[Tango-L] Review of the Milonga at Viejo Correo

[Shahrukh Merchant]

"Peter Esser" <peterwesser at oregonducks.org> said:

> Sharukh, you say: "What you don't get at Viejo Correo: A lot of
> technically skilled dancers."
> This gives me pause. ...
> My question, how, by what, does one recognize a "technically skilled"
> dancer?

Hi Peter, I was carefully to add the qualifier "technically" in my 
comment. I'll explain what I meant by that, but essentially it goes back 
to a post I made a few weeks ago where I identified three components of 
what people usually are considering when they talk about there being 
good dancers, the three components being (1) Good to watch (2) Good to 
dance with and (3) Good to dance amongst. Huge caveat in all this is 
that this is only ONE component (or three, if you want) of many many 
components that make for an enjoyable milonga or en enjoyable night out.

To return to the question: A technically good dancer would be one who is 
well versed in the vocabulary of Tango, executes the figures and 
movements with precision, good balance, stable on his/her axis as needed 
with the additional range of turning motion afforded by this stability, 
leads or follows precisely with minimal physical effort, and has usually 
been schooled (i.e., taken lots of classes, of course combined with 
talent and aptitude) to achieve this. By this definition, a "technically 
good dancer" would usually be good to dance with (absent personality, 
attitude and other such problems :-)) and should be good to watch. May 
or may not be good to dance amongst (the technical skills may be used or 
abused here, and frequently do tend to be abused).

As to how one would recognize this ... I think most of this can be 
observed and gleaned by watching the person(s) in question, and of 
course by dancing with them. At my evening in Viejo Correo, one of the 
regulars I danced with whom I described as being very good was 
"technically skilled" by this definition as were the two Colombian girls 
I was with. One of the other regulars I danced with was an "ocho 
machine" and with the other really I could not do much more than take 
small simple steps and pauses with no "figures" to speak of, not even 
ochos. I would not describe either as "technically skilled." In terms of 
observing other dancers, this was mostly peripheral observation while I 
was on the dance floor, since our table was far enough from the dance 
floor that we couldn't really see too much of what was going on while 
seated.

Shahrukh