What is a Tango Community?

[tangomonkey]

We talkin' about tango musicians now?
Checked up on local guy Alex Krebs, and don't remember seeing this article before.
http://www.reed.edu/reed_magazine/autumn2007/columns/alumni_profiles/dance_with_me.html.

I would love to dance to live music, familiar tunes or otherwise. I don't think there is nearly enough support for live music in general, not just in AT circles. Of course live musicians cost much more than a DJ and they won't be able to play for six hours. But a live performance of a few sets over 2-3 hours alternating with a DJ would be nice. Of course the milonga fee might go from $10 to $50, but if the music and the band are good, I'd pay it. Don't think anything like that happens around here.

 

[Lilly_of_the_valley]

But a live performance of a few sets over 2-3 hours alternating with a DJ would be nice. Of course the milonga fee might go from $10 to $50, but if the music and the band are good, I'd pay it. Don't think anything like that happens around here.

Here the entrance fee in that case goes up $5-$10 ( to $15 -$20 from $10, usually), but a live music feature always attracts much larger than a usual crowd to a milonga.

 

[chanchan]

Recently I saw a tango docu on Berlin, and the following sentence was pronounced:

A real tango community produces (besides dancers) a least supraregional known show couples, tango literature and poetry, and tango bands or soloists.

Any comments on this?
.

Probably the meaning is that tango is a popular culture which involves many forms of art.
Maybe we can compare it with hip-hop: would you say that there is a real hip-hop community in a small town in Patagonia with no DJ, no MC, no writer, but only a group of dancers who, after taking lessons of hip hop argue about old school and new school without even knowing what they are talking about?

 

[sixela]

Probably the meaning is that tango is a popular culture which involves many forms of art.

Or just one. I'd expect a "tango community" of a city with 6M inhabitants to be a little more diverse than one that has just, say, 20K inhabitants. I'd hesitate to call any community without at least a dance community a "tango community", but I think the other stuff is mainly optional (except for the music, but it doesn't need a live tango music scene, I think. I think a couple of good DJs and people who actually listen to the music and 'grok' it will do the job in a pinch).

Musicians might disagree with it (you could have a vibrant community of people playing tango chamber music without having dancers involved), but that's not a very useful definition on this forum.

As for tango literature, well, I think that's even more optional (just as is "tango painting", "tango cinema", "tango sculpture", "tango martial arts", you get the gist). Tango was born as a dance and a music, after all, not as a philosophy or literature movement.

 

[quixotedlm]

It's only a *real* community when there is an emergence of malcontentment under the thinly veiled guise of community service, and there is enough critical mass of acquaintance-dancers who care to indulge one another in such things as intentional conflict.

 

[sixela]

and there is enough critical mass of acquaintance-dancers who care to indulge one another in such things as intentional conflict.

You apparently don't need that much of a scene for that...just having two teachers (or two DJs or two organisers) will often do.

 

[chanchan]

Or just one. I'd expect a "tango community" of a city with 6M inhabitants to be a little more diverse than one that has just, say, 20K inhabitants.

I wouldn't expect an urban metropolitan culture in its complete form to be present in a 20K inhabitatns town, just like I wouldn't expect to find clean air in the center of a 6M city.

Anyway I think that a dance and a live music community is necessary to generate the double feedback between musician and dancers that allows the evolution.
The rest is probably optional, but it should come naturally if the community is big enough: at least it gives me the idea that tango is something more than going on the floor and performing a set of figures.

 

[sixela]

Even if you don't have live music it's already a lot more than that (don't get me started on 'figures').

 

[opendoor]

Poetry?

Dont know if it is poetry. But in my town regularly a guy rigs up his old gramophone and reads his latest poems and tango stories at coffee milongas in the afternoon. At festivals and festivalitos there is at least one open poetry slam, and (dreadly feared) there are several writers (male as female) of crime stories in our community, which did actually publish novels with a tango background, in which you could find yourself again with a bit of luck.

:bandit:​