[Tango-L] What Argentine Tango is, and what it is not.

[Tom Stermitz]

On Mar 7, 2008, at 4:17 AM, Alexis Cousein wrote:

> Floyd Baker wrote:
>> I believe and have been told by people here that it is very much what
>> Tango is.., and what it is not.   Tango, imho, is such an entirely
>> separate entitity from ballroom that I do not even consider it a  
>> dance
>> at all.
>>
> I don't consider ballroom a dance, but a sport much like figure  
> skating is ;).

I'm not sure I understand this discussion. It doesn't correspond to my  
experiences with ballroom.

I learned ballroom dancing (not learn in a studio) before I learned  
AT: Foxtrot, One-step, Peabody, Half-and-Half, Waltz, Tango. These are  
all improvised social dances, not choreographies. Before that, I  
danced a little country western, two-step and things that were  
basically improvised foxtro

In the United States, ballroom dancing has a social tradition that  
goes back to the 1910s. Country Western pretty much has an unbroken  
lineage back to the 1940s. In the Western US there were working CW  
bands and multiple dance venues even in small towns up through the  
1980s. This sort of collapsed in the 1990s to a handful of venues in  
bigger cities after Nashville got a hold of CW and turned it into a  
rockified genre with sappy red-neck ballads, big hats and bigger hair.

Ballroom did get really messed up with the studio system and their  
Bronze, Silver, Gold marketing, but even there, the studios always  
held, and still hold, social dances every Saturday. Most of the  
clientele consists of married couples or Dance Widows hiring a  
professional to dance her at the occasional showcases.

I think you guys are discussing International Style Competition  
Ballroom. That is it's own sub genre, that doesn't have much to do  
with social ballroom dancing. But again, I would expect any decent  
International Ballroom dancer to be able to dance socially with  
improvised movements.

Argentine Tango also has its choreographed side, the stage tango that  
may have been more popular during certain decades.