Hi everybody, Fran here with your Tango Tip of the Week. If you've ever taken any kind of ballroom dance lessons -- including Latin or Swing -- you've most likely noticed that not only are the steps for each dance regimented in an inflexible, cookie-cutter way, but so is the individual timing of each figure. As ballroom dance students, you might by this time be quite used to thinking about each one of your memorized bronze, silver and gold dance figures in terms of "slows" and "quicks;" i.e., in specific, unchangeable rhythmic responses to music.

In fact, this idea leads us directly to my Sixth Commandment of Ballroom Dance:

Each dance form requires that we assimilate a specific, unwavering timing for each figure we learn.

Right now, you might believe that this is the way ballroom dancing is -- and always has been -- done in Western culture. However, I for one do not believe that this is true, or that it represents the way people is this country used to dance at all. My own speculation is that in our own "golden age" of ballroom dance during, let's say, the 1930s and 40s, the timing of dance steps was almost certainly a matter of personal preference. Some dancers might choose a particular way to time a figure; others might choose another way. Neither would have been considered right or wrong, because social dancing was an individual dancer's way of moving to music.

In this context, the role of dance teachers -- from Vernon and Irene Castle onward -- was to offer general recommendations rather than rigid pronouncements about possible ways in which dancers might address the timing of any given figure. Nothing was written in stone; nothing was strictly prescribed -- that is, until what I'm going to call "the Arthur Murray era."

Arthur Murray's brilliant -- and ultimately extremely profitable -- concept was to bring ballroom dancing to the masses, to make it possible (according to his organization's promotional material, at any rate) for literally anyone to more or less instantly become a ballroom dancer. He accomplished this by reducing the learning of social dancing to a series of progressive, easily ingestible figures, each of which had its own specific character and timing. Within Arthur's brave new world, innate talent, individual inclination, and creative aptitude became secondary. The ability to follow specific instructions, to count, and to memorize took center stage. As Kathryn Murray (Arthur’s wife) repeated over and over on TV during the 1950s, "If you can walk, you can dance."

Moving to the present day, for those of us who have discovered Argentine Tango, this way of learning how to dance has been turned on its ear. Teachers in Buenos Aires utterly reject Arthur Murray's watered-down marketing approach to what they feel is a social art form. Instead, they tell us, "There are no steps." They tell us, "There is no one way only to dance." And they tell us, "There is no set timing." In fact, some dancers of Argentine Tango seem at times to exhibit almost no specific timing whatever in their dancing.

Personally, I think of "timing" in Argentine Tango as "impressionistic." I hope this doesn't seem too amorphous or ephemeral. But as I watch people whom I consider to be fine dancers (I am, of course, talking about natives of Argentina, milongueros who have spent their lives in the dance halls of Buenos Aires, for example), I see that sometimes their individual steps coincide with musical beats -- and sometimes they very decidedly do not. Instead, they move effortlessly through musical phrases, using starts, half-time and double-time movements, and dramatic pauses with expert fluidity -- creating an overall impression of cohesive, individually creative responsiveness to the music without rigidly adhering to any set timing at all.

This way of moving to music flies directly in the face of what we're taught as American/European ballroom dance students. No slows, no quicks, no set patterns of easy-to-execute timing. We are encouraged to dance what we feel.

This, of course, is very, very difficult. As beginning students, in fact, it is impossible. What we need as beginners is something tangible, something we can grasp. For this reason, most of us who teach Tango have our students respond in some definite way to the pulse of the music, using half-note, whole-note, or eighth-note (double-time) paradigms. But we look forward (often with considerable unease) to a time when our students will notice for themselves that this isn't really the way social Tango is danced at the highest levels. Because then, we'll have to open Pandora's box, and try our best to explain how it's really done.

Next week, we'll continue discussing my Ten Commandments of Ballroom Dance, comparing how they differ remarkably to the way in which we dance Tango. In the meantime, try to forget all about quicks and slows, and have some fun dancing.

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 - Rolled Cookies
• Kerry - Cheese Popcorn
• Barbara Lombardi - pistachio nuts
  

• Barbara Lombardi
  
• Mary Pagano
  
• Bill Auer
  
• Vely Daleus
  
• Christine Russo
  
• Bill Krukovsky
  
• Edna Negron
  
• Mike Casale
  
• Bob Brillo
  
• Eduardo Campos