[email protected] wrote: > When you dance at milongas and the majority of the people are not dancing > nuevo, do you stop and change directions and take up a great deal of space?
No. This came up on Tango-L in last decade over hundred times over: the nuevo method enables you to teach the technical part very fast, but you can't teach adults to learn how to pay attention. Most Europeans and even more in the US are used to large spaces, used to excessive personal freedoms, which makes most of them simply unaware that in this situation they must find a compromise: they have to restrict their own freedom to enable the fair distribution of resources (space) available. This also applies to the way they treat leading-following, their partners. In short: bad dancing is not nuevo. Nuevo is not bad dancing. While someone dancing nuevo is more likely to be young, ambitous, more keen on the technical part than the other half, open and therefore more extroverted, maybe even eccentric, thus they may stand our more than the tradition loving who tends to be more introverted, rule-abiding, simply: conservative. There are stupendously bad dancers in much larger numbers among the traditionals according to my experiences, but you do not need to be a statistician to see that perception is cheating you: bad nuevo dancers are like lighthouses, bad traditional dancers are simply ignored or avoided by the more knowledgeable dancers within the community, or they happily find each other. > If this is what you do, how do you feel about not following traditional > tango etiquette rules? > I'm asking you this question because I would really like an honest answer. > I'm not against tango nuevo, it's just that I see nuevo dancers have a > rather selfish approach to space and line of dance and they don't seem to care > or have respect for others on the dance floor. > I don't believe in etiquette as such. Most of the codigos are as natural as tango itself. They are simply based on the very simple fact of a large number of people trying to cope with the given situation, in a given environment. They simply had a lot of time to experiment with what works best. I look at the so called etiquette as a guideline to avoid problems. If you know the reasons behind the rules, you will know how to avoid the problems they were devised to solve (and bend the rules accordingly). As for the line of dance: as a teacher I usually have my students dance in a space less than squaremeter (a bit more than a squareyard) per couple right during the first two classes. It is not easy for them to improvise, change direction, mark/follow, on music, while in a confined space, but my experience is that it works, people enjoy it, and also if you allow beginners to disregard available space while they learn the basics, it will simply fail to become a part of their routine. It is infinitely harder to learn it later. Obviously, these problems are there with the traditionally oriented dancers as well. So again: it is not nuevo. It is bad dancing. Only nuevo dancers usually do have the technical capabilities much earlier in their learning process to cause problems, and therefore they tend to cause a lot more visible problems for other dancers if the teacher failed to make them aware them. I hope I could answer all you questions to your satisfaction. Best wishes, Aron -- Ecsedy Áron *********** Aron ECSEDY Tel: +36 20 66-36-006 http://www.milonga.hu/ http://www.holgyvalasz.hu/ __________ Information from ESET NOD32 Antivirus, version of virus signature database 4479 (20091004) __________ The message was checked by ESET NOD32 Antivirus. http://www.eset.com _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
