[Tango-L] How tango evolves

[larrynla@juno.com]

Jack Dylan writes --->  this is ... my opinion [only] on his dancing; Chicho 
might well be a great teacher and choreographer.

I found him a middling teacher (of course he MIGHT have improved since 
2003/4).  A lady friend took one class and said never again.  His 
focus, she said, was just on the men's part and totally ignored 
women's.

I think he's a brilliant choreographer, but obviously his stuff is not 
to everyone's taste.  And his choreography depends on his partner.  His 
current one seems a bit limited, but that might be because she does not 
assert herself.  What he did with Eugenia Parilla I loved, but I 
suspect she pushed to get in neat stuff that showcased her, as in the 
following video.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyZq6sOLI0g
_______________________________________________________
I'm a fan of nuevo tango and have taken a lot of classes in it, but 
some people have greatly exagerated its importance today and in the 
future.  I think it ultimately will have a definite but only a small 
part in the continued evolution of tango.

The most important contribution to tango that Naveira and Salas 
provided is a way to look at traditional tango less as complex steps 
and more as simple movements which could be combined in different ways.  
But they aren't the only ones who contributed to this movement toward 
deconstruction (destruction + reconstruction).

Some people in this and other tango forums have identified a nuevo 
style of dancing and listed aspects of it.  Among those is a distant 
embrace which gives more freedom for the dancers to do fancy stuff.  
But this is true for most show dance routines, and was around long 
before Naveira and Salas started their deconstruction efforts.  Most of 
the traveling teachers I and many other learned from in the early 90s 
were professional dancers from shows such as "Forever Tango" and "Tango 
por Dos" who taught this embrace.

For that matter, a number of social dance teachers from Argentina teach 
a distant embrace.  One couple I took classes from in the early 90s, 
for instance, spoke contempuously of the "belly bumper" (their words) 
embrace, associating it with vulgar street dancers.

Some of the "steps" associated with tango nuevo also have been around 
for a long time before its advent.  The volcada, for instance, is just 
a fashionably newer name for the extreme lean, which has been around 
for a long time as part of several traditional show and social figures 
such as the carousel.

Other movements associated with nuevo are natural extensions of 
traditional figures.  The colgada, for instance, is what you get when 
you do a parada where the woman does a half back-ocho before she's 
stopped.  But the man leads her to continue her spin beyond 180 degrees 
to 270, 360, or even several complete turns.

(Larry briskly brushes his hands together and mutters dismissively 
"So much for nuevo.")


Larry de Los Angeles
http://shapechangers.wordpress.com



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