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

[steve pastor]

My posts haven't been getting through, so this a final test before I maybe
  unsubscribe.
   
  My experience has been that ballroom teachers emphasize doing the pattern
  as taught. If you deviate you are scolded, either by the teacher or your 
  partner for not dancing what is being taught.
  Although this also happens in AT, there is an order of magnitude of difference.
  And many AT teachers teach patterns while talking about, and even teaching,
  variations and improvisation.
  There is a similar difference between being able to point to a few "crossed foot"
  patterns in non AT dances, and teaching being in "crossed system" as an 
  integral part of the dance.
   
  Steve

Tom Stermitz <stermitz at tango.org> wrote:
  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.

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