[Tango-L] Dance What You Love To Hear WAS Re: Tango Music

[ceverett@ceverett.com]

On Sat, 29 Sep 2007 15:31:13 -0400, "Carol Shepherd"
<arborlaw at comcast.net> said:

> I couldn't disagree more strongly with Jake, that one is better off 
> learning argentine tango without previous dance experience.  Training in 
> coordinated rhythmic body movement and experience in creating a frame 
> and a connection with a partner, and in communicating lead and follow, 
> put a new tango dancer light years ahead of someone who is inexperienced 
> and has no comfort with coordinated body movement and/or social dancing.
>
> It's true that dancers get ahead of themselves and perceive 
> similarities between dances that aren't there, and it can be hard to 
> undo ingrained habits.

I believe Jake was speaking to the notion that tango newbies with 
extensive experience in other styles find it difficult to drop all 
the stuff that comes with those dances when the tango music starts 
up.  

And not just newbies ... I regularly see long time teachers who 
show an obvious background in other dances in their quality of 
movement when they dance tango.

Just as only the great dancers of tango develop their own styles 
that don't show the direct influence of their teachers, it's easy 
to spot the people in the room who came to tango from another dance, 
and which dance they came from ... all you need is eyes to see.

If you want to get down to nuts and bolts, there are very few excellent
dancers of tango who dance other styles well ... the divergence is just 
too great for a normal talent to bridge the gap.  

> An excellent dance teacher should know enough 
> about the basic structure of all the popular social dances, to know 
> about the differentials in frame, posture, lead and follow, style, and 
> vocabulary of moves, and be able to help translate for these 
> 'cross-dancers'.

Those of us interested in dancing tango as well as we can ... we tend 
to avoid obvious cross-dancers.  Life's too short to suck at 2 things 
at once.