[Tango-L] Those vulgar "belly bumpers"

[larrynla@juno.com]

Nina Pesochinsky writes ---------> You can read the archives of the
tango-l. There is a story in detail about how Susana Miller invented the
term "milonguero" when she began teaching in the early 1990s. The reason
that Puppy and others didn't say that they danced "milonguero style" is
because they didn't know that they did!:)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5CmBLdEY9A

Looking at the video you can clearly see that Puppy always left a space
between himself and his partner. That is, he did not dance what some
people call "milonguero style."

While I was working for NASA I was sent fairly regularly to San Francisco.
I often could take a long weekend and danced and took classes. One of my 
favorite teaching couples were Argentine. They described their style as
"salon" and a separation was an essential part of it. They complained 
about the "vulgar" style that some people had begun to bring back from
Buenos Aires.

"Belly bumpers" (their exact term) were not real tango dancers. They
were milongueros, which to them meant drunks without jobs who spent all
their times at the milongas to pick up young women. They danced close
to seduce the innocent women. They especially liked foreign women because
they had money and did not know better than to let a man dance so
disgracefully close. They even thought that dancing close was proper!

Oh, and these layabouts were too poor to own a suit, which was essential
to an evening of elegant dancing. Probably because if they did have jobs
they were just cab drivers or waiters or worked at the docks.

They amused me but they were always kind when criticizing us and gave us
useful aid in overcoming whatever problems we had. I respected them and
so respected their viewpoints and always listened attentively to them.
I heard echoes in them of what must have been said by the middle and
upper classes in Argentina when the French made tango popular for all
people. Perhaps in it was a little fear of the poor invading the elegant
halls that they themselves trod in.

Larry de Los Angeles


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