[Tango-L] tango schizophrenia

[Victor Bennetts]

Chris>The only historical evidence I've seen or heard of professional teachers
>of social tango to natives of that time is of dance schools that served a
>minority who had no family or friends to learn from

I don't know a great deal about the history of tango, but a teacher out of BsAs who started dancing in the late 70s, early 80s, before the resurgence of tango, recently gave me the benefit of her recollections. She told me that when she started dancing, the milongueros of the time all danced completely differently. She said at one of the infrequent milongas of the time you might only dance with three leaders all night and she could remember being amazed at how different those three leaders could be. Apparently the leaders were very conscious not to dance the same steps as other well known dancers, because that would be like infringing their copyright or admitting the other guy was better or something like that.

Interestingly, at that time there was only one regular milonga a month (Sunderland) and it was a revelation apparently when a weekly practica started up. Its hard to imagine BsAs without El Beso, Canning etc. I think she said Gricel was the only one of the current milongas running back then, but it mainly played cumbia (?) with just one set of tango maybe as a break! I believe this particular teacher was classically trained so that is how she came to dancing, but she said no one thought to work at tango in any formal way back in the early 80s because there was no expectation anyone outside of Argentina would ever be interested in it or that anyone could ever make a living out of it.

She said that by comparison, the leaders of today are very similar one to another with just what she described as 'some variations' between dancers. So that is an objective evaluation of differences between modern leaders who might model themselves on Javier, Julio, Chicho, etc from someone who is in a position to make a comparison between modern tango leaders and the milongueros of the 80s. This tendancy to standardisation is not all down to teachers and individual performers I am sure. A dance form must just mature over time and modern technology would hasten that process. Youtube, for instance, would have an enormous impact. Take the colgada craze of a couple of years ago. They came from nowhere and suddenly everyone was dancing them. The craze has subsided, but now they are an accepted part of the standard tango repertoire, with a pretty standard way for them to be led and accepted variations to fit them into various different social dancing situations. So take your pick of who you want to model yourself on. Maybe it doesn't really make much difference anyway.

Victor Bennetts

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