Trini wrote: <Susana Miller's influence was in the teaching, not the dancing. Many of the old-timers had no idea how they did what they did.>
True, but some do know how to teach. She may have figured out how to teach it well but she never learned to dance it well. I prefer to take workshops with someone I consider a beautiful dancer. Admittedly many dancers are not good teachers, but more importantly, students tend to emulate the dancers they like. Whether good or bad, a teacher is still going to be the dance model for what they teach. That is my point: Susana Miller is a so-so dancer with an over-inflated reputation, not an important and influential one. She just got more publicity. The only reason her "close embrace" approach was novel was because it appealed to people who had no sense of tango history or never learned tango correctly in the first place. Tango has alway been danced close, unless it was a performance (as on the stage, NOT in the milongas). So-called "close embrace" (or milonguero or whatever) has been around for almost a century. It is sad when the traditional way of dancing is forgotten or ignored to the point that someone can come along and market it as if it were a new way of dancing. Cheers, Charles ************************************** Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL at http://discover.aol.com/memed/aolcom30tour _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
