..?

[opendoor]

..useful to us as dancers

I hear the critic. You are right, I should not have answered to the question, but start a new thread, instead.

 

[Gssh]

I hear the critic. You are right, I should not have answered to the question, but start a new thread, instead.

Nah, it was not intended as a criticism. The question if history/roots/sociological parallels have use in improving my current tango is something that i am going back and forth on. I am firmly convinced that e.g "true BA" style milongas with their codigos and cabeceo and assigned seating and eating and drinking are a really useful, functional framework to create a positive dance experience. I am not sure if it is really a cure for all problems, but the milongas i expereinced that follow that framework seemed to work quite a bit better on average than the ones that don't follow this framework. Now this is something where i think that historical forms used good tools to deal with issues that have as much relevance now as they did back then, and we don't seem to have been able to develop better tools.
So looking at the socio-cultural environoment that tango developed in, and similar socio-cultural frameworks in the us could very well give us a some guidance to develop musicality. When i talk about individual expression and styles in tango the parallel i tend to use is that the logic is more like hip hop than anything way, and trying to use a "there is a standard" model leads to misunderstandings. Tango is all about neighbourhoods, doing the thing ones own friends do, dissing the other neighbourhoods dance style. So it is natural that everybody dances the "true" tango, and all these true tangos don't mix very well with each other. The strong identification with ones neighbourhood is something that the average modern suburban dweller does not immediately have access to.

 

[itwillhappen]

I think in times of cars, trains and planes is "neighborhood" a wide area. My neighborhood milonga is 200 km away. But do I have to take much effort to develop musicality or decompose my steps to dance with my neighbors?

 

[ArbeeNYC]

Nah, it was not intended as a criticism. The question if history/roots/sociological parallels have use in improving my current tango is something that i am going back and forth on.

Same here. Very interesting post, by the way. My current position is that the historical background helps to provide a context for tango, helps us to know where it came from, how it developed and grew, the musical influences, the dance influences, local traditions, and so on. I don't think this will improve one's dancing but it will help to put us in touch with the underlying currents of tango that prevailed throughout many decades in Buenos Aires. I also get the impression that the dancers most in touch with the history (social and cultural and musical) of the dance and its implications want to duplicate (to the extent possible in today's world) the framework of the traditional milonga and its conventions, and those that are uncurious or indifferent slip more easily into tango nuevo and alternative milongas.

Your point about neighborhoods is a good one. As I understand it, in B.A., in tango's heyday, there were hundreds of milongas a night and every neighborhood had its own local milonga, in addition to the larger downtown milongas of central B.A., which gave us what has come be known (not very accurately) as "milonguero" style. But there must have been many local variants in the 30s and 40s. And, needless to say, they were all example of "tango de salon."

 

[itwillhappen]

I think it's obvious that the young crowd during the EdO - without noteworthy musical and dancing education, with occasional live music instead of a spotify account - was not dancing very "musically" in terms of knowing all accents and pauses, no matter what the aged milongueros tried to tell us.

I not so good in memorizing the specifics of songs and don't spend much effort on it till now. So I have to dance to the music that I hear and make decisions based on my expectations of the structure. Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's bad, I get my dances.
And I'm not alone. Whenever I turned off the sound from the video of a crowded milonga, I was never able to discover the end of phrases or even sets in the couples movements. But I'm interested in a positive example.

 

[Loisa Donnay]

Blues and American country music, and blues and Rock n roll are much more "connected" than blues and tango.

Tango does not have a habanera rhythm, generally. Milonga does. (that's the bum ba dum dum rhythm of Spanish music-like "Carmen" in the opera.) This can help new students to tell the difference between a slow milonga and a fast tango. Country/Western music often has that habanera rhythm. especially older Western music. You can almost picture the horse's hooves. And Ballroom tango retains it, interestingly enough. Blues shares tango's phrasing, that beautiful dragging to the beat, and phrasing is so important in truly dancing tango. As we look for connections, it is clear that there was a lot of "borrowing" from other genres going on.

 

[Gssh]

Your point about neighborhoods is a good one. As I understand it, in B.A., in tango's heyday, there were hundreds of milongas a night and every neighborhood had its own local milonga, in addition to the larger downtown milongas of central B.A., which gave us what has come be known (not very accurately) as "milonguero" style. But there must have been many local variants in the 30s and 40s. And, needless to say, they were all example of "tango de salon."

Not just in the 30's 40's - just look at Villa Urquiza (and the interesting phenomenon of how many people outside of BA both try to emulate that neighbourhoods particular style, and at the same time when they visit BA don't actually consider sunderland their home milonga). I sometimes wonder how different the tango world would look if e.g. Dinzel had pushed Villa Crespo the same way (I think that more peoples actual home milongas when in BA are there, and the style is similar enough that a lot of people would probably not notice anyway). Or if "milonguero" had been presented outside of BA as Centro/San Nicolas (or maybe Monserrat, Constitucion, Balvanera?- I kinda like this - i might use constitucion the next time somebody asks me what tango i dance). I think this is one of the more interesting things one learns when living in BA for a while - how precise and detailed a blueprint/diagnostic of somebodies dance one can get by knowing what specific set of milongas one goes to (and how disconcerting it is to some people when one crosses set boundaries)
I am also a bit skeptical of the utility of the idea that they are all examples of tango de salon - momo smitt and n.w.a are both examples of hip hop (and even west coast hip hop, at that), but the differences between claiming roots from rosecrans in compton or from milongas in portland lead to quite different takes on the genre. I always feel that acknowledging just how different and often quite incompatible the different tangos are would be a good thing.

 

[Chrisa Assis]

I am also a bit skeptical of the utility of the idea that they are all examples of tango de salon - momo smitt and n.w.a are both examples of hip hop (and even west coast hip hop, at that), but the differences between claiming roots from rosecrans in compton or from milongas in portland lead to quite different takes on the genre. I always feel that acknowledging just how different and often quite incompatible the different tangos are would be a good thing.[/QUOTE]

I find the fact that there are different styles of Tango really fascinating, not because of the options but because once you started learning of how each of them was created you can start seeing the roots and the different cultures it was inspired by. And from the looks of it, quite a few of us are like that..!hahaha
And we probably won't physically become better by learning the history and identifying the difference and chatting about it but we will definitely become more aware of what all the options, and maybe explore a couple of them...
I mean one of the reason I stopped doing greek folk dancing was that after you learn the different dances of the different areas in Greece, then that is it--now don't get me wrong it took me like years to learn all the dances from the different areas in Greece but still after almost 20 years you start identifying the limit... There are no different styles, or different approaches or room for further exploration within the dance itself.
Tango doesn't have that kind of limit necessarily, you can try a different style and get a complete different experience
So I am not sure if there is any physical benefit from this but there is surely a gain no..?

 

[opendoor]

...don't get me wrong, it took me like years to learn all the dances from the different areas in Greece but ... There are no ...different approaches or room for further exploration within the dance itself..

You´ve put it in a nutshell, well said Chrisa and analyzed strikingly: Actually everyone has to ask this question one day or another in his life: Neo or Netro? And for the more courageous among us, I would vote for...

 

[opendoor]

Retro, of course, not Netro..... (orthographically) but Neo practically.

 

[itwillhappen]

For me is "Neo" only a renaming of "Nuevo", I see nothing new on the market at the moment.

But to dance Nuevo seems to be quite difficult, it might be more suited for a talented minority than the courageous crowd.

 

[dchester]

But to dance Nuevo seems to be quite difficult, it might be more suited for a talented minority than the courageous crowd.

What makes nuevo seem more difficult to you? It's different, in that is relaxes some of the "rules", especially on the embrace and connection, but that makes it seem easier, to me.

 

[Gssh]

After seeing opendoor contrasting neo with retro i now like the name "neo" less - it is not a new (and improved?) version of the old "retro" tango, it is a branching that emphasizes some aspects of the dance - and by doing so de-emphasize others.
I would agree with dchester that neo is probably not intrinsically more difficult than retro, but i think that its failure modes are more obvious. It is perfectly possible to dance a version of the "retro" tango that uses none of what i would consider the fundamental techniques of that style, and still manage to make it work somehow, while neo without using proper neo technique just doesn't work.
Anecdotally whenever i worked with training partners on constitution class technique (counterbalance, maintaining energy when not moving, relaxing into movement, using the partners connection to the ground equally to ones own) they tended to feel that it was very demanding, and we used to do nuevo to relax (i was really into el pulpos stuff - i still think that the way he talked about the awareness of what leading surfaces are available and that one should be able to connect and sustain connection with any body part, and that his style was all about the thigh as the leading surface is one of the more exciting ideas to play with. In some ways the "stickiness" in the way he thought of bodies intersecting is quite different than the "bounciness" that others use)

 

[opendoor]

For me is "Neo" only a renaming of "Nuevo"..

That was not my point, itwillhappen, we talked of different mind sets in the folk dance and balfolk community, not of tango. Neo and Retro are sociological tools.

..Nuevo seems to be quite difficult, it might be more suited for a talented minority..

The period of the tango as a mass phenomenon is over.

 

[itwillhappen]

What makes nuevo seem more difficult to you? It's different, in that is relaxes some of the "rules", especially on the embrace and connection, but that makes it seem easier, to me.

Additionally to the excellent thoughts of Gsss above:

My SO insists on a really good connection. That's possible in any distance, but in my opinion more difficult than in a zero distance close embrace.

And I think it would not get easy to find good nuevo teachers and dancers in these days. Norberto "El Pulpo" Esbrez died 4 years ago.