Dance

The tango is born as a dance created by the people to find an identity and overcome the difficulties of integration, to feel part of a nation. It soon became a dance also loved by the rich who initially criticized the excessive ease. Nobody manages to escape the call of the new dance, because dance is imitation. It is called dance of society, but we mean dance of a certain society. “How many things there are in a minuet!” They wrote in the eighteenth century about court intrigues, the famous dangerous relationships perfected during those conversations. Later, others saw in the frenetic pirouettes of the waltz even the reflections of the disorientation determined by the Congress of Vienna. Not to mention the harmless Furlana of our parts or the infinite forms that folklore takes in different latitudes. Thus, social dance not only represents a society, but reiterates the order of hierarchies. When instead the platense tango appeared it was immediately clear that what burst in the story was not a social body, but the subjective and individual body, made of flesh, blood desire. After a first phase dominated by sensuality, a kind of surprise to be embraced without mediation, the tango has gradually developed into a myriad of styles, positions, figures and steps, or in all repertoire of variations on the theme of the embrace. The body of the man of the woman, united, express the need for a hug, the need not to be alone, to escape from the winds of war, slavery, misery and pain, the impotence to change one’s destiny. No other dance in the world touches us so deeply as the tango; we only need to see it dance well, sincerely, only once, to realize that the dancers have our face and that those figures are actually the millennial movements of the human couple.
Reasons for the planetary success of the tango are perhaps all here, in this capacity to make the most intimate strings of our heart vibrate.
To dance it we do not need a specialized body: the tango accepts us as we are. In this dance we find a deep integration of different factors: cultures, dance styles, rhythms that can give rise to an original process, which in turn will produce around him other more or less important phenomena, more or less vast as music , literature, culture. We can try to analyze the tango starting from 1907, the presumed year of the first real performances and retrace the steps that have determined its evolution, to make it become a real cultural phenomenon.
The rhythm of the tango is strongly cadenced, it has a melody that is more pushed or less pushed in the same song, not uniform, this means an acceleration and deceleration of the steps, in harmony with the music. The choreography had to take into account, from the beginning, the particular rhythmic structure of this dance. This explains why the tango immediately lent itself to many personal interpretations and because, even when it was codified, it gave rise to many figures of varying length with different stylistic characteristics.
The position of the couple: knight and lady are hugged tightly, so that the lady could perceive even improvised movements of the partner, the abrupt changes of direction and be guided without problems. The woman in the tango was called follower: she had to know how to follow the rider with lightness, elegance and skill.
The true sensuality of this dance consisted, not so much in the embraces and in the intertwining of the legs, as the well-meaning people believed; but in the immediate understanding, in the total and malicious complicity, intuitive and instinctive, which in the silence was established between the partners: a kind of intimacy without words, a deeper penetration of simple physical contact. It happened to notice a man and a woman, who even without ever having seen each other before, could form a perfect pair of dancers on the first try. One of the common places to debunk about the tango is what defines him as “masculist”; most likely the first tangos were danced between men, as many vintage photographs testify, this was due to the fact that there were few women there and that almost none were willing to dance with strangers.
It can be said that the tango was born between men and initially danced by men but those same men would not have refused a female presence in their midst. The rule that the woman, instead of the man, must retreat, can be interpreted as “macho”, but only by those who have never seen more couples dance together the tango.
Finally, the alleged passivity of the woman in the dance; she is guided by man, but this also happens in other dances, the woman is anything but passive: she must listen to the signals of man, understand them, interpret them, it must not be carried by man but having its own autonomy. The role of women is therefore fundamental, equal to that of man, it is indeed true that if the woman was not important for the dynamics of the copy, there would not be on the man’s part the search for the best dancer, let alone the contest in times when there were very few women.

Differences between tango and other dances.

The tango is a couple dance closed to figures. Also in this case the tango represents a synthesis between the dances of the couple, similar to the waltz and to the dances to figures, ballads in groups, such as the contradictions for example. The tango combines candombe, habanera and milonga, from which the rooms where the tango and the milongas are danced are named, each one of which is contributing its own rhythm and differences from standard dances. The starting position and the fact that it is the man to drive, are perhaps the only similarities that we can identify three tango the other dances of a couple; in fact, already the first dance step discovers the first big difference at the postural level: the dancers form a sort of triangle with their bodies, ie the legs are free to move while at the level of the chest, as opposed to the standard dances, the dancers are united in an almost precarious balance; the weight moved on the toes, “causing” the typical slipped pass.
Another fundamental difference concerns the tango choreography which is more complex than the symmetrical-parallel one present in the waltz. The waltz, unlike the tango, develops with a continuous sequence of always the same revolutions; in tango this can not and must not happen, because much of its beauty lies in the incredible and infinite variety of steps, and also in the alternation of true causes of suspension, cortes, continuous equilibrium quebrada.
The tango is a rather complicated dance, not that the other dances are simple, but certainly you can more quickly learn a single step rather than a sequence of steps always new and unpredictable as those of the tango, in which there is no “step” base “and where much, if not all, is played on the unpredictability, on the invention of the moment. The man creates in his mind a sequence based on music and develops it gradually, adapting to the woman’s responses, creating a different, unrepeatable tango every time. One of the most obvious differences is that in the tango dancers can invade the partner’s space; the embrace already presupposes a maximum closeness between the two, but also at the level of the legs, there is no rule that obliges them not to touch, indeed there are steps that favor this interweaving of very choreographic legs. Finally also the behavior of the dancers in the room is different: the conventional anticlockwise movement is lost and the woman starts with the right foot instead of the man.