[Tango-L] tango schizophrenia

[Ecsedy Áron]

>> I have.  With old Argentine guys who have danced for years.
>> It's not so fun.
>>     
>
> You should hear what they say about you, Trini.
>
>   
Well, there goes oximoron #2.

If the marvellous milonguero is able to please any female dancer with a 
working pair of legs and enough willingness to _try_ to follow, then how 
come that it comes up so often that if a girl doesn't enjoy dancing with 
a (usually older Argentine) milonguero, it is her fault. (ohh, and it 
does come up...)

I see nice little castle made of thin air here. Good old sentimental 
type of "traditional" tango is nice the same way as a 1940s car is nice. 
It has the style, the form and all the nostalgia. It is so nice, that 
you might even accept how badly it sucks to drive it without a servo (it 
is part of the experience, no?), that it has no air conditioning 
(breathe in the ambience!), that it is guzzling fuel like a Boeing 747 
(it has that ancient power) or that in case of even a low speed frontal 
crash, you'd be dead no matter what (the danger of the wild)...

If you accept that tango is for both parties to feel great, but you 
believe that learning must be done through trial and error and must be 
personality driven, then you must also accept that there is no such 
thing as a good dancer. There are only matching couples. It stems from 
the basis assumptions: a good dancer must make the partner feel great, 
but he may only use his own resources. Also, because of the added 
stylistic restraints, this dancer will not be able to please all 
partners. There will be partners who have different needs. So there is 
no single measurement for being a good dancer, therefore the only thing 
you can estabilish from someone, that X is a very _popular_ dancer, 
which is completely performance based. However, this type of performance 
will never be influenced by either preferred style, technique, preferred 
teachers or the lack of them, only the hard facts, whether partners love 
to dance with them or not.

Of course, this will not allow anyone to protect their egos through 
creating artificial classification system to justify that what they do 
is great and all others are loosers. Most Argentines I talked to never 
classified tango in absolute terms. They classified individual people or 
their styles. And mostly these classifications were moving along the "I 
like it - Don't like it" line (and there was an interesting twist of 
this that went like "I like it, so it means it's great!" - of course 
with more explanation, but if you approach it with a little cynism and 
discard all definitions that were recursive...).

Maybe there is one generalization there: foreigners suck at tango. :)

Aron

-- 
Ecsedy Áron
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Aron ECSEDY

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