Tango is a Language!
The Language That We Speak.
Have you ever learned French ? English as a second language ? Spanish ? Ever taken a language course at all ? If you have, then this will sound familiar. Think back to your first few lessons of the language. You started off learning how to say “Hello”, and “Goodbye”. How to say your name, spelling words, learning how to say the latin alphabet (if it was a romance language), and generally starting from scratch, just like you were 5 years old all over again. Within a matter of weeks you were conjugating verbs, and just starting to put whole sentences together. And a few months after that, depending on how deep you went into the language, your vocabulary had grown to the point where you could actually hold a conversation in the language beyond, “Hello My name is …… “, etc. And a few months after that if you were really diligent, you were actually speaking and conversing nearly fluently, and had started to think in the native language of your choice, and even dream in it.
Sound familiar ?
If it doesn’t that’s ok. There’s another language that you have learned, that has had pretty much the same learning curve. Remove the word “language” from above, and replace it with…yup, you guessed it, “TANGO”.
Tango is a language.
And like all languages Tango has different accents, and dialects. To be clear, in case you’re not, an accent is a pronunciation of the linguistics, a dialect is not only an accent but in addition to that the dialect may have different meanings for the same words, or may in fact have words that bear no striking resemblance to any word in the mother tongue at all, or any cognate at all to speak of.
Tango is the same way. Over the last century as tango has become more diversified, and more ubiquitous, it has also sprung some rather interesting dialects, and most definitely some very fascinating ‘accents’.
By example of what I mean by accent, vs dialect. Take the ‘basic 8′ for instance. There are some schools of tango that teach the ‘basic 8′ as the foundation for everything. There are some that teach everything but, and then are some that teach that the crossing step is a lead step, and some that teach that the crossing step she’s required to do, period. And still there are schools that teach steps 3 thru 5 of the ‘basic 8′ and call it “The Argentine Cross”. All of these are variations on a theme, the crossing step for the follower. Some of them are accents, by example – Steps 3 thru 5 of the ‘Basic 8′…and some are whole dialects, ‘The Basic 8′. Think about it the ‘Basic 8′ had its roots in the Argentine floor shows that came to the western world (the states) early on, and the stage dancers asked the show dancers of those shoes what were the basics of the dance. “The Basics ?” The argentines looked at each other, scratched their heads and made up step to teach the beginner dancers the dance. Those stage dancers thinking that they’ve just learned ‘tango’, took that and ran with it.
Well that’s one story anyway of how we go the ‘Basic 8′. No matter, that story is probably not true, who the hell knows, but it shows you how an idea of the language of tango could have been introduced to a group of people who took it and ran with it. In the end those few steps probably bore little resemblance to the dance of the day.
Here’s another interesting one, look at Ballroom Tango or International or American Tango. This dance bears little resemblance to the dance that we all know and love, the embrace is radically different, the steps are ‘cleaned up’ and standardized, and more over…here’s the kicker, the music is exactly the same. Being that the music drives us, how could ballroom tango stray so far from the mother root ? Continental drift ? Nope. The simple answer is Puritanism! Or more simply put, it strayed because the purveyors of what would become ‘ballroom’ (read that as Arthur Murray and Fred Astaire) realized early on that one of the only ways you could sell argentine tango – ‘the forbidden dance’ to the masses was to keep a respectable distance from your partner and clean up all that body on body nastiness that america just wasn’t ready for, thereby removing from the dance any and all traces of anything that closely resembled body on body touching, but keeping the ‘spirit’ of the dance intact…hence the music stayed but pretty much everything else went by the wayside…and instead became stylized, or euthanized, depending on your point of view.
My belief is that in learning any language one must have a good, clear, clean, understanding of the foundation, structure, syntax, and correct grammar to be understood clearly without a discernible accent. At the same time when we step out onto a social dance floor, we’re asking the person that we’re dancing with if they speak our dialect or our accent, and or if they can translate, or if we can translate theirs to ours.
In each case where its a dialect or an accent or some such in between…you still have to start with the primary tongue itself. The foundation, or in this case, “hello”, “goodbye”, or to put it in tango terms, Forward, and Back Steps, respectively. We start conjugating verbs when we get into Ochos. And we begin putting simple sentences together when we work with the molinete. And then we graduate to the Argentine Cross! And that’s just open embrace simple vocabulary, let’s not even get into the dialect known as ‘Close Embrace’ or its many many accents, and super dialects….oy.
In these respects one can easily start to see that we have in fact learned a language, and its the language of tango.
So the next time you are out on a social dance floor and you see a pair of dancers that looks ‘odd’ to you, ask yourself this question, “I wonder what dialect they speak ?”. Far too often when think that we’ve achieved some level of mastery over the dance (I know I haven’t), we think that we have the right to judge other people’s dialect or accent as invalid, and the fact is that we don’t, well I believe we don’t. I learned early on that those dialects or accents, or the middling in between are valid to those people that dance them.
One last point, there is a difference between a dialect, and accent, and POOR GRAMMAR! The difference is that POOR GRAMMAR is simple laziness and a lack of understanding on how to be correct within the chosen dialect or accent. To put this in tango terms, its the difference between performing an ocho WITH disassociation and without. Or more to the point applying disassociation or having it applied for you! Where the latter is bad and the former is good.
That said…Happy Dancing.