"More edge, passion and yes even some drama..."

"Tango passion" PxHere

Back here I said I wanted to address another point that came out this discussion on Tanda of the Week.

Antti, the owner of that blog said:

There's nothing wrong with the occasional special selection and the Donatos and Lomutos etc. But many DJ's go so far into centering their set around the likes of Canaro, Donato, Rodriguez and some Guardia Vieja that the set feels out of balance and the occasional Troilo will not save the set for me. And it is not just that I don't get to hear my favorites but also the fact that the general mood and dynamics of the songs from these orchestras is so different that I feel like a lot of the passion that should be in the music is missing and instead all we're getting is at it's best nice and comfortable music for snuggling. I do want a lot more from my tango music. More edge, passion and yes even some drama. And yeah uptempo valses and milongas too. And then... I'm ready to snuggle also.

I found this idea bizarre  - and interesting.  Why would somebody talk about snuggling and cuddling in the milonga?  I don't feel that.  What is it like to dance tango?  Well, at the very least, for me it has nothing do with cuddling.

Many DJs play the orchestras he refers to (with some disparagement), in balance with the stronger pieces in say Troilo, D'Arienzo, Biagi, De Angelis, Tanturi because they feel dancers like a balance.  Guardia Vieja apart, there's a lot going on I think in good tracks of the orchestras he mentioned and in others which, at a guess he might have mentioned - OTV, Carabelli, Quinteto Don Pancho, (though by Quinteto Pirincho the magic, apart from in vals, has gone for me).   I might not want to hear all of those orchestras in one night, and only one tanda of those I do hear.  But I don't dance these orchestras, or any, because I want to cuddle.  I remember reading somebody writing about their own "snuggly embrace" in a lip-licking way. Yuck.  If we want to cuddle, we stay with our nearest and dearest on the sofa or in bed - if anything it's about not moving.  We cuddle our lovers and our children, not people we dance with, not even - usually - our friends.  We hug our friends. We embrace our dance partners. I think these are all different.  The embrace when you dance tango isn't sexual or about vertical cuddling, but it is intimate.

There is a very fundamental difference between an embrace and a connection in dance with a stranger (or friend) and a cuddle.  I don't know that I can think of the similarities beyond body contact.  You can't even say when you cuddle another that they have your full attention as I find is the case in dancing tango.  You might be snuggled with your significant other watching TV!  You can cuddle a baby to sleep while having a conversation with someone else - in fact I found that tends to work well!

I don't dance to cuddle and I don't know that I know personally anyone that does, at least in public. Occasionally a woman will find herself, frozen like a rabbit in headlights in the embrace of a guy for whom dance is clearly the last thing on his mind but the milonga is such a public environment I think that kind of thing is relatively uncommon, at least in the UK and the reputation of such people goes around so quickly that their life-span in the milonga is probably going to be short.

I did once hear dancing in a milonga to Lomuto's Las cuarenta described memorably as "unendurable huddle-shuffle".  It's a perfectly good track, but a lot depends on how these pieces are danced.  Watch any dancing crowd.  Does the energy, the tone of somebody's dance change at all, with the track?  If the sound were turned off, could you tell the differences between tracks in the way they are danced? Could you make a guess at the kind of music - by descriptor, not necessarily by name?

All the music by the different orchestras have different feelings about them.  Some are playful, some sad, some dramatic, some fevered, some soft, some light, some strong, some sweet, some dignified.  Antti said it himself:

"A lot of the music [of orchestras such as Lomuto, Rodriguez, Donato ] is cute, funny, nice, quirky, lovely, soft, smooth, simplified, strange etc.... but not much more."

Well, goodness, I think that's quite a lot!  But put that with the feelings from the line before and how much more feeling can there be? But that's why I believe good trad sets are balanced - for that spectrum of music and musical feeling, depending too, on the crowd and other variables like time of day and the type of event.

Upon challenge Antti did say "The words "snuggly" or "cuddly" don't propably cover very well what I tried to describe " so on the strength of that I am going to try hard not to mention that word again. But I bring it up, not just for this but because I have noticed lately, in some quarters a general dressing-down of the idea of connection in tango dance in favour of, well, I'm not quite sure what - show I think.

I for one, like a range of feeling in music.  The reason I like a whole range of orchestras and a range of music because different music gives different feelings.

Often it's just hard to say what the feeling is besides "I really want to dance this" or "I really want to dance this, but only with him or her". I can't say what kind of feeling I have when I hear D'Arienzo's Mandria.  I just know I have a certain kind of feeling and I want to dance it.  How very much depends on the feeling my partner has.  When we dance locally we may know who will have or not, a similar feeling to us about certain music.  I know who likes Canaro, who Fresedo, who Biagi, who Lomuto vals, who is better at vals than all else and the guys who can dance milonga.  It's not surprising that we want to dance music with the people who love it and feel it distinctively.  A girl invited me to dance Di Sarli in the guy's role and I did, though I would not have invited anyone to it because that kind of Di Sarli isn't my thing.  You always know you're faking a dance when you find yourself going through the motions, when it feels like work, when you are moving yourself through the music rather then the music moving you.  I didn't feel I danced it that well.  Afterwards, we danced Troilo-Fiorentino, which I liked a lot and, no surprise, she said it was completely different.

Maybe the feeling is different for everyone, but that doesn't matter, because you don't need to say or to analyse whether your feeling is like someone elses, because somehow you find an accommodation and you dance the music and the feelings you get from it. You communicate with your body, what you feel to another person and that is where this magical accommodation and response and movement  happens in ways I for sure can't explain.  The embrace is the way we communicate that feeling well. Good connection is when your bodies somehow fit and feel the same music, the same way.

When we read a novel, or even hear another person's story -  we  see another perspective.  At the cinema, depending on the degree to which one can suspend disbelief, it lets us inhabit another story, try on different personae.  The words and images bring the actions, experiences and the feelings of the characters closer, allowing us to empathise or recoil from them.

Dancing different music  lets us enter different feelings, temporarily .  More, in fact, than reading a novel because in that medium you are the "fly on the wall" to the thoughts and action of others.  In dance you actually inhabit this feeling for a time. This feeling comes naturally and then, with luck - and the cortina - it clears and you can dance another.

Incidentally - here's Oscar Hector Malagrino dancing beautifully in a way suitable for social dancing with Haydée Esther Malagrino to I think a good Di Sarli, that's fairly soft, although it has energy.  He is dancing with his sister but it's hardly what I'd call cuddling, or anything remotely like it.