3694  Tango Communities from Tango Shows, part 1 - Montreal's example

Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2005 09:53:20 -0600
From: Brian Dunn <brian@DANCEOFTHEHEART.COM>
Subject: Tango Communities from Tango Shows, part 1 - Montreal's example

Dear list,



(This is a LONG multi-part message, triggered by recent posts and the
experience of putting together our new show - delete if desired!)



From her website, renowned tango teacher Susana Miller writes (thanks to
Sergio for primary translation from Spanish),



".Tango is known all over the world due to its stage form.It is due to those
fine, skilled dancers, true artists and thanks to their inspiration and the
many daily hours of hard work that they dedicate to their talent that tango
is known worldwide, but...the origin of tango was the salon, a place where
it still resides full of life...The best stage dancers never stop going to
the salon because this is their fountain of inspiration, the place where
their choreographies breathe new oxygen."



"Show Tango must be spectacular but it needs the salon for inspiration
otherwise it would be showing something that does not exist.Tango salon
needs tango stage to spread and reach other areas of the planet and the new
generations as well."





In Susana's view above, she credits stage representations of tango with
successful "tango outreach" to worldwide audiences and young people, who are
then often drawn to the social side of tango that almost all of us revel in,
almost all of the time, with the sense of scale, movement, vocabulary,
musicality and social interactions on the shared dance floor that most of us
understand as "social tango".



But the evolution of tango communities in North America, for example,
followed a somewhat rocky path through this progression. Many writers on
this list have noted the influence of tango shows in creating the
fascination for tango in the general public that helped grow their
communities. However, they also note that stage tango portrays in many ways
an unrealistic portrayal of the available tango experiences for audience
members. These portrayals can have negative effects on the development of
local tango communities. This is, they note, because the tango portrayals
on stage suggest to those freshly inspired newcomers that those kinds of
movements, done to a broad scale, with elaborate and complex figures
executed with precision in a huge nearly empty space, are appropriate in the
"salon" atmosphere of their local milonga.



I have heard firsthand testimony of this dynamic at work in, for example,
Montreal. The initial tango shows came through Montreal during the end of
the last century, and stunned audience members in well-documented ways.
Many were drawn to create or join various tango clubs, where they sought to
recapture the passion of their responses to the professional tango dancers
by attempting to re-create themselves what they saw on stage. I am told
this process became somewhat institutionalized in Montreal, more than in
many other cities where tango arrived later, in that most tango
organizations and events for the first few years of tango in Montreal were
"show-focused" in this way. The dancing was figure-based, involving amateur
tango dancers trying to execute complicated choreographies using their often
significant natural talent and previous training. The esthetic was
externally focused on proper execution of figures, verifiable by observers.



But within a decade, there was a growing interest in Montreal in fostering
the social tango experience more than recreating the stage experience. These
new tango fans wanted to prioritize the pleasures of partner connection in a
genuine "tango community" of social dancers. This pursuit came into
conflict with the prevailing show-tango mindset. This confrontation was
driven in large measure by local teachers who sought explicitly to grow
their tango communities with this emphasis on connection, instead of
focusing on the re-creation of spectacular choreographies by the trained and
talented few. In many cases, these "tango populist" teachers came from
traditions like contact improvisation or other social dances, where local
community-building with available social resources was a far higher priority
than staging shows. My sources tell me that there was a period in Montreal
of intense soul-searching by the original group, which resulted in the
consensus refocusing on "tango community" which characterizes the vibrant
Montreal scene today.



(continued in part 2)



Brian Dunn

Dance of the Heart

Boulder, Colorado USA

www.danceoftheheart.com <https://www.danceoftheheart.com/>