505  Learning the Soul of Tango (Was: Integrating Workshops and Local

Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 07:37:51 -0500
From: Stephen Brown <Stephen.P.Brown@DAL.FRB.ORG>
Subject: Learning the Soul of Tango (Was: Integrating Workshops and Local
Classes)

Nancy wrote:

>[T]hose who want to perform on stage are hard-pressed to make a living
>at it, so they promote themselves as teachers, hoping to continue to do
>stage-work as their primary vocation and to use their stage renown to get
>them jobs as teachers. ... Some of them even do their stage tango on the
>salon floors of BsAs to the great consternation of the social dancers.

>Those who are the consumate social dancers just want to make enough money
>to get into the milongas, have a cidra or two, buy some cigarettes, maybe
>take a woman out for a cafecito. ... These guys dance for themselves and
>their partners. They would not dream of passing themselves off as
>teachers because they know that the soul of tango dance cannot be taught.

Nancy's comments might leave someone who wants to learn to dance tango with
the question as to whether they can find the soul of tango in their own
dancing. I think the answer is yes, but because most of us must start from
the outside and work toward the inner tango, the result in a lengthy
process that has many pitfalls. Daniel Trenner frequently tells the story
of having learned to dance tango what he thought was fairly well, only to
find himself excluded from milongas in Buenos Aires because the figures he
was executing created a navigational hazard for the others around him.

In Buenos Aires, tango is so ingrained in the culture that even someone who
doesn't like tango knows a lot about it. Even guide books to Buenos Aires
from 15 years ago (when tango was not as popular as it is today) described
tango as being both absent and permeating the culture. In North America
and Europe, tango does not permeate the culture. Many porten~os grow up
with an inner sense of tango--hearing the music on a daily basis, knowing
the rhythm of the music, and implicitly understanding that the essential
elements of the dance are improvisation, moving to the music, engaging in
rhythmic play, and developing a heart-to-heart connection with one's
partner. These are all extensions of the Argentine culture. Because many
of these porten~os come to the tango with an implicit knowledge of its
essential elements, learning a few steps and figures can be sufficient for
them to develop the ability to dance the soul of tango.

Those of us who learn outside this frame of reference are dependent upon
our instructors to a degree that is unfathomable to most Argentines,
including those Argentines who regularly teach tango to foreigners. And to
further add to the confusion, many of the touring Argentines simply teach
scaled-down stage figures for the reasons that Nancy explains above. If we
are to find the soul of tango, we must learn to hear the rhythm of the
music before we move to it. We must understand that tango is an
improvisational dance that engages the intellect, but is expressed from the
heart. In short, we must understand the craft and the heart of tango
before we create the art of dancing it.

Taken outside its original milieu, however, the available instruction in
Argentine tango conveys only the craft. Only a few instructors and a few
instructional videos try to convey the improvisational nature of tango.
Few instructors and no videos attempt to convey an inner sense of
tango--that is, moving to the music, engaging in rhythmic play, and
developing a heart-to-heart connection with one's partner. (I think these
are ideas that Tom Stermitz has attempted to convey for years on Tango-L.)

For those of us outside tango's original cultural milieu, finding our way
to the soul of tango is largely a personal challenge. Living in a
community where the social forms of tango are danced is a big help.
Working with an instructor who is capable of bridging aspects of the
cultural gap that separates us from authenticity can be of immense help as
is building a collection of tango music for social dancing and listening to
it regularly. Perhaps the greatest help, however, is simply understanding
what elements might be missing from our dancing and/or the instruction we
are receiving and looking for
them in our own hearts and experiences.

Un abrazo,
Steve

Stephen Brown
Tango Argentino de Tejas
https://www.tejastango.com

Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 11:17:29 -0400
From: Maria Lemus <mlemus@THE-BEACH.NET>
Subject: Re: Learning the Soul of Tango (Was: Integrating Workshops and Local
Classes)

Stephen wrote:

> For those of us outside tango's original cultural milieu, finding our way
> to the soul of tango is largely a personal challenge.

Stephen everything was so beautifully written.

I have had some Argentine friends tell me the same thing and I find it the
topic fascinating. Even if they don't like tango somehow they all eat,
breathe and live it. I question, however, if it's only tango? Possibly an
entirely different way of seeing the world than we do here in the US? For
example, in a trip to Spain last year that I took to discover my roots, I
found that there was no need to "discover" them because I felt very at home
there. The attitude of the people I met was work to live, not live to work.
There was a stronger sense of the importance of maintaining social ties,
connecting with people, in short a very strong "heart" sense to life, even
if it meant staying up late and going to work the next day with dark circles
under their eyes. Whereas here most people postpone their social lives to
the weekend. "Don't have time to hang out. Too tired. Have to go. Work
in the morning." I realize these are two extreme generalizations, but you
get the picture.

I don't think one could argue that tango is genetically Argentine, but it
makes sense to me that if Argentina is similar to other Hispanic cultures
where everyone starts to dance socially the moment they're born, and every
social gathering usually spontaneously erupts into dance, then yes, it is a
deeply ingrained "way of life" and it's much harder for those raised with
different cultural habits to adopt it. This may seem like a silly point -
but just look at the way people greet each other in different cultures. In
the US, people don't generally kiss or embrace. A hand shake suffices when
introduced to another person. It's a whole different act in Hispanic
cultures. Heck, in Spain you get two kisses and hug when you say hello and
goodbye. That's four kisses and two hugs with one person in one encounter,
assuming you're only seeing one person! It takes half an hour just to leave
a party because you have to kiss everyone!

Even if it is just a social greeting "code," (after all you might not like
someone but you still have to salute him or her that way), when you get used
to it, you feel like something is definitely "missing" when you don't kiss
or hug the person in front of you. A greeting is not a dance, but it is
part of a body-language that permeates the culture. I've never been to
Argentina, but I do know from hanging out with my Argentine friends that we
share the same "embracing" sense of the other person. It is a beautiful
gesture that says, "I accept you into my space and establish a physical,
human point of contact with you for a moment."


That "heart" sense is extremely important in any dance. I used the phrase
"open the heart, movement will follow" in a card I designed last year and
never imagined it would doubly apply to tango. The heart center is the
core, and it's risky business to open it up in the dance, as well as in
life. Surrendering to an open heart leaves you vulnerable, but you have to
do it in order to embrace life fully.

Un abrazo
Maria
Miami Beach

Date: Sat, 13 Apr 2002 11:05:13 -0500
From: Stephen Brown <Stephen.P.Brown@DAL.FRB.ORG>
Subject: Re: Learning the Soul of Tango

In Al Compas del Corazon, Homero Manzi wrote, "Oyes el compas? Es el
corazon." (Do you hear the beat? It is the heart.)

Un abrazo y beso,
Steve

Date: Sun, 14 Apr 2002 01:11:03 +0900
From: astrid <astrid@RUBY.PLALA.OR.JP>
Subject: Re: Learning the Soul of Tango (Was: Integrating Workshops and
Local Classes)

Maria, your posting is beautifully written, too.
Yes, having an "embracing sense of the other person" makes all the
difference.
Besides, all these embraces constitute a preparation and practise for the
tango embrace, and you can really notice the difference when dancing with
people who do not do this in daily life.
You say, "Argentina is similar to other Hispanic cultures
where everyone starts to dance socially the moment they're born,"
. I don't know about this, but I bemusedly watched when some relatives of
our Argentine teacher came to visit him during the practica. They showed up
at about 10.30pm, with a small boy of about one year or so. My teacher
immediately picked him up and started doing dance steps with him in his arms
for a long time. Then the boy was passed around to a few of the tangueras
present who did little dances with him one after another. Then he was made
to watch some of the dancers, until he started smiling and hopping and
dancing himself (he had just learned to walk), and everybody clapped and
cheered him. His parents watched with a smile, and finally left close to
midnight when the child got very sleepy. We all agreed that he must be
feeling like he "has got tango in his blood" when he grows up, even if he
may not remember how it got there.

Astrid

Date: Tue, 16 Apr 2002 13:47:14 -0300
From: Janis Kenyon <jantango@FEEDBACK.NET.AR>
Subject: Learning the soul of tango

Maria Lemus wrote:

"That "heart" sense is extremely important in any dance. I used the phrase
"open the heart, movement will follow" in a card I designed last year and
never imagined it would doubly apply to tango. The heart center is the
core, and it's risky business to open it up in the dance, as well as in
life."


We're all here to learn lessons in life. If we don't open our hearts, we'll
never learn. Tango is only a path which some of us have chosen to find what
we're all searching for. That's why it is not only a dance. It has life
lessons for us to learn. Those who analyze steps, etc. are missing what
tango has to offer.


Pichi