[Tango-L] who invented the basic step

[Joe Grohens]

 > Who invented the basic step?

Daniel Trenner speculatively credited Raul Bravo and Antonio Todaro  
for defining (and disseminating) the salida that begins with a back  
step, if that's the "basic" that we're talking about.

See: http://www.neadance.org/daniel/ar_basic.html

<excerpt>

"So, why the step backwards to get the salida going in all these basic  
steps for export, you ask?
The closest answer I can come up with is the Antonio Todaro/Raul Bravo  
school of stage dancing, which has had by far the biggest influence on  
modern stage dancing. Todaro and Bravo had a tango school in Flores  
for sixteen years in the 60's and 70's.

Anyway, these guys used to teach private lessons in houses that had  
small rooms, all the steps being turned in on themselves for the small  
space, later to be stretched out on the stage. They used the same  
first five parallel steps that we now call the "basic" (the leader  
opposite; the front-side-back-back-cross of the follower) to get  
themselves from the side of the room, where I guess one always starts  
because it is after all the side of the dance floor, to the center  
where they would begin the turning figure that was the focus of the  
lesson.

This prep step, kind of breath step to get you going into the figure,  
seems to have been adopted as a basic step by the stage dance  
community, who turned out to be the first ones to teach outside of  
Argentina. So it had become almost universal by the time this innocent  
arrived back in the first world from his recuperation in Buenos Aires."

.......

Another influential school was that of Copes.

Copes counts the "salida simple" as 1 - prepare, 2 - mans' side left.  
[ ... ] 5 - crusada.

Gavito used to use this way of counting, so that the first step of the  
salida was numbered "2", or "the two".