[Tango-L] Social Tango: A Cultural Perspective

[Trini y Sean (PATangoS)]

--- Tom Stermitz <stermitz at tango.org> wrote:

At some races they may even offer a bottle of champagne at
the end of the race for the jockey who crosses the finish
line first.
> 

Sean again. Marisa's comment is fair and to the point. The
convention in tango is that the dance progresses around the
floor in a clockwise direction. If there is a gap in front
of one dancer, and a jumble of people behind him, then he
is a problem. Either he doesn't know how to dance socially,
or he doesn't care about the other dancers.

It is not my intention to defend close embrace roadblocks.
Rather, I contend that they are [1] less likely to injure
another dancer (if you can avoid splitting your knuckles
against his skull) and [2] easier to get around than open
embrace roadblocks.

To Marisa: The guy walking the line between 2 lanes can
probably be temporarily corrected with a friendly word or
two. After 3 or 4 weeks of nonconfrontational correction,
it might even become a lasting improvement. (He is not
going to learn how to move without taking some actual
classes, but at least you might get him to block only a
single lane.) I doubt very much that there is any hope of
making a social dancer out of the mermaid guy, who is
easily blocking 3 or more lanes.

I also agree whole heartedly with Marisa's critique of
people who move in the same way to very different music,
except that I am not so generous as to regard that as
dancing. Intermediate and advanced dancers of any style
express the music. (That's a priori. In my definition, if
you don't express the music, you are a beginner, even with
10 years of experience doing steps.) In my experience,
close embrace dancers learn musicality much faster than the
other styles (weeks vs. years). Probably because they don't
spend as much time learning vocabulary (a fair trade off in
my mind).

Sean

PATangoS - Pittsburgh Argentine Tango Society 
Our Mission: To make Argentine Tango Pittsburgh's most popular social dance. 
http://www.pitt.edu/~mcph/PATangoWeb.htm


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