[Tango-L] Get real

[Jake Spatz]

Anton,

While I basically agree with Floyd (and with "TFH"), let me relate my 
experience regarding a few points of yours in particular:

Anton Stanley wrote:
> Having been taught and danced the various Ballroom styles, I challenge the often put statement that
> Ballroom is not interpretive.
(This statement I have never even heard. But maybe it was in one of 
those posts I skipped.) ("Interpretive" and "improvised" are NOT 
synonyms, note.)
> [...] The mood of the leader, the music, the connection with the partner, size of the floor, number on the floor, experience of his chosen partner - all influence how the dance shall be danced. As opportunities arise, they are danced. Others are aborted as the opportunity closes. What's so different?
1. The music (self-explanatory, HUGE, and already covered by Sergio)

2. The degree of improvisation
    -- What you describe above, as social ballroom dancing (etc.), is 
not improv, and I have never seen a (non-AT) ballroom dancer who can 
actually improvise. (I have performed professionally with two excellent 
ones.)
    -- Ballroom dancers (and, sure, many AT dancers too, who are still 
getting the idea) rely on patterns, and /at best/ they choose those 
patterns spontaneously and perhaps style them somewhat. That's NOT improv.
    -- Improv is when I don't know when (or how) the individual step 
will end _even as we are taking it_. There is no "opportunities arise" 
or "abort procedure" about it, except in retrospect. The two approaches 
to dancing are as unlike each other as an original drawing and a 
clip-art collage. They are radically different.

3. The embrace
    -- Besides being physically different from ballroom (as Sergio 
described), the AT embrace is Intimate City. This means that, if you're 
doing it right, there isn't so much a damn "lead" and "follow" 
situation, but something more like both dancers having precisely the 
same idea at the same time, as it's happening. I.e., we don't _use_ the 
embrace in Argentine tango, we _enjoy_ it. It is not the means of the 
dance, but its end. The steps are meaningless: they're just an excuse to 
enjoy the embrace.

4. The man
    -- In ballroom dances, the man dances according to some external 
stylization that someone else (who? who knows) decided was "authentic" 
for whatever caricature he's supposed to be doing. (Ballroom dances, so 
far as I can tell, are all kitsch knock-offs of actual dances from 
actual places.) In Argentine tango, the man dances his own way.
    Even if he's a goddamn copycat, he's still (almost inevitably, 
somehow) _uniquely_ derivative.

5. The meaning
    -- Tango is the opposite of suffering and therefore inextricably 
tangled up with it. It's why people dance when they dance for real, on 
some level. Ballroom is... well, I don't know what ballroom is. It's a 
jumble of imitations-- very superficial and exterior imitations. 
"Pastiche a la carte" would be a serviceable name for it. What anyone 
dances it _about_, I surely couldn't say; but I pity them the vacuity of 
their smiles.

6. Cliches
    -- When you dance a cliche in ballroom, they give you a prize. When 
you dance a cliche in tango, you'd better be smirking.

Jake
DC