Tango East Blog

The Mythology of Leading and Following

The words we use shape our reality -  dancers who create tango express more than the reductionist, causal relationship of action and consequence implied by the use of the words ‘leader’ and ‘follower.’ In the realm of theatre dance it would be usual to apply the term ‘duet’ to the creative work of two dancers; in the world of social dance it’s termed more prosaically as a ‘partnership’.

In the process of learning, the question “What is the lead for this ?” could equally be “What is the follow for that ?’  The answer to the former, a Zen - like  ”You’ll know what the lead is when it’s taken from you”. We may also legitimately ask  ”How do I extend an invitation to be led ? ” Is this a question you have ever heard ?

A dance floor is a place of Presence: when dancers are present to each other, dualistic thinking around leading and following recede and a tango emerges. 

Tango Thinking or the "Art of Mindfulness"

Choreography and dancing are two distinct and very different practices.  

In the case that choreography and dance coincide, choreography often serves as a channel for the desire to dance. One could easily assume that the substance of choreographic thought resided exclusively in the body. But is it possible for choreography to generate autonomous expressions of its principles, a choreographic object, without the body?  

The force of this question arises from the real experience of the position of physical practices, specifically dance, in western culture. Denigrated by centuries of ideological assault, the body in motion, the obvious miracle of existence, is still subtly relegated to the domain of raw sense: precognitive, illiterate. Fortunately, choreographic thinking being what it is, proves useful in mobilizing language to dismantle the constraints of this degraded station by imagining other physical models of thought that circumvent this misconception. What else, besides the body, could physical thinking look like?  

William Forsythe

www.williamforsythe.de

“In the season 1934-5 a new style of Tango was introduced into this country. But a wrong impression of its execution and technique sprang at once into existence; with the result that the dancing world is at present  failing to reap the full benefits which the new style has to offer.

Many skilled dancers have for years made the Tango their especial favourite: nevertheless most of us have agreed that the accepted style was not very well adapted to interpret the subtleties of Tango rhythm. The new style offered an immediate solution to our problem.

Unfortunately, however, many teachers still seem unable to achieve a perfect understanding of this new style. When it sprang into being many exponents, both amateur and professional, exaggerated its movements into a display of gymnastics reminiscent of a hotch-potch of Paso Doble, exhibition Tango, and Apache dancing.”

Henry Jacques from his book ‘Modern Ballroom Dancing’ first published in 1944. Noverre Press.

This TV ad, designed to ride the wave of enthusiasm for ‘Strictly Come Dancing’ perfectly illustrates this -  Plus ça change. It is however, interesting to see such a variety of styles from such a small sample of dancers. 

Dance like your Grandad

Questions of tradition and authenticity in tango practice require us to ask whether we are simply reconstructing the past, reviving a previously moribund form or merely creating a pastiche from fanciful ideas of what it means ‘to dance a tango’ ?  I believe that we can settle these by a continual return to technique. Donnie Burns recently commented that dancers can often view technique as a burdensome element in their practice, the study of which impedes or curtails their freedom of self-expression as dancers and performers - to paraphrase his counter-argument to this attitude - the techniques that we practice today are the product of analysis, a looking at the great dancers of the past; dance practice from the great dancers of the past - technique comes from analysing the bio-mechanics of the movement, seeing how it is inscribed in the body, it comes from living dancers of the past and it is practised by living dancers in the now - tradition and authenticity are part of the ‘Eternal Present’ of dance every time a mindful dancer takes to the floor. 

To illustrate, if you were to change the soundtrack in this clip of Victor Silvester and Phyllis Clarke dancing tango nearly a century ago and analysed the movement, it isn’t so vastly different in its embodied vocabulary from contemporary social Argentine tango dancers. We are all the bearers of tradition; all practitioners of authentic tango and yes, when we dance we evoke the movement of our Grandparents. 

Open air tango at The Scoop, More London as part of the Thames Festival - even the remnants of hurricane Katia cannot deter the dedicated tango dancer.

Kinship Relations in Tango 

3: The Father and Daughter waltz or should that be ‘vals’ ? 

Oscar and Sheila Casas are the dancers.

Wallflowers and Femme Fatales - a lecture from dance ethnographer and historian Marta E. Savigliano, author of Tango and the Political Economy of Passion - this piece is worthy of note to those of us who dance tango just for fun, in that it presents a good example of how dancers from different dance disciplines express tango with differing physical accents. It is not dissimilar to the auditory difference between American English and European English, La Parole to borrow a term from Derrida. How would you as a viewer distinguish between the dancers who come from a contemporary, theatre background and the dancers who come from the social tango background ? How is tango written in their bodies ? For me, as a teacher of tango it is in the words ‘torsion’ and ‘release’ . Each creates a dance with a coherent dynamic and whilst it’s all tango in the end, there does come a point when fusion leads to opacity instead of clarity and the dance techniques which are specific to tango, are crushed under the weight of relativism. There may be no ‘right’ way to dance tango, but there is a difference between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ tango and that is down to tango technique. You want to be a better contemporary dancer, practise contemporary technique; you want to be a better tango dancer, practice tango technique. The aesthetics are subjective, the work is not.

http://www.tangoeast.co.uk

Kinship Relations in Tango 

2. The Dancing Mother and Son

The legendary Olga Besio and Federico Naviera

Village Tango: Urban Dance in Rural Spaces 

Kevin & Terri Fitzgerald are the dancers,  Adrian Cherry is the image maker, and the social space is provided by the good folks of The Holme Hale Playing Field Trust at The Pavilion, Holme Hale, nr. Swaffham, Norfolk. The image isn’t posed - it was captured ‘in the wild’ during an evening of social dancing.