The popularity of Champagne has been great ever since the monks in France decided to reveal their experiments with wine. The result of that popularity was an opportunistic and thriving copy-cat of wines made by the same method. As a result, the French reserved the right to call Champagne only to wines produced within the region of Champagne. All the others had to be called something else: sparkling wine, or Cava, Spumantti, Espumante...
Like those Sparkling wines, ballroom tango was allowed to carry the word “tango”. Now this is annoying and makes it extremely misleading, leading lay people to think that tango is danced as if someone had something stuck up the back-passage at the same time that bites a rose. I don’t blame them, - that’s what comes on blockbuster films!
On top of this, there is a proliferation of (so called) Argentine Tango schools teaching this dance in a set of choreographed moves. They even have number for the moves and the other day I heard that someone knows as far as move number 8! Tango Lego MUST be eradicated! The soul of tango is in the pure improvisation.
These are the reasons why the tango community should try to protect the Argentine Tango brand. To protect Tango from those who only want to make money out of it. How would this be done? Creating a Think Tank? Any ideas?
Post Scriptum - Straight after writing this post i found this post by mshedgehog that goes in phase with what has been written here. Pure coincidence but it shows that more people are worried about this matter!
5 comments:
You can't protect a brand for something that isn't a manufactured product; and anyway it's far too late because this word is already used in English to refer to at least two distinct dances, and probably more. You might as well try to protect the word "Football", which refers to at least five completely different sports, that I can think of offhand. I think the only thing you can do is what I've just tried; educate people so they know the word is ambiguous and then they will be able to solve the problem themselves by asking whatever they need to ask to find out what you are talking about.
Hi mshedgehog, my problem is not so much with the ballroom tango but more with the way tango is taught in some places.
I think it is something in the air, my opening post was vaguely on the same argentine/ballroom tango differentiation.
LimerickTango!
Thanks for your comment and for your post! Good to see that you came to enrich the blogosphere!
Thanks for the welcome koolricky, we'll see if I have anything new to add... :-)
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