[Tango-L] Those vulgar "belly bumpers"

[Trini y Sean (PATangoS)]

Your post is insightful, Larry.  The video also takes place in a large hall with plenty of room.  In a more crowded room, Puppy might dance quite differently, without the space between couples.  Geraldine's parents (who influenced Geraldine) are from Villa Urquiza, I think.  Anyone know where Puppy is from?  This is one of the styles we think of as "salon".

Whether folks like it or not, "milonguero" is a term that has been accepted by enough people to make it valid description of a style of tango.  We all know what style to envision when Larry wrote:

That is, he did not dance what some people call "milonguero style."

This is how language works.  It's not as if some government council on English decides that, for example, "talk to the hand" means "don't talk to me".  Which reminds me, in countries that have nouns with genders, how do they decide if something is masculine or feminine?  Why is it "volcada" and not "volcado"?  The term came from a verb, which is gender neutral.

Trini de Pittsburgh


--- On Fri, 8/8/08, larrynla at juno.com <larrynla at juno.com> wrote:

> From: larrynla at juno.com <larrynla at juno.com>
> Subject: [Tango-L] Those vulgar "belly bumpers"
> To: tango-L at mit.edu
> Date: Friday, August 8, 2008, 3:22 AM
> 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.
>