Steps, Musicality and Choreography

Novice dancers often focus their attention on steps and neglect music and choreography. In fact, the quality of a dance hinges more on musicality and choreography than steps. To explain this, let's first take a closer look at how the milongueros dance tango.

What impressed me most about the dance of the milongueros is not their steps but their musicality and choreography, which have the following characteristics.

(1) They dance at a slower pace, allowing the woman to follow in a restful and elegant manner. (2) Every step is well thought out and clearly led, focusing on expressing the music and feelings, not on impression. (3) There is a pause after each phrase or sequence, just like there is a punctuation mark after each sentence. (4) The pause is not completely still but in subtle motion to allow the woman to do embellishments. (5) The steps are pulsating, like surging waves rather than flowing water. This facilitates cadencia in the dance. (6) There is a soft transition between two steps, often in the form of some degree of turn, preparing the next surge in a different direction. (7) Surging step, pause, soft transition, and another surging step constitute the basic rhythm of the dance. This arrangement can better reflect the music, sentiment and feelings that feature social tango.

The dance of the milongueros is in sharp contrast to our tango, which tends to be hasty, busy and beat-chasing, prioritizing movements rather than musicality and choreography. If their tango is art, then ours is more like gymnastics. We tend to step on every beat and dance at a hurried, monotonic speed, leaving little room for the woman to express herself. There is a lack of pause, slow motion, subtlety, depth and emotional expression in our tango. The following is an example.

These are not novices but fairly experienced dancers. In fact, their dancing skills are better than the average found online. I chose this clip to illustrate that dance techniques, musicality, and choreography are seperate skills. What most dancers lack is musicality and choreography.

Of course, as with any skill that requires effort to become proficient, tango has a learning curve. The dancers in the video below have made quite a bit of progress.

Many of them are imitating the style of the milongueros. One shining example is the man in the hat appeared in 3:10-3:50, who used a lot of pauses and slow motions. As you can see, by adopting the choreography of the milongueros, the dance becomes deeper, tastier, more musical and less gymnastic. Pause and slow motion are to dance what punctuation is to writing, which make the dance more musical, meaningful, expressive, and captivating (see Floorcraft, Choreography and Hastiness). The following is another good example.