Tango is a complex and deep art form. It implies different things to different people. To a beginner, it’s steps. To a master, it’s feeling and interpretation of the music. To a man, it’s leading. To a woman, it’s following. To a milonguero, it’s a social activity for personal enjoyment. To a stage dancer, it’s a performance for entertaining an audience. To a musician, it’s a music genre. To a thinker, it’s a philosophy. To a foreigner, it’s a dance. To Argentines, it’s a culture and life style... We all dance differently for who we are and what philosophy we have.
Tango philosophy involves issues that make us defferent. The following is an incomplete list of such issues. Each may have many answers. Every dancer entitles his/her own opinions. Some may be more or less “correct” or “incorrect”. Others may just be personal preferences and neither right nor wrong. But collectively these opinions and preferences define the way each of us dances and behaves, and divide us into different groups. Studying and exchanging opinions on these issues may not only help us better our own dance and tango community, but also help us understand, tolerate, and learn from each other. It may also help to reduce the distinctions between different styles and achieve mastery through a comprehensive grasp of all aspects of tango.
1. What is tango?
2. Why do we dance tango?
3. What do men want from women in tango?
4. What do women want from men in tango?
5. The gender roles in tango
6. Masculinity vs. femininity
7. Sexual intimacy vs. non-sexual intimacy
8. Close embrace vs. open embrace
9. Movement orientation vs. music/feeling orientation
10. Social tango vs. performance tango
11. Personal enjoyment vs. showoff
12. Classic tango music vs. alternative music
13. Age and styles
14. Cultural bias and impacts
15. Lead vs. follow
16. Individuality vs. partnership
17. Dictation vs. conversation
18. Active follow vs. passive follow
19. Tango partnership vs. real-life partnership between opposite sexes
20. Simple movement vs. fancy movement
21. Compact movement vs. wide movement
22. Fast movement vs. slow movement
23. Monotony vs. variations
24. Rhythm vs. melody
25. Romanticism vs. gymnastics
26. Improvisation vs. choreography
27. Elegance vs. comfort
28. Inner beauty vs. outer beauty
29. Simplicity vs. complexity
30. Innovation vs. tradition
31. Creativeness vs. standardization
32. Free expression vs. milonga code
33. Tango as a dance vs. tango as a culture
34. Cabeseo vs. verbal invitation
35. Buenos Aires vs. international
36. Elitism vs. community
37. Highbrowism vs. populism
Saturday, April 30, 2011
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
Tango is an altogether different beast to anything I’d seen. It’s so meticulous and beautiful. I would never have dreamt of stepping out into the dancing crowd without a lesson or two. Love it!
ReplyDeleteJosefina A. - hotels in San Telmo
Do you regard all of these pairs of concepts as strict dichotomies? I think some of them are actually hard to separate out, such as "movement orientation/music-feeling orientation" or "personal enjoyment versus show-off" (we want to look good while we're dancing so as to get more dances and hence more enjoyment!) or "elegance vs. comfort" (if your aesthetic involves a very natural, smooth look, which is also comfortable to dance) or "rhythm versus melody" (I am still sceptical as to whether we can really dance to the melody, as opposed to the rhythms within the melody). It sounds as though there is potential for some interesting discussion.
ReplyDeletewww.tangoaddiction.wordpress.com
We hope beauty and comfort go hand in hand, but that is not always the case. Movement oriented dancers like to do fancy stuffs that catch eyes and use whatever embraces that help to expand movement possibilities, often at the cost of their own and their partner’s comfort. On the other hand, those who dance for personal enjoyment may be embrace specific, use simple steps, focus only on personal feelings and don’t care much about how they look.
ReplyDeleteDance to the music does not only mean stepping on the beat, it also means dancing with cadencia. When in motion, the body produces a momentum in each step, which can be maneuvered by accelerating and then halting the body motion to create a lilt or cadence in the horizontal direction, like a wave of motion across each step in correspondence with the rhythmic flow of the music. The rhythm is faster, regular, and less emotional. The melody is slower, more sentimental and often irregular. Dancers with good musicality can use different cadencia and other means, such as slow motion and pause, to express different emotions.
ReplyDelete