Argentine Milonga - The New Salsa

I am not claiming it, it's written in this dance school's website! Some people shouldn't be allowed a computer in front of them!
To teach tango, first, understand what tango is. Then perfect. Then devise a way of teaching it. Then teach it. Some people forget to do the first. What happens? Tango Lego happens.

Making tango a protected brand!

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!

Tango LEGO

When I started tango I wasn’t so into going to dance in different places; I was quite happy in Edinburgh, I knew most people, had a regular group of people that knew enjoyed dancing with me and was generally confident. But my (full) time at Edinburgh drew to an end and, back in Braga, Portugal, I was getting cold turkeyed. So I decided to go to a milonga in Porto, about an hour drive and check out the scene.

I went in, the organisers greeted me, asked me about me, offered me a espresso and I went to sit quite happily. I stayed watching for a little bit and I was very confused. Everybody seemed to dance the same way! Everybody were copies of one another dressed in different bodies. The same ganchos, the same giros, the same embrace. Back in Edinburgh it’s the opposite. Even people that learn in the same place have different styles, different ways of walking, different solutions to get in and out of the dancing line. I asked somebody to dance and was again quite horrified when people did not understand a simple front ocho with a pasada. The simplest of things and they didn’t know how to follow it, even worse, they said that didn’t know what to do! I went home horrified that I had been learning the bad tango, that the last year and a half was hopeless.

It took me some time (weeks), but I soon realised that instead of dancing with an emphasis on the walk and on pure improvisation of movements derived from the walk, what these people were being taught was sets of moves that were pre-rehearsed and could be stuck one after the other, pretty much like a LEGO puzzle. LEGO tango? No thanks.