Tango improvised

[tangonuevo]

I'd like to ask everyone for the earliest written description of Argentine Tango as an improvised dance. What ever that means.
Seriously, although I don't read Spanish and haven't looked at books from Argentina, just about every book I've seen referenced presents steps and patterns, and never mentions AT as being primarily improvisational. In other words, in print it seems to have always been presented the same way as other dances.

Anyone?

I'm sure you have Simon Collier's book Tango. Early in it, he cites historical references to the birth of Tango. Sounds improvised to me. I suspect that, prior to Tango becoming an "accepted" dance, it was largely without form or structure, being made up by the dancers. If so, it parallels the development of swing dance in the US in the 1920's and '30s. Swing was just a bunch of people partying to jazz.

 

[Steve Pastor]

Don't have it to look at, but yeah,

prior to Tango becoming an "accepted" dance, it was largely without form or structure, being made up by the dancers

and most of those dancers were blacks and lower class whites, and the dance was smoothed out in Europe and then it came back to Argentina.
I happen to be reading "Swingin' the Dream" and, as you write, initially people "make things up" which means they combined elements from other "dances", and/or drew from "venacular" movements, etc.

But, in the history of both dances, people began teaching, not peer to peer as part of an informal transmission of knowledge, or learning by watching, but as teachers with students and with money (or maybe other services) changing hands. For tango that happened in Europe. That's when all the "racey" stuff was taken out. That, I think is where the improv part was lost.
With "swing" even the Savoy dancers, the best of whom were professionals, sold lessons to others (although in general the dance spread informally without a host of teachers). "Swing" as a dance wasn't used until after the term "jitterbug" had run its course. And jitterbug was a catch all that included Shag, Suzi-Q, Truckin', etc. Far as I can tell the term "Lindy Hop" was localized around NYC. (in LA it was called the New Yorker)

In reading about how people who lived outside of cities in the US danced, there was a lot of variation, to my way of thinking, improvising. This has a very low profile in dance history.
I bring this up because waltz, one of the most "ballroom" of dances, was taken from a dance or dances that were danced in the countryside. No doubt it became codified in the courts and ballrooms.

So, I see a lot of similarities in the history of these dances. And they all seem to start informally and with improvisation, which is then lost when it begins to be "taught" by teachers who have students.

So maybe a more precise quesiton would be, when did AT again start having an emphasis of being improvised, and is there any documentation of that.
Maybe it's always been that way, but then the quesiton is, why wasn't it "written up" that way? Or was it?

 

[Steve Pastor]

Don't mean to bump this, really, just adding that "Swing" as a dance was the subject of a book in 1937. So, this isn't right...

"Swing" as a dance wasn't used until after the term "jitterbug" had run its course.

 

[AndaBien]

I've never studied the research itself, but I think there is a built in filter in it. Writers were writing for people who had time and ability to read. I don't know if anyone was writing about what happened with the lower classes. In a book titled "The Invention of Argentina", the author wrote that many upper-class Argentines automatically rejected anything that was home-grown, as opposed to imported from Europe.

 

[opendoor]

I'd like to ask everyone for the earliest written description of Argentine Tango as an improvised dance. What ever that means.
Seriously, although I don't read Spanish and haven't looked at books from Argentina, just about every book I've seen referenced presents steps and patterns, and never mentions AT as being primarily improvisational. In other words, in print it seems to have always been presented the same way as other dances.

I'm sure you have Simon Collier's book Tango. Early in it, he cites historical references to the birth of Tango. Sounds improvised to me. I suspect that, prior to Tango becoming an "accepted" dance, it was largely without form or structure, being made up by the dancers. If so, it parallels the development of swing dance in the US in the 1920's and '30s..

May be my english isn´t good enough to understand properly, but what do you want to know, the first description or citation of TA as "improvised dance", or the fact itself, the origin or developement of the improvisation?