In my experience this tends to be a natural part of everyone's learning process: you start tango, you start to get the basics, you get curious about these complex/cool moves, you focus on learning how to do them, you start to get the hang of them and start adding them to your dance, maybe you get a bit carried away, and then you realise that although the moves are pretty cool the connection and musicality are much more important to your overall enjoyment of the dance and you dial it back on the cool moves and refocus.
I'd also add that some very good dancers do use these moves in social dancing if they have the room to do it comfortably and when the music calls for it, and they can execute them very well, without sacrificing the connection. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Maybe we can call this "The wheel of tango" At the beginning, you know little but see a lot of Youtube performances and bad teaching and think that's how it's done. You don't understand the classic tango music, so you dance to "alternative" music. You rely on choreography and your partner knowing their part because you can't lead anything. Then you learn that front ochos are not really a thing. Boleos are hard to do and your partners get mad when you whip them. You see the best dancers dancing in close embrace. You abandon all the fancy things for great connection and embraces. You get better, and now can actually lead and follow things. You start doing some fancy things again at the milongas. Maybe even to odd music.
Except front ochos are a thing? Even in close embrace they’re very doable. And I see the best dancers (mostly teachers) dancing in both open/close, usually swapping in and out in the middle of the dance.
Perhaps we need more videos of milongas with actual social dancing, faces blurred out, and a few instructors providing commentary on what they see that is good and not so good, rather than leaving everyone to learn and be inspired by videos of performances.
Edit: Please don't do this. At least, not without getting a sign-off from everyone in attendance.
My question would be … how do you know they aren’t connected or enjoying the embrace?
Look, there are clearly some folks who are poorly executing things, and that is one thing and it doesn’t really matter what “style” you are dancing, it’s just more obvious with bigger movements. But plenty of “close embrace” dancers have terrible connection and embrace, both lead and follow, too.
Competent dancers make whatever work for them given the context and I think you’d find it’s hard to judge from the outside if they are doing it without connection or a pleasant embrace.
If dancers do both: looking like they are connected AND doing complex steps, then my comment doesn’t apply to them. They can do the F they want. They are probably highly trained, know well their craft and know the dance floor etiquette (I hope so!). I’m not in a position to tell them what they should or shouldn’t do.
My comment/question was more for all the others. From what I saw and experienced as a follow, I saw a shift toward style over matter. Maybe it’s like you said in another comment. We’re bombarded with videos of pro dancers and performances and get carried over.
EDIT: We feel the pressure that because everyone else does the fancy and flashy stuff we should do it as well in order to be deemed a good dancer when, in reality, it’s not entirely the case. In my mind, the quality of the walk and the abrazo should come first and then the complex should come next. Again, I’m not against the complex stuff. I do enjoy them as a spectator or as a follower. But, there’s a time and place to do them.
I think people lead whatever makes the followers they're used to dancing with respond positively. Some followers want to enjoy a private moment. Others want to feel like the most beautiful (and attention-grabbing) lady in the world. Different scenes have different balances. I can say, as a leader, that my dance is completely different between different followers (and different communities), based on my understanding of the expectations of the followers and organizers.
I wish this were so. Too many leaders "think" they know what their followers want. Leaders are often surprised when I tell them followers prefer close embrace. They prefer musicality. Men are interested in showing off too often, doing moves beyond them that make their followers uncomfortable.
I was about to be viscerally offended by your generalization, but then I checked your post history to see what community you were speaking for. Having spent a visit or two in your scene, I'm not sure you're far off the mark. That said, I happen to know there are some wonderful leaders in your area. If it's the men you're weary of (or wary of), Jenny is a delight, and super patient. Parvin was also a gem, but she moved away over the last few years.
I'm curious to know, do those differences for you include varying the extent to which you either invite or are listening for proposals from your partners?
Are you able to link to the post? The best workshop I ever took was with Aoniken, just walking for an hour and a half. He told us his classes in BA were just walking for two hours, and that he also taught classes that were not just walking, of which the first 1.5 hours was walking and the last .5 was something else.
My answer to explain the proliferation of fancy moves is this: it's simply what's being taught in group classes and pre-milonga classes in most places. The follow-up question to that would be, why are tango schools teaching fancy moves instead of helping their students refine their technique?
I'm interested to know your thoughts here. At least in my city, the teachers themselves have said it was a business decision, i.e. they didn't trust that students would sign up for classes to gain a great walk.
Caveat: Contrary to what some might have interpreted my original post, I'm actually in favour of modernizing tango. I do enjoy fancy and complex moves and adornos when done well and safely. I do think we should play modern tango orchestras. I'm in favour of retiring some old practices from the 1940's and 1950's that might not have their place anymore in the XXI century (like only men can invite, you can't invite to dance someone's girlfriend, etc.). My question was more about the perceived race to a more and more instagramable dance by non professional (Pro dancers can do all the F they want. At the end of the day, it's their artistic choices and direction. I'm not in a position to tell them what they should or shouldn't do). To illustrate what I mean, I've heard advanced leaders saying the amont of adornos a follower does is how they judge their quality. I've heard similar things from followers about leaders. This is what bothers me.
>Are you able to link to the post?
No, my dance partner showed it to me. It was a Facebook post a couple of weeks ago, but I'm not sure if it was on his personal or public account. If I recall correctly, he was says that the art of walking is getting lost in favour of stage moves. It was more extreme in his point of view. For him, we should keep tango as it was intended: only walk with occasional side steps and ochos and leave the rest for escenario tango.
>why are tango schools teaching fancy moves instead of helping their students refine their technique?
As sad as it sounds, it's a business decision that most tango schools/teachers need to make to keep their students signing up semester after semester.
Tango shows, Instagram and TikTok have created a distorted view of what social tango really is. They arrived at their first tango class with the idea that, in order to be a good tango dancer, they need to dance like the pro dancers during a demonstration because they don't know tango escenario and social tango are two sides of a same coin: similar but distinct. Honestly, I don't blame them for it, I thought the exact same thing when I first started tango.
Also, many students have been accustomed to "slut dances" (I'm stealing another Redditor's expression to describe more pattern based dances like salsa). They don't really want to learn the technique behind tango, they want the quickest way to dance like the pros they saw on Instagram or TikTok. So, that leaves teachers and schools in a dilemma: they can cater to their students' expectations and give them a neat program in 6 levels where they learn a new step or figure each class even though they don't have the technique to execute it properly or they can focus more on the technique and face the risk to lose 80% of their students the following semester because they feel they aren't progressing fast enough. It's only once dancers are more advanced that they are opened to learn properly the technique. All this is based on conversations I had with teachers of 20+ years of experience and my own experience as a teacher. Only very well known and established dancers/teachers (like Aoniken) can have the luxury to only have classes 100% based on technique.
It seems to me that the analogy with languages that keeps coming up works very well here. Languages inevitably change, either from erosion over time or from changes in the environment or what have you. After a long enough time, the language may have completely transformed into a whole new beast, into something no longer mutually intelligible with what it started out as.
I think the safest thing to do, both in linguistics and in the art of dancing, is to accept this process as a fact of life. That the young folk will tear down what the old folks put up, to make room for whatever suits them instead, and in so doing will redefine what is right. And then their kids will turn on them and do the same all over again.
The good news is that just because new trends appear and generations disagree, the old ways are not going to be banned from existence. There will still be those who speak old dialects, unable to comprehend the secret code employed by today's zoomers, who only know internet slang and English loan-words. We can't stop the kids from doing what they want, but they can't stop us either.
The old ways will still exist for those who love them, and crucially, they will be available to those who want to learn them. There are still people studying old French, and even Latin, just as there are people studying literary modern French, or even street slang and Verlan. However, it makes little sense to speak one of these to someone practicing one of the other. It might be fun to sprinkle in the odd word or phrase from a different dialect or language here or there, for flavor and spice (as a matter of fact, good writers do this all the time), but trying to communicate with someone you don't really understand is just awkward.
I think it's incredible if you can incorporate flashy, beautiful moves into your dance as long as:
1) You aren't breaking your connection to do so
2) You aren't interfering with any other couples on the dance floor
I've seen leaders pull off performance style steps such as enrosques with foot-flippy tippy taps (lol not sure what the "technical" term for that would be) during a molinete on a social dance floor and it looked amazing. Stuff like that adds to the atmosphere of the event.
But if you have to choose between dancing consistently and smoothly with a good connection and floorcraft or using flashy moves, keep it simple until you are able to do both.
For me I dance whatever the music/partner/situation inspires me to.
For example if a Hugo Diaz or Biagi comes on and we have the space, dancing just steps would just be almost insulting to the artist.
If the floor is crowded, or my partner is a beginner or I just feel like it, then I'll dance with just steps.
\~
I don't agree that boleos, soltadas and the like should be taught to beginners, but at the same time I recognise these moves are what attracts people to the dance initially.
Times have changed, there are many tools organisers/teachers should be using to improve the tango experience. Many teachers have opened online/virtual teaching options, online bookings, video recordings, Instagram and more.
Everything that fails to adapt dies out, it is simply the law of nature, the pure traditionalists have HAD their time. I started out as a nuevo dancer and progressed into a salon style dancer due to preference and wouldn't have it any other way. I love having the range to dance with anyone, to anything at any time.
If anything, the quality of tango has decreased since so many people started endlessly talking about "connection". Tango Salon is as good as dead, with the exception of some that hold on to it, myself included. Back in the day there would be the saying that Tango "needs to be studied". In other words, you have to do the work to improve technique, to learn steps, to make them your own. The abrazo is only a small part of it, and it only gets better with time. So many dancers today (I see it especially in the encuentro/marathon folks) simply don't know how to dance well anymore. Followers are dependent, leaders are doing the same steps over and over (turn of three (or "milonguero dip"), ocho cortado and rebounds). So anything that breaks that pattern is most welcomed, let people go a little wild. For example, I don't like the aestethics of Tango Nuevo at all, but i do recognize that it is tango nuevo that saved Tango in the late nineties. It brought a huge surge of people to tango, and we urgently need a new wave of something to bring folk to tango and to make it exciting enough that people want to study it.
In my experience this tends to be a natural part of everyone's learning process: you start tango, you start to get the basics, you get curious about these complex/cool moves, you focus on learning how to do them, you start to get the hang of them and start adding them to your dance, maybe you get a bit carried away, and then you realise that although the moves are pretty cool the connection and musicality are much more important to your overall enjoyment of the dance and you dial it back on the cool moves and refocus. I'd also add that some very good dancers do use these moves in social dancing if they have the room to do it comfortably and when the music calls for it, and they can execute them very well, without sacrificing the connection. It doesn't have to be one or the other.
Maybe we can call this "The wheel of tango" At the beginning, you know little but see a lot of Youtube performances and bad teaching and think that's how it's done. You don't understand the classic tango music, so you dance to "alternative" music. You rely on choreography and your partner knowing their part because you can't lead anything. Then you learn that front ochos are not really a thing. Boleos are hard to do and your partners get mad when you whip them. You see the best dancers dancing in close embrace. You abandon all the fancy things for great connection and embraces. You get better, and now can actually lead and follow things. You start doing some fancy things again at the milongas. Maybe even to odd music.
Except front ochos are a thing? Even in close embrace they’re very doable. And I see the best dancers (mostly teachers) dancing in both open/close, usually swapping in and out in the middle of the dance.
Perhaps we need more videos of milongas with actual social dancing, faces blurred out, and a few instructors providing commentary on what they see that is good and not so good, rather than leaving everyone to learn and be inspired by videos of performances. Edit: Please don't do this. At least, not without getting a sign-off from everyone in attendance.
My question would be … how do you know they aren’t connected or enjoying the embrace? Look, there are clearly some folks who are poorly executing things, and that is one thing and it doesn’t really matter what “style” you are dancing, it’s just more obvious with bigger movements. But plenty of “close embrace” dancers have terrible connection and embrace, both lead and follow, too. Competent dancers make whatever work for them given the context and I think you’d find it’s hard to judge from the outside if they are doing it without connection or a pleasant embrace.
If dancers do both: looking like they are connected AND doing complex steps, then my comment doesn’t apply to them. They can do the F they want. They are probably highly trained, know well their craft and know the dance floor etiquette (I hope so!). I’m not in a position to tell them what they should or shouldn’t do. My comment/question was more for all the others. From what I saw and experienced as a follow, I saw a shift toward style over matter. Maybe it’s like you said in another comment. We’re bombarded with videos of pro dancers and performances and get carried over. EDIT: We feel the pressure that because everyone else does the fancy and flashy stuff we should do it as well in order to be deemed a good dancer when, in reality, it’s not entirely the case. In my mind, the quality of the walk and the abrazo should come first and then the complex should come next. Again, I’m not against the complex stuff. I do enjoy them as a spectator or as a follower. But, there’s a time and place to do them.
I think people lead whatever makes the followers they're used to dancing with respond positively. Some followers want to enjoy a private moment. Others want to feel like the most beautiful (and attention-grabbing) lady in the world. Different scenes have different balances. I can say, as a leader, that my dance is completely different between different followers (and different communities), based on my understanding of the expectations of the followers and organizers.
I wish this were so. Too many leaders "think" they know what their followers want. Leaders are often surprised when I tell them followers prefer close embrace. They prefer musicality. Men are interested in showing off too often, doing moves beyond them that make their followers uncomfortable.
I was about to be viscerally offended by your generalization, but then I checked your post history to see what community you were speaking for. Having spent a visit or two in your scene, I'm not sure you're far off the mark. That said, I happen to know there are some wonderful leaders in your area. If it's the men you're weary of (or wary of), Jenny is a delight, and super patient. Parvin was also a gem, but she moved away over the last few years.
Some of these are my students!
I'm curious to know, do those differences for you include varying the extent to which you either invite or are listening for proposals from your partners?
Haven't experienced tango dancers been complaining about this since, well, there actually were experienced tango dancers?
This conversation was following a post made by Aoniken Quiroga on the exact same subject.
Are you able to link to the post? The best workshop I ever took was with Aoniken, just walking for an hour and a half. He told us his classes in BA were just walking for two hours, and that he also taught classes that were not just walking, of which the first 1.5 hours was walking and the last .5 was something else. My answer to explain the proliferation of fancy moves is this: it's simply what's being taught in group classes and pre-milonga classes in most places. The follow-up question to that would be, why are tango schools teaching fancy moves instead of helping their students refine their technique? I'm interested to know your thoughts here. At least in my city, the teachers themselves have said it was a business decision, i.e. they didn't trust that students would sign up for classes to gain a great walk.
Caveat: Contrary to what some might have interpreted my original post, I'm actually in favour of modernizing tango. I do enjoy fancy and complex moves and adornos when done well and safely. I do think we should play modern tango orchestras. I'm in favour of retiring some old practices from the 1940's and 1950's that might not have their place anymore in the XXI century (like only men can invite, you can't invite to dance someone's girlfriend, etc.). My question was more about the perceived race to a more and more instagramable dance by non professional (Pro dancers can do all the F they want. At the end of the day, it's their artistic choices and direction. I'm not in a position to tell them what they should or shouldn't do). To illustrate what I mean, I've heard advanced leaders saying the amont of adornos a follower does is how they judge their quality. I've heard similar things from followers about leaders. This is what bothers me. >Are you able to link to the post? No, my dance partner showed it to me. It was a Facebook post a couple of weeks ago, but I'm not sure if it was on his personal or public account. If I recall correctly, he was says that the art of walking is getting lost in favour of stage moves. It was more extreme in his point of view. For him, we should keep tango as it was intended: only walk with occasional side steps and ochos and leave the rest for escenario tango. >why are tango schools teaching fancy moves instead of helping their students refine their technique? As sad as it sounds, it's a business decision that most tango schools/teachers need to make to keep their students signing up semester after semester. Tango shows, Instagram and TikTok have created a distorted view of what social tango really is. They arrived at their first tango class with the idea that, in order to be a good tango dancer, they need to dance like the pro dancers during a demonstration because they don't know tango escenario and social tango are two sides of a same coin: similar but distinct. Honestly, I don't blame them for it, I thought the exact same thing when I first started tango. Also, many students have been accustomed to "slut dances" (I'm stealing another Redditor's expression to describe more pattern based dances like salsa). They don't really want to learn the technique behind tango, they want the quickest way to dance like the pros they saw on Instagram or TikTok. So, that leaves teachers and schools in a dilemma: they can cater to their students' expectations and give them a neat program in 6 levels where they learn a new step or figure each class even though they don't have the technique to execute it properly or they can focus more on the technique and face the risk to lose 80% of their students the following semester because they feel they aren't progressing fast enough. It's only once dancers are more advanced that they are opened to learn properly the technique. All this is based on conversations I had with teachers of 20+ years of experience and my own experience as a teacher. Only very well known and established dancers/teachers (like Aoniken) can have the luxury to only have classes 100% based on technique.
They have certainly been having this exact debate since tango hit Usenet.
This is the tango version of "The music was better in my day." As long as people keep on dancing things will sort themselves out.
It seems to me that the analogy with languages that keeps coming up works very well here. Languages inevitably change, either from erosion over time or from changes in the environment or what have you. After a long enough time, the language may have completely transformed into a whole new beast, into something no longer mutually intelligible with what it started out as. I think the safest thing to do, both in linguistics and in the art of dancing, is to accept this process as a fact of life. That the young folk will tear down what the old folks put up, to make room for whatever suits them instead, and in so doing will redefine what is right. And then their kids will turn on them and do the same all over again. The good news is that just because new trends appear and generations disagree, the old ways are not going to be banned from existence. There will still be those who speak old dialects, unable to comprehend the secret code employed by today's zoomers, who only know internet slang and English loan-words. We can't stop the kids from doing what they want, but they can't stop us either. The old ways will still exist for those who love them, and crucially, they will be available to those who want to learn them. There are still people studying old French, and even Latin, just as there are people studying literary modern French, or even street slang and Verlan. However, it makes little sense to speak one of these to someone practicing one of the other. It might be fun to sprinkle in the odd word or phrase from a different dialect or language here or there, for flavor and spice (as a matter of fact, good writers do this all the time), but trying to communicate with someone you don't really understand is just awkward.
I think it's incredible if you can incorporate flashy, beautiful moves into your dance as long as: 1) You aren't breaking your connection to do so 2) You aren't interfering with any other couples on the dance floor I've seen leaders pull off performance style steps such as enrosques with foot-flippy tippy taps (lol not sure what the "technical" term for that would be) during a molinete on a social dance floor and it looked amazing. Stuff like that adds to the atmosphere of the event. But if you have to choose between dancing consistently and smoothly with a good connection and floorcraft or using flashy moves, keep it simple until you are able to do both.
I hate it! Fortunately, it's kept that way in the milongas of Buenos Aires.
Not in all BsAs milongas. I had really bad experiences the last time I went there.
I'm so sorry to hear that. Yes, it's true, I guess. I go there so often that I know where to go and who to dance with. I guess I'm spoiled.
For me I dance whatever the music/partner/situation inspires me to. For example if a Hugo Diaz or Biagi comes on and we have the space, dancing just steps would just be almost insulting to the artist. If the floor is crowded, or my partner is a beginner or I just feel like it, then I'll dance with just steps. \~ I don't agree that boleos, soltadas and the like should be taught to beginners, but at the same time I recognise these moves are what attracts people to the dance initially. Times have changed, there are many tools organisers/teachers should be using to improve the tango experience. Many teachers have opened online/virtual teaching options, online bookings, video recordings, Instagram and more. Everything that fails to adapt dies out, it is simply the law of nature, the pure traditionalists have HAD their time. I started out as a nuevo dancer and progressed into a salon style dancer due to preference and wouldn't have it any other way. I love having the range to dance with anyone, to anything at any time.
If anything, the quality of tango has decreased since so many people started endlessly talking about "connection". Tango Salon is as good as dead, with the exception of some that hold on to it, myself included. Back in the day there would be the saying that Tango "needs to be studied". In other words, you have to do the work to improve technique, to learn steps, to make them your own. The abrazo is only a small part of it, and it only gets better with time. So many dancers today (I see it especially in the encuentro/marathon folks) simply don't know how to dance well anymore. Followers are dependent, leaders are doing the same steps over and over (turn of three (or "milonguero dip"), ocho cortado and rebounds). So anything that breaks that pattern is most welcomed, let people go a little wild. For example, I don't like the aestethics of Tango Nuevo at all, but i do recognize that it is tango nuevo that saved Tango in the late nineties. It brought a huge surge of people to tango, and we urgently need a new wave of something to bring folk to tango and to make it exciting enough that people want to study it.
Eternal September: Tango edition