how mysterious the tango dance; not what has long taken the form of a show, but what is expressed on the floors of the ballrooms, that is, in the so-called milongas.
If we take a quick look at other Argentine dances for couples, we can evoke the happy love game that emanates from a well-danced chacarera, or the refined, discreet but clear seduction that the zamba performs.
The tango, object of study?
But what about tango? What do we conjure? Two bodies linked by greater or lesser proximityin more introspective than sensual attitudes, and which are understood through keys that are difficult to reveal if the observer is not initiated.
Among the other unknowns that this dance arouses, there are also its origins and the reasons for the changes it has undergone over time.
And to contrast it with that other ballroom dance which is the Viennese waltz, we see that it is danced today (at least in Vienna and, for better or worse, at wedding parties) practically the same as two hundred and fifty years ago. Instead tango dance has changed in every way over a century and a half.
It is perhaps for these and many other reasons that it has increasingly become the object of study and analysis.
A good testimony of this interest is reflected in the days of National Tango Meeting (from Thursday 17 to Saturday 19 from 14:00 to 20:00 at the Borges Cultural Center, Viamonte 525), where there will be spaces for reflection, meetings with teachers, workshops, debates, as well as lessons and choreography. All activities are free to enter.
A journey through the ways of dancing
Tango should have a peripheral remote source; but what is absolutely certain is that it experienced a great expansion in the early 20th century, was successfully exported to Europe, returned triumphantly to the Río de la Plata, flourished in every sense in the 1940s, yes it’s receded towards the decade from the 1960s it returned to popularity in the 1980s.
With the passage of all this time, the tango dance has undergone several stylistic changes: the first forms, which are believed to be very similar to what the rhythm of the milonga is today (in its danced expression), have adapted to the original compas of two times four; but when it was composed the little birthday by 1917, the time signature had changed to four fours. For some reason, even mysterious, the tango continues to be called “the dance of two by four”.
And so went the orillero tango, canyengue tango, parlor tango, and downtown tango of the 1960s; and then the most recent modalities such as fusions or derivations of previous styles.
original features
The essential difference between the newborn tango and other ballroom dances of the same era – the then very popular polka or mazurka – is, first of all, that the movements performed by the man and the woman are not symmetrical; that is to say, one and the other can do different things at the same time.
Hence, that the execution of the steps does not respond to a pre-established order because the one who leads the dance is improvising while dancing on the track. Even with the change brought about by the new forms of relationship (couples made up of two men or two women), the distribution of roles is the same: someone improvises and leads and the partner follows.
The tango, on the other hand, introduces the pause, the arrest at different moments of the dance, as a fundamental element.
It is what is usually called “cut”, often mentioned even if the exact meaning is often not known. It is worth adding that the word “broken”, usually related to “cut”, alludes to the broken movements of the hips; but this is a characteristic of the early tango style which then fell completely into disuse.
Ballroom tango, stage tango
The track tango and stage tango o exhibitions were born almost simultaneously, measured in historical times; Their paths have crossed numerous times over the years and still do today.
Popular scene dancers have taken steps from ground dancers at different times, in the same way that popular dancers have incorporated steps performed or invented by professionals.
“Tango is the vertical version of another horizontal exercise,” someone wrote. The phrase is familiar and is repeated in different forms, but maybe it’s just a clever play on words that adds nothing to the understanding of tango as a ballroom dance.
Another thing is the genre of stage tango, which has evolved in the manner of a strong eroticism often in very acrobatic forms. But this difference between one genre and the other says nothing in particular about one or the other, it does not make one purer or more legitimate than the other.
In milonga tango, on the other hand, the compatibility between dancers is limited to the encounter on the dance floor and the duration of the musical theme. In the ephemeral life of a tango an almost loving communication is established, although it does not transcend the confines of the dance and although nothing else connects the parts.
The dance and the music that accompanies it
Curiously, the tango, in its danceable aspect, has changed in many respects, but the music to which we dance today in milongas continues to be, in a very major proportion, that which was composed and recorded in the 1940s and 1950s. ’50, a little more, a little less.
Is it necessary for new tango music to appear to renew the dance? It doesn’t seem to have needed it in the last twenty years, in which new forms have emerged, new steps, new dynamics, other ways of linking the dancing couple. But if the tangos of the golden age orchestras serve both the inherited forms and the new forms that are being produced, it is unlikely that a change will be imposed from outside.
Change something so that nothing changes
With the planetary expansion of the tango dance, and with the thousands of milongas scattered throughout the world, it is moving to think of that multitude of individuals who in countless countries and cities of the world move in pairs according to the rules of a complex dance. It is extraordinary.
Perhaps it is a new cycle of society dance, the return to the dance of the united couple, which in the case of the tango has also shown that it can change everything that is necessary to continue to be the same.
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Source: Clarin
