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03/26/2005 Entry: "Travel, Tango"

Last week we talked about travel in class. In pairwork, I handed out slips with prompts such as "you like cheese", whereby the students were to discuss where one might travel to satisfy this particular interest.

Another was "You want to learn Tango". The answer, to me at least was obvious; why don't you travel to Argentina to see how it's done?

But my students were a little foggy on the roots of Tango. "Where does Tango come from?"
"Spain?"
Well, not quite, but it does come from a place where Spanish is spoken.
"Finland?"
What?
"I saw these dancers from Finland on TV. They danced the Tango very well."
That may be true, I said, but that isn't where Tango originates. Finland is where the Lapdance comes from.
They liked that one.
Then I told them about the hard-working gauchos, who went straight to the saloon right after getting their hard earned pay. Those dance hall girls had to make a living, but those fellows smelled pretty ripe; so they danced with their bodies close, but their heads and upper torso turned away.
They liked that one too.

Afterwards, I did a little looking around online for more on the roots of Tango and I couldn't find anyone to back me up. I found however a plethora of interesting stories. It apparently has many roots coming from Spanish music, gaucho music, as well as poor Italian and Jewish immigrants, among others. Most are quite adamant that the dance style had nothing directly to do with brothels, but there was a great tendency for poor men to practice dancing with each other.

Seeing that there was such a shortage of chicks in Buenos Aires back then, this seems quite plausible when you consider the posture and gate of the dance: the footwork is complicated, spindly and spidery, close together, "but I'm not, like, gay, you know?" That brings to mind that scene in Tango Lesson when Sally goes to Buenos Aires for Tango lessons and during part of the training montage we see the two (male) instructors dancing together.

Still, the most interesting things about these kinds of dance is the social and economic realities that made them possible. Just about all of them have something in common (I am familiar with this because I studied drums in college): there is always the dichotomy of high society with lower class. There is always the high value on the presence of live music. There is always the presence of folk-style getting down. There is always the need to socialize and meet those of the desired (usually opposite) sex.

Looking at these sociological features, I suspect that there will be no new popular pair-dances coming from this century. After all, there hasn't been one since the fifties, right?

The Lambada is just a repackaged Salsa. Line dancing is just a repackaged form of square dance and the Hustle, but devoid of the social elements of mingling; it's not really a dance at all, it's just a choreography. No, we in Western society will not have anything new out there for a while. The factors, the dynamics are simply not there. Instead we have streamlined online dating for example, where you can just log on and hook up and get right down to business. Or so I have read.

Not to say that dance is dead, mind you; recall breakdance of the eighties and the hip hop moves in the nineties and those jerky breakbeat moves of the naughties. In the artworld, they've made lightyears of progress since that faggy jazzdancing in West Side Story. And that Irish Guy With the Pants really made them whoop and holler by doing Irish stepdancing--to a lightshow. Whoooo!
Someone out there is dancing. But if you are hoping for the waltz to comeback, we'll need a lot bigger movement than that handful of newlyweds and thirty-somethings trying to spice up their marriage crisis. I guess someone did put Baby in her corner afterall.


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