No I am not going all green here, I am talking about time as an organic thing, flexible and ever-changing. I have on my wrist a Seiko automatic watch, it is filled with little cogs and springs, it is alive, it has soul. I remember a very proud man showing me his Jungens radio watch accurate to a thousandth of a second and pointing out that my watch was two minutes out. Two minutes! I could waste double that standing at the bar waiting for a drink. Another friend cannot understand why, I, a product of the electronic age still cling to such old technology when quartz is so much more accurate.
We live in an age when time is divided up into thousandths of a second, in formula one a second is considered a huge margin, but consider this, a man as great as Stephen Hawking has said that time is not a constant and we all know that time speeds up as you get older.
Have you ever been in a traffic accident? The miles you travelled before the accident passed in a flash yet the few seconds from the first anticipation to the impact seemed to last hours. So this constant measure of time really is quite pointless.
Every tango lasts about three minutes, the only division of time that really matters. Three minutes of pleasure, three minutes of warm embrace, three minutes to measure the soul and art of the great musicians and put your own interpretation on it.
That time is divided up into fast time and slow time as the artist has decreed. We (hopefully) accept these divisions and interpret the dance accordingly. We are not doing some routine or simply thinking of the next move. We are not there to practice what we learned at the last workshop or to show the assembled masses how many moves we can remember.
No, we are there to please our partner and we do this by listening to the music, doing what the music tells us and moving in another time frame. When everyone is doing this we get the sort of scene you can see every night in Buenos Aires, a room so crowded that you wonder if anyone can move. Yet move they do, as one with the music. Two hundred or more people in perfect harmony, with their partners, with each other, and with the music.
Paul, I don’t think the Argentine style of Argentine tango is very hard to achieve amongst people who actually want to dance that way. If it seems otherwise, surely that’s because most people around here don’t want to dance that way.
As to your proposed entirely different model of learning and diffusion, it’s interesting to note that it is entirely the same as the traditional model of learning and diffusion in BsAs.
Paul, not so much utopia, Sounds more like Casa Gresford to me.
Bob: people in perfect harmony, with their partners, with each other, and with the music
Sounds good to me! Yet what is it that makes it so hard to achieve this outside the traditional milongas of Buenos Aires?
You mention two contributory factors: the inclination people have to practise newly learned moves as well as that unfortunate exhibitionist desire to show off one’s fancy stuff. However valid these points may be, I am still loath to place too much blame on individual class-goers; that said, I came pretty close to doing just that last night when I observed one couple attempt this hop-onto-the-knee sentada move in the middle of a crowded floor. Fortunately, no one got hurt and the couple (in their mid-forties at a guess) didn’t injure themselves. The question is- where did they get this from? Whatever gave them the idea that this is what Argentine tango is all about?
For me, therefore, the underlying problem is closer to what Chris implies when he talks about different “versions” of tango. The version of tango most successfully and widely sold in tango schools and shown on YouTube as discussed here is of the show type characterised by its complex choreography that has little or no relevance to aspiring social dancers. As a business proposition, however, this version of tango makes perfect sense: in order to learn complex choreographies and show moves suitable for stage performance, one needs to put in a long, long shift. In fact, this can translate into years and years of cash-generating enrolments: one local school hereabouts allows those who have completed 8 years or more of tango to sign up for level 6! As the Gershwin song says, it’s nice work if you can get it.
Contrast this with Daniel ‘El Flaco’ Garcia’s comments. in the recent Italian documentary Milongueros.
Daniel Garcia: The less you do in tango, the more tango it is. There are two important things when you go to dance in a salon. You know, salon tango is to pause, to walk with elegance and to transmit the subtlety [of all this] to the woman. [my translation]
Actually, I count that as three but we can perhaps forgive him that.
Personally, I am more and more convinced that any hope of producing decent social dancers outside of Buenos Aires will need to rely on an entirely different model of learning and diffusion. The model I envisage is more that of a social club exclusively run by and for amateurs where no professional classes, workshops or demos are ever seen. Does that sound too Utopian for some?
“We are not there to practice what we learned at the last workshop or to show the assembled masses how many moves we can remember. No, we are there to please our partner and we do this by listening to the music, doing what the music tells us and moving in another time frame.”
Absolutely. Herein lies the essence of the difference between the Argentines’ tango dance and what’s most sold as Argentine tango in England. The Argentine version comes from the music. The English version comes from the instructor.
Great article, Bob. Thanks.