Hi everybody, Fran here with your Tango Tip of the Week. When we begin a social partner dance, the very first thing we do is form a physical connection with another person. In Tango, we sometimes call this el abrazo del tango, or simply el abrazo (the embrace). Spend time at any of the milongas in Buenos Aires, and you'll quickly notice that the embrace people form on the dance floor varies widely from couple to couple. There isn't just one "approved" way to create and maintain the embrace. It all depends on how tall or short you are in contrast to your partner, what neighborhood you come from, who taught you, and what your personal preferences might be in terms of your own experience in learning how to dance.

By comparison, what we call the "dance hold" in progressive ballroom dancing (Foxtrot, Waltz, American Tango, Quickstep, etc.) is quite a different matter. You may recall that the first of my Ten Commandments of American ballroom dance is the following:

The bedrock foundation for each dance is the preliminary formation of an extremely uncomfortable (might one say comic?) structure called the "dance hold."

Nota bene:

If you're a student of ballroom dance, you might find it illuminating to trace the development of our contemporary ballroom dance hold from what it was in, let's say, the late 1930s to what it has eventually become today. To give you a quick introduction, the dance hold we currently employ in ballroom dance started out originally as something that looked pretty much like our neutral, "Golden-Age" inspired Tango embrace. However, as it became more a contrivance of the dance studio than an improvised creation of the dance hall, it gradually degenerated into the tortured, cartoon-like distortion we are now admonished to accept as written-in-stone orthodoxy.

Back to the world of Tango, we seem to have our own special problems with el abrazo. Over the past 10 to 15 years there has come about an erosion of our own embrace into what is sometimes referred to as the apilado (piled up) style. In this formation, the couple leans precariously and uncomfortably forward against one another, severely -- I would say, fatally -- compromising both balance and the ability to execute traditional movement within the dance. What is truly disturbing to me is that a good many so-called teachers of Tango -- people who perhaps should know better (but apparently don't) are actually encouraging their students to engage in this nonsense. I am hopeful that this misguided aberration from good, "forward-poise" dance practice is a temporary affectation that will ultimately be discarded in favor of the balanced, upright, comfortable paradigm which is characteristic of Tango in the epoca de oro.

Next week, we'll talk about timing in Tango. In particular, we'll address my Sixth Commandment of Ballroom Dance: Each dance form requires that we assimilate a specific, unwavering timing for each figure we learn. In the meantime, please don't lean on each other, try to stand up straight, and start experiencing the joy of balanced movement.

The following folks helped set up, break down and clean up before and after the milonga. Without them, there would be no Firehouse Tango.

• ​​​Henry Kim - Cookies
  

• Barbara Lombardi
  
• Christine Russo
  
• Fred Meyer
  
• Camille
  
• Carl Schaefer
  
• Bill Krukovsky
  
• Flo Salierno
  
• Walter Milani
  
• Bob Brillo
  
• Eduardo Campos