The "dark side" of Tango scene

[Brummbaer]

I've been told that dancers today (especially women) are much better today than, say, 30 years ago and have better training.

Professionally, yes; socially, depends in the person and the culture. I'd say that it''s possible to be a better dancer today, but, as ever, you have to want to be better.

I wouldn't agree about women; there have been, and are, cultural issues for men who learn to dance (stupid attitude: look where the women are)

 

[JohnEm]

It also requires the ability to observe, recognize that it doesn't meet some level, accept that is the case, and be willing to do something about it. Sure, you can observe yourself (video/mirror). You can even feel that it was "good" with that follower/leader, but really the easiest and best is a private lesson with a trusted "coach" - that isn't necessarily some great dancer themselves.

Good luck in finding a coach you can trust!

I have never found a one "best" but many, many confusions.
So my recommendation is to spread the net widely, do your
own research and make your own decisions. Many will be the
wrong decisions but they are all part of learning any skill.
Allow yourself to fail in order to succeed.

And since this should be a body lead dance look outside dance
to posture and movement specialists and learn exercise from them.
But they are a mixed bunch too.

Finally, here is Muma talking about Ricardo Vidort and
some of what she learned from him:


This is the more useful short subtitled version.

The difficulty with social AT is identifying what's wrong,
or doesn't work for you, and trusting some teacher
to know what is "right" and how to get you there.

Even the milongueros couldn't do that and I have to include
Ricardo Vidort. They danced from when they were young and fit,
so what they did they never had to think much about.
Ours is a different age in so many ways.

And typical of today, you imply that going to a teacher
you think knows enough for you to pay for their knowledge
will also be able "to get you there". That's a misconception.
Only you can get yourself there, with or without a guide.

 

[Brummbaer]

Good luck in finding a coach you can trust!

I have never found a one "best" but many, many confusions.

AbsolutelyFortunate that our's is also a posture and movement specialist, although, again I only take that so far.

For elements, or their combination, I also look elsewhere.

Only you can get yourself there

True, but sometimes you need assistance. The problem is when you go out of habit or to be entertained in some lesson. No point having a coach who doesn't point out where you could improve.

 

[ArbeeNYC]

Only you can get yourself there, with or without a guide.

Thanks for posting the interview. I've watched that video a couple of times and am always affected by it. It serves as a kind of touchstone for me in that it encapsulates everything I feel is important about tango. The essence as she so aptly puts it.

As for finding a coach/teacher/instructor/mentor, it may be more a question of compatibility and harmony than anything else. But if we don't trust that person, we'll never learn because everything will be suspect. So trust has to be the first element. With that we can decide what helps and what doesn't.

Everything else you say, I agree with. And true about the old milongueros (I mentioned that in another reply somewhere else), who learned as teenagers and informally without today's unending emphasis on proper technique and movements. They each developed their own personal style and ways of moving. I assume the rest came with practice and trial and error.

 

[Rabbit]

Well, modern technique is really a toolbox for understanding the body movements involved in tango. I have no doubt that dancers today are on average physically more skilled than those of the past because this understanding (which owes a lot to the input of people with knowledge from other movement disciplines) greatly accelerates the learning process. However, technique on its own isn't enough to be a good dancer, because it's really a language that enables you to express something

 

[Bailango]

Well, modern technique is really a toolbox for understanding the body movements involved in tango. I have no doubt that dancers today are on average physically more skilled than those of the past because this understanding (which owes a lot to the input of people with knowledge from other movement disciplines) greatly accelerates the learning process. However, technique on its own isn't enough to be a good dancer, because it's really a language that enables you to express something

Technique is like learning spellings, understanding correct grammar usuage, sentence construction, etc. That is not going to make anyone Shakespeare or Yeats.

 

[HugoPT]

Technique is like learning spellings, understanding correct grammar usuage, sentence construction, etc. That is not going to make anyone Shakespeare or Yeats.

Speaking properly does not make people enjoy talking to you.

 

[Rabbit]

If tango styles were literature...

- Milonguero: Historical fiction. Pretends everything was much cleaner than it actually was.
- Salon: A romance novel. Forgot there was supposed to be a happy ending.
- Stage: Fantasy. Decided putting dragons in the story would make it sell better.
- Nuevo: Claims to be a modern day thriller. Actually ripped the plot off from one of the classics.
- Neo/Fusion: Throws in lots of foreign words because they sound cool. Without actually understanding the language.
- Competition: Reading is boring. What we want is action movies where the directors try to one up each other with better special effects.
- Ballroom: Might have been a good story once. Can't really tell because all the best parts were censored.

 

[JournalInTime]

Speaking properly does not make people enjoy talking to you.

And correcting others' speech makes them actively hate talking to you! So does not letting them get a word in edgewise.

 

[Gssh]

Well, modern technique is really a toolbox for understanding the body movements involved in tango. I have no doubt that dancers today are on average physically more skilled than those of the past because this understanding (which owes a lot to the input of people with knowledge from other movement disciplines) greatly accelerates the learning process.

I personally really disagree with this - especially about the input of people with knowledge from other movement disciplines. I feel that a lot of so called modern technique is actually wrong for the geometry and actions that are part of traditional tango. And i find especially ballet influence to be almost completely antithetical to how tango biomechanics work. A framework of movement that was essentially developed to create an even, "stepless" glide for somebody wearing a long skirt is not the best fit for the polyrhytmic connected arcs of tango. If we want to look for other movement disciplines to increase our understanding tango i think we should look principally to african dance for dissociation (which most western couple dances approaches try to avoid, and create structures that make it difficult), salsa for the use of cuban motion to power steps (latin ballroom does (from my few) overemphasize the look, and underemphasize the mechanical underpinning - i think it should be almost invisible but it is key to the proper skeletal and muscular alignment of the walk), and tai chi for the use of the standing leg to smoothly and continuously transmit power up and forward (though there are quite a few of modern tai chi stylists that don't have that method of power generation through the ground path because they don't work the applications / push hands properly).

(my background is in doing a bunch of martial arts, and one of the things that i have learned when transitioning from one to another is that there is only very little universally good biomechanics, and a whole lot that is application dependent. For every "good body mechanic" we have to ask "good for what?". I feel there is a lot of misinformation in tango about what the different body mechanics are trying to achieve, and a whole lot of refitting vocabulary and structure of the dance to work with some biomechanical framework that was arbitrarily decided to be "good", instead of looking for biomechanical frameworks that actually work with tango as it it (or increasingly as it was...).
(one of my friends is as much a classically trained modern dancer as one can be (martha graham academy all the way), and she said one to see similar things happen there - instead of being open to graham technique and what it does they cling to their original ballet training, and don't even really try to power their external movement internally using the graham way, and that makes the graham choreographies not quite work properly))

 

[JohnEm]

I personally really disagree with this - especially about the input of people with knowledge from other movement disciplines. I feel that a lot of so called modern technique is actually wrong for the geometry and actions that are part of traditional tango. And i find especially ballet influence to be almost completely antithetical to how tango biomechanics work. A framework of movement that was essentially developed to create an even, "stepless" glide for somebody wearing a long skirt is not the best fit for the polyrhytmic connected arcs of tango. If we want to look for other movement disciplines to increase our understanding tango i think we should look principally to african dance for dissociation (which most western couple dances approaches try to avoid, and create structures that make it difficult), salsa for the use of cuban motion to power steps (latin ballroom does (from my few) overemphasize the look, and underemphasize the mechanical underpinning - i think it should be almost invisible but it is key to the proper skeletal and muscular alignment of the walk), and tai chi for the use of the standing leg to smoothly and continuously transmit power up and forward (though there are quite a few of modern tai chi stylists that don't have that method of power generation through the ground path because they don't work the applications / push hands properly).

(my background is in doing a bunch of martial arts, and one of the things that i have learned when transitioning from one to another is that there is only very little universally good biomechanics, and a whole lot that is application dependent. For every "good body mechanic" we have to ask "good for what?". I feel there is a lot of misinformation in tango about what the different body mechanics are trying to achieve, and a whole lot of refitting vocabulary and structure of the dance to work with some biomechanical framework that was arbitrarily decided to be "good", instead of looking for biomechanical frameworks that actually work with tango as it it (or increasingly as it was...).
(one of my friends is as much a classically trained modern dancer as one can be (martha graham academy all the way), and she said one to see similar things happen there - instead of being open to graham technique and what it does they cling to their original ballet training, and don't even really try to power their external movement internally using the graham way, and that makes the graham choreographies not quite work properly))

We are on the same page here! I agree totally about
the disruptive influence of classical dance and about
looking to African and Cuban dance for clues.

Tango is a grounded dance, or at least it should be
to connect with the music, the opposite of a floating
dance. Of course Argentines themselves haven't helped
because too many seem to want to deny it. So today's
Salon is taught professionally and new dancers arrive
at the milongas from commercial classes.

Interestingly, there is now the continuing revival
of some sort of Canyengue. You can be dancing and the Argentine
in your embrace will call the music Canyengue (usually it isn't
but it is Tango Viejo), wanting to change to the old embrace
and mark the pulse emphatically. So now, having smoothed out
the African/Cuban influence they are trying to dance an even more
African influenced rhythmical dance. All is not lost.

Meanwhile, try dancing into the floor . . . .

 

[Bailango]

I personally really disagree with this - especially about the input of people with knowledge from other movement disciplines. I feel that a lot of so called modern technique is actually wrong for the geometry and actions that are part of traditional tango.

You cut my work short. Was about to say the same thing. They try to force fit movements learned in yoga, pilates, modern dance or other places into Tango. The good ones are those who use knowledge gained from other areas to inform their tango. Which is very different. They are able to bring voculabary to break down and explain things. But they need to be good tango dancers first and understand tango movement as a dance.

And i find especially ballet influence to be almost completely antithetical to how tango biomechanics work.

Fortunately I haven't witnessed anyone trying to apply ballet movement or technqiue to grounded dances such as tango or salsa.

That reminds me of closed captions where it was literal translation from one language to other making it sound stupid. Idioms, traditional expressions, proverbs don't transliterate intelligently across languages. Equilvalent proverbs and idioms do exist across languages and culture. Transliteration doesn't help identifying those either.

 

[Gssh]

Technique is like learning spellings, understanding correct grammar usuage, sentence construction, etc. That is not going to make anyone Shakespeare or Yeats.

Verily, it is much, and valuable things - a true cornucopia of riches, like gaias gifts to mankind each autumn - - that the ancient greats can teach us later descendants, living in an inferior age, void of the light that those giants among men threw to illuminate even the lowest and most wretched of their contemporaries - indeed, it is us, both poor in body, and sprit, and almost completely abandoned by terpsicore, euterpe and above all thalia - o sweet thalia - who should do more to cherish the gifts they gave us, far beyond any duty, merely crumbs from their tables overflowing with riches, but limitlessly valuable to us - Arbores serit agricola quarum adspiciet baccam ipse numquam - it is their sentence construction, use of the relative clause - o glorious relative clause, so neglected in this iron age - like the ancient hindoo knows, we live in a age bereft of the truth, it is no longer Krita Yuga as they called the age of the ancients where truth and virtue reigned supreme, no, our age is the age of iron or Kali Yuga, with one part virtue mingled with three quarters sin, like vinegar mingled with wine, witness the lost wonders of the second case singular - lost and abandoned by us and even our forefathers, but vibrant and virile in their hands, the hands of the ancient masters - wilfully and unrighteously abandoned i say; in defiance of their good example, acta deos numquam mortalia fallunt.

(ok, enough with the burton pastiche - one sentence with 13 lines is plenty of evidence of my mastery of proper sentence construction *laugh*)

 

[Rabbit]

The good ones are those who use knowledge gained from other areas to inform their tango. Which is very different. They are able to bring voculabary to break down and explain things.

This is what I meant, thank you.

 

[JohnEm]

You cut my work short. Was about to say the same thing. They try to force fit movements learned in yoga, pilates, modern dance or other places into Tango. The good ones are those who use knowledge gained from other areas to inform their tango. Which is very different. They are able to bring voculabary to break down and explain things. But they need to be good tango dancers first and understand tango movement as a dance.

You don't think that today's open moves/movements
qualify as being influenced by modern dance? Every time
I see a couple executing a so-called iconic tango move
while ignoring the music I am reminded of classes I once
occasionally attended attempting the fusion of tango and jive.
Amir coined Jango and in the US I think its name was even
worse, Swango. Some very bad dancers emerged from that time.

Fortunately I haven't witnessed anyone trying to apply ballet movement or technqiue to grounded dances such as tango or salsa.

Unfortunately I know of classically trained dancers teaching
tango, especially by women to women. The interest in Tango
has attracted many professional dancers from other styles
looking to make a living from teaching and/or performing.
The Mundial competition is full of them and the winners
go teaching all over the World. The Argentine sociable
and connected way of stepping is being lost even in Argentina.
It has never been really popular in Europe.

Actually . . . a while ago we (my dancing French partner and I)
went to a milonga in Nice: to our surprise most of the women
were rhythmically stepping into the floor the Argentine way.
Unfortunately the embrace and the rest of their dance was not.