[Tango-L] How tango evolves

[Tango Society of Central Illinois]

On Sun, Nov 30, 2008 at 9:46 AM, larrynla at juno.com <larrynla at juno.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

Larry,

Let's hope you're right about this. Right now it seems that nuevo
defines tango in some tango communities or events in the US, where the
tango from which nuevo evolved is no longer recognizable.

> 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).


Go talk to the milongueros. They were dancing simple movements and
recombining them before Naveira and Salas were born, and still are
today. The difference is that, unlike many nuevo dancers, milongueros
take floor traffic and the music into account when they do it.

> 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.

The difference is that the lean in social tango is rarely used and the
woman does not gvet displaced from her position (i.e., take a step)
while off axis. By the way, a good calesita, if used, does not pull a
woman off her axis, it only rotates her on her axis.

>
> 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.

One almost never sees a parada coming out of a back ocho in the
milongas of Buenos Aires. It is usually danced by someone who looks
uncomfortable on the dance floor. This isn't social tango; it is stage
tango.

I see a lot of people grasping at straws to justify nuevo as a close
evolutionary descendant of social tango. Tango evolved in part from
several European dances (apparently polka, mazurka, waltz, if one
believes the tango historians) and if one looks hard enough, one can
probably find some steps they share, but this doesn't mean that tango
is polka or mazurka or European waltz. Likewise, one could find
similar steps in tango and foxtrot and quickstep, and these probably
share no evolutionary relationship. In some ways (e.g., complete
separation of partners, underarm turns) nuevo has borrowed movements
not used in tango. It is a hybrid. (In nature hybrids are sterile and
produce no offspring.) It deserves its own niche, where it does not
compete for resources with tango.

Ron