>> I have. With old Argentine guys who have danced for years. >> It's not so fun. >> > > You should hear what they say about you, Trini. > > Well, there goes oximoron #2.
If the marvellous milonguero is able to please any female dancer with a working pair of legs and enough willingness to _try_ to follow, then how come that it comes up so often that if a girl doesn't enjoy dancing with a (usually older Argentine) milonguero, it is her fault. (ohh, and it does come up...) I see nice little castle made of thin air here. Good old sentimental type of "traditional" tango is nice the same way as a 1940s car is nice. It has the style, the form and all the nostalgia. It is so nice, that you might even accept how badly it sucks to drive it without a servo (it is part of the experience, no?), that it has no air conditioning (breathe in the ambience!), that it is guzzling fuel like a Boeing 747 (it has that ancient power) or that in case of even a low speed frontal crash, you'd be dead no matter what (the danger of the wild)... If you accept that tango is for both parties to feel great, but you believe that learning must be done through trial and error and must be personality driven, then you must also accept that there is no such thing as a good dancer. There are only matching couples. It stems from the basis assumptions: a good dancer must make the partner feel great, but he may only use his own resources. Also, because of the added stylistic restraints, this dancer will not be able to please all partners. There will be partners who have different needs. So there is no single measurement for being a good dancer, therefore the only thing you can estabilish from someone, that X is a very _popular_ dancer, which is completely performance based. However, this type of performance will never be influenced by either preferred style, technique, preferred teachers or the lack of them, only the hard facts, whether partners love to dance with them or not. Of course, this will not allow anyone to protect their egos through creating artificial classification system to justify that what they do is great and all others are loosers. Most Argentines I talked to never classified tango in absolute terms. They classified individual people or their styles. And mostly these classifications were moving along the "I like it - Don't like it" line (and there was an interesting twist of this that went like "I like it, so it means it's great!" - of course with more explanation, but if you approach it with a little cynism and discard all definitions that were recursive...). Maybe there is one generalization there: foreigners suck at tango. :) Aron -- Ecsedy Áron *********** Aron ECSEDY Tel: +36 20 66-24-071 http://www.milonga.hu/ http://www.holgyvalasz.hu/ _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list Tango-L@mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
