The apilado equation

Gssh said:
Dancing chacarera in a line is a better experience than dancing it only as a couple. (though strangely enough i don't feel quite the same way about zamba - it is structurally similar, but much more a couples dance). The folk dancers i have seen seemed to tend to create smaller huddles when the dancefloor is to big for the number of people they have, not separating them wider.
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Well, I am not sure that chacarera and other folk dances with fixed sequences are really relevant analogies. The shared connection in these dances happens precisely because everyone is doing the same thing and most of them would look really stupid if only 1 couple was dancing.
 
Rabbit said:
.. folk dances with fixed sequences are really relevant analogies..
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The generic analogies are lindy, rock and roll, foxtrot, salsa, bachata and bolero. All together these are so-called otros ritmos. Traditional tango does not only alternate with argentine waltz and milonga. Actually vals, milonga and otros ritmos should follow those two tango tandas (ttv-ttm-tto..). Otros ritmos were sacrificed 30 years ago, today the vals is currently dying in BsAs, and tomorrow, the milonga porteña will vanish.
 
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Gssh said:
So if none of these are actually necessary (useful?) for good floorcraft what is? Especially in the context of me claiming that "tango is a freeform circle dance".
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I think when "the masses" dance, whether in Finland in the 80s or Argentina in the 40s, then there is no dedicated concept, something that got learned, and there is also no overall elegance. Basically a feeling of wanting to move forward, similar to a demonstration on the street.

In tango today - I think it's the ability to change your movements when there is a disturbance, combined with some empathy for the partner and the people around. And before that comes the confidence to keep dancing out of error situations. I think that's why I'm being said that I led quite rigidly at the beginning.
 
opendoor said:
The generic analogies are lindy, rock and roll, foxtrot, salsa, bachata and bolero. All together these are so-called otros ritmos. Traditional tango does not only alternate with argentine waltz and milonga. Actually vals, milonga and otros ritmos should follow those two tango tandas (ttv-ttm-tto..).
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I agree it would be better this way. The question is how we can convince organizers and the community in general to loosen up a bit and stop behaving like a religious cult.
 
Gssh said:
(e.g. for a while i had a lot of trouble to dance to electro tango - i had been working a lot on my milonga, so the most obvious element that i wanted to dance to was the often quite fast underlying beat - and neither the majority of my partners nor the ronda agreed with me on that)
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I have noticed this kind of training effect on movements. When I have repeatedly solo trained 20-50 figures with similar content there has been a noticeable effect towards those movements during a milonga. I do not do one whole figure but tendencies or fragments of them turn up without any planning.

I like this better than learning one or two whole figures and then struggle with finding the space and musical phrases for them during a tanda.
 
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opendoor said:
The ronda is a modern dance school atavism.
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I have never heard teachers talk about ronda or train people to manage it. They mention it but then they teach figures going 2-3m contra dance direction.
People attending schools do not show the skill here.

So I wonder who is driving this? :)
 
TTanguero said:
The good ones do.
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Indeed!

One of the teachers who taught me my higher-level group classes and many private lessons in vals made this his top priority – even ahead of musicality. As far as he was concerned, you couldn't claim to be able to dance a step – much less dance it musically – until you could execute it with couples behind, in front of, and to at least one side . . . without inconveniencing any of them. During practices of said concepts, he would routinely jump out in couples' paths to challenge them on this. Good times.

He was also one of the two teachers who taught the special course that was entirely about floorcraft. In that class, we started in about 1/3 of the studio blocked off with chairs and had it reduced to a postage stamp as the teachers pushed the chairs closer and closer over the length of the class. Those who actually did this class really improved, but it was largely unpopular because it didn't teach steps.

Oh, and he was the one who taught the "tango self-defense" workshop, which was about how to hold your ground and not drift or stumble even when dragged by a bad partner, bumped by an oblivious couple, or actively shoved by a jerk. He had me be the jerk a few times, which was hilarious.

But again . . . without steps and patterns and endless, mostly useless vocabulary, you can't "sell" a class.
 
LadyLeader said:
I have never heard teachers talk about ronda or train people to manage it.
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Pretty much everyone who's taught us, either simply in executing some move on and adjusting to the situation, or more extensively by, for example, reducing the available space. OK, as we've progressed there's been less emphasis, probably because we have some awareness, but it still comes up.

If you're going to train people to dance in a particular style of milonga then you need to start at the beginning and progressively. It's going to be difficult to educate some 'old dogs' to behave if they're not even aware.
 
JournalInTime said:
He was also one of the two teachers who taught the special course that was entirely about floorcraft. In that class, we started in about 1/3 of the studio blocked off with chairs and had it reduced to a postage stamp as the teachers pushed the chairs closer and closer over the length of the class.
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I've had at least three teachers do this, including one who used chairs to give each couple about one square metre, and challenged us to find as many ways as possible to dance inside this space.
 
We knew about how the dancers should advance on the floor but 20 years ago the local teachers were quite inexperienced to teach it. I remember one of the best saying that he started to teach after 2-3 years of dancing.

At that time navigation was not a pedagogy issue but an order problem we on the pista tried to solve. It sounds the basic education is better today!

Beyond the basic level we had only workshops (festivals, visiting couples) and there teachers seldom talked about navigation. What is your experience with workshops and navigation instructions?
 
LadyLeader said:
Beyond the basic level we had only workshops (festivals, visiting couples) and there teachers seldom talked about navigation. What is your experience with workshops and navigation instructions?
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The school I was dancing with explained it in a special pre-milonga workshop a few months after I started tango.

I went to the milonga from day 1 though and walked too much and overtook people a lot.
 
LadyLeader said:
..have never heard teachers talk about ronda or train people to manage it...
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As written in another thread, this is a generation thingy. Pre-Urquiza style teachers did not teach codigos for ideological reasons.
And of course there are financial issues, too. A teacher or studio wants to stick their students to their own floor, instead of the pistas in the wilderness of the world outside.
 
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