Tango Styles

               Hi there, it’s me again, the Kayak Hombre, sending my unsolicited insights into the sophisticated world of Argentine Tango into cyberspace. This week’s topic: tango styles. There are many ways to dance tango and I’d like to point out the ones I’ve seen employed most often.

               By far the most common method practiced is the Wrong Way. It’s very popular and it is the style first acquired by nearly everybody. There is not much to this particular technique but the practitioner must be certain that this dance can be easily mastered in a few months. I was an ardent disciple of the Wrong Way for quite a few years. In fact, I still revert to this mode when I get lazy. I can tell you from experience that it is a lot of fun as long as your partner is drawing from the same pool of knowledge as you, which is a shallow one.

               I probably would have been content dancing tango the Wrong Way if it didn’t conflict so heavily with what I was learning at the many tango workshops I attended. After two years of lessons and near-constant rejection from devotees to other styles, I decided to move on to the New York style.

               This approach takes a lot of effort and it leads to many new and interesting encounters in the world of tango dancing. New York style focuses heavily on performance-type maneuvers such as gancho/wrap sequences or flying leg lifts. Each month there is a new move en vogue and it is difficult to keep abreast of the changes. It takes at least ten days to master the fundamental movements behind the particular flavor of the week. By the time you think you've got it down, a new one comes along and you're back to the balance bar.

               I think tango instructors from Argentina hate the New York style more than anything on the planet. Something about it brings out their sadistic side. When the Argentines are in such a foul mood it can only be satiated with lessons on the back sacada. It is always the women who suffer for the sins of the many.

               The nice thing about New York style is that it made me aware of the necessity of the tango fundamentals: front/back/side-step, pivot, in-place and pause.  Leaving the Big Apple exposed me to the style of tango that I like the most: Tango Salon. It simply means social tango and it is a combination of the tango fundamentals and a strict adherence to the codigos del tango, or the rules of tango for all you  folks out there in the Five-Seven-Oh.

               I spent the next two years trying to find my balance as I danced my way around the country in search of a paycheck to feed my hungry children who were attending college. Tango Salon can be danced in open-embrace or close-embrace. Ideally the dancers move from open-embrace to close-embrace depending upon their maneuvers. This style of tango requires that each partner pays strict attention to the freedom of the other; almost anything is allowed as long as the dancers’ respective stability is maintained.

               There are many codigos del tango and they are extremely important to this particular style if not all styles of tango dancing. It is a vast subject. If you’d like to know more you can Google the term as this is a topic too lengthy to go into here. My last blogpost, The Politics of Tango, dealt entirely with the rules of the dance as viewed by a man at a milonga.

               Five years into my tango education I encountered the BDSM of tango techniques: Milonguero style. BDSM stands for bondage, dominance, sadism and masochism. I use the term in jest but it is a nearly adequate term for how I feel about this particular discipline.

               Milonguero style is 100% close embrace. That is the bondage aspect. My first encounters with women trained in this technique often felt like I was a participant in a Scottish pole-tossing contest; I would carry the lady around the room with her hanging on my neck until the end of the tanda where I would try and toss her into a chair.

               Milonguero style dancers tend to dominate a certain geographic area. I don’t know if this is by chance or design but there should be warning signs on maps indicating that you’ve entered a Milonguero style-only zone and that it, and only it, is truly authentic tango.

               The sadists are the people who keep bringing back the same instructors year after year and the masochists are the students who keep paying them. I guess these people are into pain: taking it and giving it. If New York style is too acrobatic, then Milonguero style is too rigid.  

               The final style I’d like to talk about is the Argentine Tango style.  This is the best one of them all. It encompasses both open and closed-embrace, the codigos del tango and the fundamentals of tango. It is danced to all kinds of music and enjoyed by widest demographic. This style is open to new techniques, movements and ideas and it is constantly changing the way people dance all around the world.


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