Tango y Cultura Popular ® English Edition TyCP Special | Page 21

So, what is Tango? What we are all aware of: a dance of two, a
deep communication with the other, and with music, and..., and...
and so, we “discover” the dialogue’s idea. The dialogue between
the dancing couple, the dialogue with music, the dialogue among
each other’s feet and the floor drawing the famous “ochos”, and a
thousand other things - and, if it suits, the feet and legs dialogue
with the air, accurately drawing “boleos” of defined forms, created
and recreated each time.
But what is the “adornment”, sometimes also called
“embellishment”, “expressiveness”? The adornment consists
precisely in expressing the essence of Tango. It is useless to
make adornments by merely following technical procedures if
one does not really understand “what it is all about”. The female
dancer legs (and also, those of the male dancer) are equivalent
to a tango couple. They embrace, get together, dialogue, caress...
technically speaking, this is achieved from a set of rotations of
the joints. But this game of rotations should not be taken as
something cold and practical, but as something absolutely natural
and logical, as natural, and as logical as any language. The legs
“express”, “they are expressive” when they have a language, not
when they merely move.
Thus, we have just overthrown several myths.
* One, is that adornments are “movements to be learned” or
“repeated”. No way. Technical learning is very important, but it is
not enough. There are wonderful female and male dancers who
make something beautiful out of adornments, but, unfortunately,
we also see simply movement repetitions or copies of this or
that dancer, without actually having understood the meaning; in
these cases, the “original” dancer is generally excellent, and the
phony versions are insignificant, sometimes even unpleasant or
grotesque
* Another, that the adornment is “a matter of women”. No
way. Adorno is everything that man and/or woman do without
interfering in the marking, the step, the figure, the sequence,
etc., making it fit accurately in the music and without producing
any kind of vibration or pulling. For this, it is absolutely necessary
to know how to lead and follow and to have a very good musical
ear. (I often tell my students they shouldn’t be aware his or
her partner makes adornments until they see it in a video. This
happened to a famous dancer, who one day was filmed and
discovered what his partner was doing and why there were so
many good comments about her).
* Another: that “for the woman to adorn, the man has to give her
time”. This is true when it comes to a choreography, which can
be worked out either jointly or unilaterally, or by a third party.
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