[Tango-L] the fear of close embrace

[Alexis Cousein]

On 16/09/2010 22:46, RonTango wrote:

[I can understand why you wanted to comment on the other
poster, who could be read to imply that *all* the qualities
he ascribed to "open embrace" somehow were inaccessible
to people with different styles, but I can't let the pendulum
swing entirely back to the other side either.]

> whereas in the milongas of Buenos Aires the
> rare person dancing in an 'open embrace' is a misguided tourist.

Some practicas have porteños dancing in embraces that are decidedly
open. Somehow, I think they wouldn't agree being labeled
"misguided tourists".

A misguided tourist doesn't know what embrace to use when. But
many (in my opinion not so misguided) porteños know darn well
how to dance where, and even how to dance to what music (even
within the space of "classical tango", lest you accuse me
of speaking about electropunknewbeathouseraggamuffingangstatango.)

> Without the close embrace it is not Argentine Tango,

I know at least three or four embraces (depending on the different
angles between the bodies, the amount of leaning, how much it all
is allowed to vary,...) that I'd personally still call close. Since
at least one of them is with the two embracers close but with each
of them on his and her axis, how much space exactly makes it "no
longer close embrace"? Should the tango police bring vernier
calipers?

> it is 'Tango for Export',

It is true that "Tango for Export" exists (and is
even danced by porteños who have to feed their kids),
and it is also an overgeneralisation to say that "it" - whatever
differs from one particular narrowly defined embrace - is merely
tango for export.

There have always been many styles of tango. Of course,
each porteño can entertain you for hours on why his style is the
Only True One, but somehow these people mix and rub shoulders,
and are fairly tolerant (up to a point) of the "others", if not
in words, certainly in deeds (a bit like soccer fans of a club
have to put up with there being other soccer teams, or there'd
be no games). And none, in his heart, would dream of
ostracising the other-styled porteños or shipping them
all to Europe.

Will you have "tourists" pick up something and run with it,
gutting whatever they run with from the very soul of it?

Of course.

That doesn't mean there's One True Style or that *any* minute
deviation from any perceived orthodoxy is suddenly automatically
"not tango". Tango's a social dance, with all that implies
(and thank God for that!), including the fact that there is
no authority to define an orthodoxy very rigidly.

> The tango of the milongas of Buenos Aires

I still tend to think of this ("THE tango of the milongas of
Buenos Aires") as a mythical beast, housed in the Platonic
world of ideas, not in Buenos Aires.

There are many milongas and up to a point each one has its own tango,
and if there are N good pair of dancers on the dance floor, each
milonga really has N tangos. It's a dialect continuum, and one
without a written form cast in stone. And the dialect continuum
has also evolved over time; people don't dance "like it was 1899".

You can fill pages of debate (and get many papers and citations)
discussing whether "hebban olla vogala nestas hagunnan hinase
hic enda thu" is Old Dutch or Old Kentish, and to a certain
point everyone arguing for seemingly irreconcilable viewpoints
will be "right" because that's the way dialect continua function.

> is a man embracing a woman and walking
> to classic tango music,

Well, *an* embrace is certainly necessary (as one of the central
tenets is that it is a pure improvisational dance, you need an
embrace or you can't lead and follow). But even you don't define
"embrace" here as "close embrace" (whatever that is, see above).

> respecting the space of others on the floor.

That's certainly part of tango (or more general, civil behaviour in
*any* form of social dance; I dont think people who dance "Valse
Musette" enjoy being knocked off the dance floor more than tango
dancers.)


> The person who has issues is the person who comes to the dance with prior
> issues. Tango in close embrace does not corrupt a decent person.

Neither does tango (within the parameters you did set above) in open
embrace, if there really *is* an embrace (it *is* indeed inexcusable
to use the fact the "embrace" is open just to utterly
ignore it and throw the follower around like a bag of potatoes
while you walk whatever way you want without leading anything
properly).

If some people are corrupted, I think it's the attitude, or even
the mere lack of experience, not the particular embrace, and you can't 
just amalgamate everything or say the embrace caused it all.

Open embracers are often more vulnerable to a particular danger
(that of thinking that "freedom" is the same as "anything
goes", and that someone who tells them that something in
their dance is jarring makes him a "tango nazi") - but that
is an overgeneralisation and the danger is not the embrace.

I see a lot of "corrupted" people in close embrace as well,
in many senses of the word. With other dangers: for some
-- though not all -- their allegiance to an orthodoxy makes them
think they're "right", and as a result they're even less likely to 
actually learn something and grow in their dance.