To the wider world, 'Tango' is danced as ballroom fantasia as on Strictly/DWTS (don't forget the rose!).
The sometimes subtle differences between salon, milonguero (centro), orillero, fantasia, escenario, Villa Urquiza, etc, etc, are irrelevant in that world.
And lest we forget, since its inception in 2003, the Mundial has had but two tracks:
Tango de Pista and
Tango Escenario. What matters there is, "Do you dance it in a ronda, with movements suitable for a ronda, or on a stage, with whatever movements you like?"
Everything else is irrelevant.
So, the cultural organization that fights tooth and nail to "own" tango and sponsor tango internationally, backed by the GCABA itself, cares about only this one distinction. The judges do not seem to care how you choose to dance what tangos by what orquestas from what eras, as long as (1) you dance well, and (2) you don't break rules that exist to keep the two tracks distinct (namely, no
escenario in your
pista).
Some might attempt to argue, "Well, yes, but we know that
pista really means
X and that
escenario really means
Y," but that doesn't pass the sniff test. Simply by watching, you can see significant variations in how different couples dance to exactly the same music – especially in the
pista rondas, when they are on the floor together. I don't claim to be an expert, but I was at least there for a qualifier, judged by some of the same who judged the finals, and the top couples definitively did not dance using the same embrace, technique, musicality, or anything else . . . all they had in common was "dancing well enough to get picked."
In this light, point (2) in my second paragraph seems very important. If distinctions between historical "styles" really mattered at this level of dance, there would be tracks for those approaches and rules to ensure their purity. That just isn't the case. So, since I'm
not an expert: If the top judges of the top couples in the dance, in the top event in the city the dance calls home, don't think finer distinctions are important, my guess is that they aren't important. After all, if there were a dollar to be made on more tracks in more "styles," you know that would suddenly become important.
Given all of that, I doubt that most social dancers who will never be "top" or judged can even perceive the finer distinctions. (And since they're the primary audience, I imagine that this explains why there isn't a dollar to be made on more tracks in more "styles"!)
Maybe these distinctions mattered at some point, back when tango was a local phenomenon, and people attached a lot of value to their neighborhoods and preferred orquestas. But my suspicion is that at least since around 2003, it stopped mattering to most people – particularly internationally. What matters more where I live is what local school you learned at, and with which teachers, because their personal stylistic opinions influence ordinary social dancers infinitely more than the details of life in Buenos Aires back in the day. Also, the mean experience level hovers at around 10-15 years, so pre-Mundial tango (22 years ago) isn't even on most dancers' radar.
Does it matter if I incorporate some basic pulpeadas from nuevo dancer Norberto Esbrez with a partner who can, or does it make me a nuevo dancer? Or am I betraying some mythical authentic tradition?
My personal style pulls in whatever steps I like, shifts embrace constantly, and expresses the same tango 10 different ways on 10 different evenings depending on how much energy I have, who I'm dancing with, what mood I'm in, and what I've been working hardest on in my coaching lately. I've never once even considered thinking like, "Ah, it's D'Arienzo from 1938, so I have to embrace this way and use only this subset of steps." That would be like limiting myself to a specific food-wine pairing because some famous chef or oenologist said so, or because of the geographical origins of the food and wine, without ever discovering other food-wine accords. I mean, that's a great plot device for a James Bond film, but rather sad in real life.
