[Tango-L] obsession with nuevo

[Tango Society of Central Illinois]

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 11:47 AM, larrynla at juno.com <larrynla at juno.com> wrote:
> I see in this and other tango forums a near-hysterical obsession with nuevo
> tango and its perceived threat to "real authentic tango" - which usually means
> "tango the way I do it" but justified often by claiming their way is how its
> done in the tango Mecca of Buenos Aires.  In the 20 years I've been obsessed
> with tango I've seen the same hysteria twice before in tango.  Both times it
> blew over only to be replaced by yet another thing to be alarmed about, this
> time nuevo.
>
> For that matter I've seen similar alarms in other fields, starting with swing ...
>

It does not matter if there have been controversies about what is
authentic in swing or salsa or even lambada. The issue here is
authenticity in tango. The situation is as simple as this. Nuevo
probably accounts for less than 5% of social tango dancing in Buenos
Aires and it is practiced in only a few places (primarily Villa
Malcolm and Practica X) and these (mostly) practicas are heavily
populated by foreigners. On the other hand, about 95% or more of
social tango dancing in Buenos Aires (over 100 milongas per week) is
tango de salon danced in a close embrace.

In the US, nuevo and fantasia are the dominant forms of tango in most
tango communities. There are some tango communities where it is rare
to find someone dancing tango de salon (i.e., some variety of tango in
close embrace as danced in Buenos Aires). There is a discrepancy here.

I find it very interesting that on this discussion list and others
there are always arguments that someone in Buenos Aires was spotted
dancing in an open embrace, or decreasing nuevo movements to fit a
smaller space. It is also noteworthy that the Loch Ness monster has
been sighted several times in Scotland, but that doesn't mean it's a
dominant species it its ecosystem. And then there are the constant
claims that nuevo is justifiable on the grounds that it represents our
tango future (and, of course, the US is ahead of Argentina in knowing
what future tango will have), whereas it quite possibly represents
some evolutionary experiment for which we have no knowledge of what
it's future may be.

It is relevant to note that TODAY in Buenos Aires Tango de Salon
(tango danced in some form of close embrace) is by far the most common
form of social tango. That the social tango scenes in the US and
Europe and parts of Asia are so different from Buenos Aires is the
result of biased cultural transmission. The primary causes of this are
unrepresentative exportation (sampling error) of tango and
differential success in establishment (for the biologists: akin to
genetic drift and differential replication). The tango instructors
from Argentina teaching in the US represent the sampling error in
teaching primarily nuevo and fantasia, explicitly or implicitly
represented as social tango, which it is not in Buenos Aires. Their
presence and success is due to its cultural acceptability in the US,
where a 'Dancing with the Stars' mentality of learning to dance being
the acquisition of visible dance patterns flourishes. The driving
force is economic. Tango is a commodity to sell and the Argentine
instructors sell nuevo and fantasia step patterns because there is a
market of consumers with dollars (or euros or pounds or yen) in their
hands willing to pay for something that fits cultural expectations.
Cultural validity of the product is irrelevant  in a marketplace where
consumers are largely ignorant and indifferent regarding accurate
representation of the cultural art form they are acquiring.

Ron