In previous articles I have argued for the following claims:

1. Dance performance requires that the dancers focus on testing the kinesphere in order to be visually impactful.
2. The horizontal push-pull image and partnering technique originates with studio-based teaching of performing artists.
3. Social tango milonguero dancing is characterised by what I’ve called the “long spine” mental image as opposed to the “horizontal push-pull” mental image, and efficient or controlled dancing at a milonga requires this.
4. This technique is outwardly manifested in floating knees and elbows.

I now want to further elaborate these arguments in terms of the different focus of the performing artist and the milonguero social dancer, namely, focus on feet and hands vs. focus on knees and elbows.

Performing artists are focused on the visual appeal of their dancing and this invariably demands regular testing of the kinesphere which in turn demands that they are focused on the extremities, ie., the hands and the feet. These are the furthest parts of the body which can effectively test the kinesphere. Thus, they are highly interested in what the hands and the feet are doing. As a result their technique (eg., the walking or partnering technique) is characteristically defined in terms of the action of the hands and the feet. The other points of focus is what they call posture, the separation at the hips in order to swivel, and the powering or pushing into each step. All of this is motivated by a concern for creating visual appeal and to aid large kinesphere testing movements. Even if you have that posture and swing the hips, there’s not that much to look at if you don’t take large steps, do high/wide boleos, large ochos, and have an expanded frame at the hold.

That this conception of tango dancing is so embedded in standard tango discourse is evidenced by how people evaluate competent dancing. On a number of occasions I got negative feedback on my skills from onlookers who were kinesphere-focused dancers and positive feedback from the woman I was dancing with. Which one do you think I care about? This is the difference between the attitude of the performance artist and their students and the milonguero social dancer. In order to dance effectively in a social context what you need is not visual appeal but what might be called spatiotemporal efficiency. I need movement technique that allows me to move to the music in sync with my parter such that I express the music and that minimises the use of space.

The issue of space can be confusing because often this is stated in terms of not upsetting other dancers rather than in terms of aesthetics of dancing experience. It is as if I have to sacrifice the aesthetics of dancing for the sake of not interfering with other dancers. I recently read on Dancing Forums the view that it is not necessary to have other dancers on the dancing floor to enjoy tango, and probably some people prefer to have more space. Of course, if you learned the performing artist dancing technique then more space is better than less space.

But I would turn the argument on its head and say that having less space, or the minimum space possible, forces milonguero social dancers to develop a highly efficient dancing technique which then results in better aesthetics. The crowded milonga is the ultimate teaching/learning tool of tango milonguero dancing, not as a style that looks this way or that way, but as a unique kind of aesthetic experience. Once you learn to dance that way you don’t care about what you look like and you have exactly zero interest in dancing the performing artist technique.

So what is the technique that is unique to the milonguero social dancer that emerges naturally out of dancing at crowded milongas and can it be taught systematically. My previous argument was that it is the vertical long-spine image characterised by floating knees and elbows. Notice that it’s not the hands and feet but the knees and elbows. This is my argument, namely, that once you remove the requirement of testing the kinesphere you no longer have a reason to focus on the hands and feet and then only question is what is the more efficient way of moving with your partner to the music.

The economic use of space translates into temporal efficiency. The less space you need to move through the faster, hence more efficiently, you move. The music moves and you move with it. To express the music in a tight connection with your partner you need to move immediately, with minimum of lag. What’s more immediate, moving through a large space, with large movements of the extremities, or moving tightly within your intimate space? Music is time, movement is space. But space equals time, hence speed and immediacy. The aesthetics of social dancing, the pleasure we derive from it, require an immediate response and that requires the minimum use of space.

The artist must move through a lot of space because moving through a lot of space buys him visual appeal. By the same token little movement through space means little or no visual appeal. The dancing lacks visual appeal. Milonguero social dancers look boring. From the point of view of the performing artist a lack of visual aesthetics means lack of aesthetics full stop. Performing artists and their students seem incapable of seeing any aesthetics other than the visual image. They are addicted to the visual image and are incapable of seeing past that. It’s the world that they inhabit, the world of the eye. The music and the physical sensations are just a background for that.

In fact, contemporary tango practice has been completely subsumed by the images of tango dancers on the internet and performances of tango by teachers, with social tango becoming a practice session for their students. It has become a simulacrum:

Postmodernist French social theorist Jean Baudrillard argues that a simulacrum is not a copy of the real, but becomes truth in its own right: the hyperreal. According to Baudrillard, what the simulacrum copies either had no original or no longer has an original, since a simulacrum signifies something it is not, and therefore leaves the original unable to be located. Where Plato saw two types of representation—faithful and intentionally distorted (simulacrum)—Baudrillard sees four: (1) basic reflection of reality; (2) perversion of reality; (3) pretence of reality (where there is no model); and (4) simulacrum, which “bears no relation to any reality whatsoever”

Wikipedia

The predominance of the visual modality has effectively created a Matrix-like hyperreality in which the participants can’t see past their biases.

The first step is to see past the simulacrum and that requires being able to appreciate what I call somatic aesthetics and what Richard Shusterman has calls Somaesthetics. Then the next question is what should we be focusing on in order to move with spatiotemporal efficiency? My answer is that we should be focusing on knees and elbows. That might seem strange if you’re used to the standard tango lesson but it’s perfectly normal if you think about dances like the Charleston or Swing. I’m not saying that you can’t move effectively by widely moving the extremities, or that dances like Charleston or Swing never involve testing the kinesphere with hands and feet. I’m saying that the wider the dance the more it depends on push-pull, wide use of space, and therefore greater difficulty and energy required to produce speed. It’s necessarily less “tight” and efficient. You can do it but you have to work hard. Finally, it’s not feasible in a packed dancing floor.

Tango milonguero social dancing focuses on the inward expressiveness within the embrace for its peculiar aesthetic effect, rather than the outward expressiveness of wide hand and foot movements and motion through space. It’s skinespheric rather than kinespheric. Unless you have experienced it you will find it difficult to be open to this as an aesthetic approach and will probably only be able to recognise the aesthetics of the visual approach. Even when dancing socially your mindset will be that of the performer and this will show to those looking on. You will look like you’re doing a performance in a social context. Twenty couples at a milonga dancing that way will look like twenty couples competing for attention at one of those tango dancing competitions. A couple dancing social milonguero type dancing will stand out on that busy dancing floor and will look decidedly inactive by comparison. It will look fundamentally different, and the students of performing artists will probably not recognise it as dancing at all.

This is an approach to Argentine Tango technique that draws on insights from somatic movement practices. It takes as a starting point the idea that tango is an improvised form and that, as argued by Steve Paxton (the creator of Contact Improvisation) you can’t learn improvised dancing by learning set patterns, steps, or movements. Investigating into the foundational skills for improvisation in tango dancing my proposal is that you should begin by learning the basic concepts of integrated movement as it relates to tango dancing. This is what Steve Paxton proposes for Contact Improvisation training and following him it is what I propose for Tango Estilo Milonguero/Tango Romantico. The foundational training (which I call the ABCD Method, see below) consists of explorations or ‘movement puzzles’ that reveal the underlying structure of movement that enables you to discover movements or “steps” experientially through improvisation.

The history of somatic movement can be traced to F.M. Alexander who discovered that the primary control in posture and thereby in all efficient movement is the head-neck relation. He found that poor posture due to tension in the neck negatively affects all movement and bodily functioning. Subsequently Moshe Feldenkrais extended this insight to the central operation of the spine in integrated movement. The Feldenkrais Method has been utilised in movement training for dance and Steve Paxton extended these ideas as a basis for improvised dancing in Contact Improvisation.*

The idea behind these approaches is that there are basic principles that underlie all efficient movement. These insights can be applied to any activity that requires the efficient operation of the body and its movements (ie., the deployment of the skeletal structure, the neuromuscular system and the fascia) such as sports, vocal performance, playing a musical instrument, or dancing. Failure to utilise these principles will result in inefficient use of the body and therefore in less power, speed and accuracy; poor breathing and digestion; and tension, fatigue and overuse injuries. By contrast efficient movement is inherently healthy, is experienced as pleasant and graceful, and is an expression of freedom and spontaneity. It is inherently more satisfying. Because you are dealing with fundamental principles of body use it is impossible to move effectively without applying these principles whether you discover them by trial-and-error or learn them systematically.

Here we must define what we mean by dancing well. When you look at movement you typically perceive its outward appearance which more often than not conceals its inner organisation. Movement which looks aesthetically pleasing is not necessarily good movement from a somatic perspective of integrated movement. Not all movement which appears pleasing to the eye is efficient movement. The dancer performing the movement may be using his body in ways which are suboptimal and may or may not be enjoying the movement. Somatic practices take an experiential perspective on movement. This means that to judge whether a movement is good you have to experience it yourself from the first-person perspective through a process of exploration, discovery and comparison, instead of judging it from the third-person perspective in terms of external or visual aesthetic aspect by using a visual image and then attempting to replicate it with the use of a studio mirror or a video recording.

So the claim is that these principles are universal to all movement that is experientially pleasant and that is also objectively efficient, healthy and spontaneous. Movement that is pleasant is an aesthetic experience that is an integral part of a fulfilling living and an antidote to a mechanical unconnected and unnatural use of the body and the mind. Using the body-mind in an integrated way is necessary to constituting the whole person. While the health aspects of applying these principles is an objective fact the psychological benefits are to be judged experientially.

So the goal of this practice is not improvisation for its own sake but rather for the sake of enhanced tango experience and also improved performance (faster learning, more efficient and skilled movement). Tango is usually taught using formulaic patterns of steps and so-called “technique” which comprises of mechanics of partnering, etc. The assumption is that these are the means of reaching improvisational dancing skills. In fact what you find is that dancers rarely get beyond dancing such set patterns and instead pile on more of them without really reaching the creativity, spontaneity and sensibility that you see in traditional dancing in Buenos Aires.

Some argue that the reason for this is a lack of cultural understanding and so if you want to move beyond such set patterns you should learn more about the culture of tango. While it is certainly true that you are well advised to learn more about the traditional culture of the tango in Buenos Aires, I take the view that the source of the problem is the use of set patterns in teaching and you also find this in tango lessons in Buenos Aires. The need to run formal dancing lessons always results in piling on ever more patterns, figures and techniques. I propose instead that a systematic approach to learning tango should begin with structured movement explorations that provide the basis for partnering and improvised walking.

The ABCD Method

The movement explorations in Focused Connected Tango Movement are divided into the following parts:

• Alignment
• Back Release
• Coordination
• Direction

Alignment

These are basic practices that you can always use to connect to the space and to the body. In ordinary living we are in the mode of end-gaining, a term used by F. M. Alexander to refer to the fact that we tend to focus on a task or a goal without paying adequate attention to the body that needs to execute that task. For example, it is common for people to strain their back by lifting a heavy object with poor form. What happens is that you focus on what it is that you want to achieve, which is lifting the heavy object and moving it somewhere but due to hastiness or lack of awareness you tend to fail to take into account what is required to complete the task effectively and without injury. You might not know that we should extend our back when lifting a heavy object, or you might know this but forget to do so, or perhaps misjudge how heavy the object is and apply excessive force. So you need know all of these to execute the task: the correct form, the requirements of the task, and attention to execute the task with the correct form and force.

People who routinely lift heavy objects such as powerlifters practice these elements and are therefore less likely to suffer injuries due to poor form. In novices poor form and not lack of power is the primary source of injuries. Now, you might not view dancing as a source of injuries as in sport but poor form or inefficient movement patterns in social dancing have minor but chronic and nagging effects such as poor breathing, poor digestion and muscular wearing that makes you tired and lowers your mood. When you drop your head down during dancing you don’t just have poor posture to people looking on from the tables but your breathing is shallow and you are wearing yourself out. You will have poor connection to your partner and struggle to follow the music in a way that is natural and satisfying. It is therefore useful to ‘check in’ with your body and the space and that means that we should shift our attention away from the ordinary goal-oriented or end-gaining activity and reconnect with your natural posture of being ‘at ease’.

Back Release

When tension builds up in the body there is a tendency to shorten whereas releasing tension leads to lengthening. The state of efficient posture and movement  is experienced as a natural lengthening of the spine that comes with a release of tension. The natural movement of the body allows for easy rotation of the spine around its axis. You can return to this natural release state of posture and movement through simple explorations of the range of motion around the spine. Through these explorations you can also develop better awareness of the natural dynamic connection between the upper and lower extremities through a released spine. It will allow you to utilise the complete range of motion when moving with your partner so that you don’t need to use excess force or tension but instead to utilise the energy and dynamics naturally stored and available within your body. Tapping into this source of natural movement means that dancing will feel more spontaneous and natural. It will provide the basis for entering a state of flow in your dance.

Coordination

Learning dancing technique is ideally learning to execute complex movements without generating excess tension. You are learning to coordinate different parts of the body in new ways and thus developing new neural pathways for efficient coordinated movement. You do this by way of focused exercises that explore the connection between upper body where you are connected to your partner and the lower body where you are connected to the ground. The improvisational possibilities in tango are the result of the different possibilities of coordination. Exploring the different options for movement that are possible in a slow, focused practice brings these possibilities to awareness and makes them available when you need them in dancing.

Direction

Partnering that is efficient and satisfying requires the ability to clearly communicate the direction of movement in real time while improvising. The Principle of Reversibility means that you are able to stop and change direction at any moment. That means that while dancing you are constantly in the process of signalling and reading the direction of movement. Both partners are signalling and reading movement in real time. This coordination of directed movement creates the experience of flow in dancing and failure of this coordination results in failure to achieve flow and poor dancing experience.

Dancing in which you power or muscle through moves in leading or following does not create flow because this type of coordination is too clunky, too slow and creates too much tension, and so does not allow for the efficient coordination of directed movement between partners. By contrast, efficient partner coordination and flow is effected by directed movement that is communicated from a directed movement of the feet that is integrated with upper body movement through the awareness skills developed in the Back Release and Coordination exercises. The action of the feet creates momentary tension in the spine communicated to the upper body that is felt by the partner and released in the transfer of weight. In order to develop the basic movement skills you practice basic walking in different directions in order to discover the possibilities of movement that this affords.

Notes

*Moshe Feldenkrais Awareness Through Movement; Steve Paxton Material for the Spine (see Reading recommendations)