Tango Theory Page
by Manuel Bodirsky
This
page contains links that I found useful concerning what I call Tango
Theory - thoughts about the system and the underlying principles of
the
non-verbal communication of Argentinian Tango. What is the language,
that the partners are using, such that they understand each other from
the very first steps they
dance together, no matter whether they have seen each other before or
not? There are only a
few books about Tango, and the web contains even less information. The list of material that I
found interesting is slowly growing, and contains:
- work on dance notation or
notation of human movement in general,
- material particularly
related to the description of the dance Tango,
- texts about the music of
Tango and its composition.
A
Notation System for Tango.
This page also contains a link
to a text of myself - which is about a notation system for
Tango. I received various reactions to the proposed notation.
Interestingly, people that do not dance Tango were often surprised - "this is already everything?". On
the other hand, many dancers found the notation quite complex. I believe
that it is not the notation, but the fundamental system of Tango
that is complex. My
explanation for the discrepancy between the reactions from dancers
and non-dancers is that dancers want to match the meaning of the
annotations with their
experience. This might
be painful,
since usually they manage their skills intuitively, and not on an
abstract level. A musician who improvised all life and never read
music scores also might have troubles in learning the notation system
for music. People that
do not
dance Tango read the notation without an actual imagination of the
corresponding movements. If they find it simple, then I'm glad, since
it is my goal to design the language as simple as possible.
Acknowledgments:
For the photos I would like to thank the Tango teachers Pablo Villarraza and Dana
Jazmin Frigoli, and the photographer Ingrid Sinzinger. I'm also
grateful to Judith Preuss,
who taught me a lot about Tango, and Julia Böttcher, Maria-Luise Bodirsky,
Katharina Bodirsky, Sebastian Bodirsky,
Daniel Johannsen, and Michael
Sattler for their detailed feedback. Parts of the text were written
during the author's stay in La Casita
de San Telmo in Buenos Aires.
Download: In postscript, and in pdf.
Note: The
document above is not yet in final form.
The copyright follows a Creative
Commons License.
7.2004
I'm grateful for any comments, further links, feedback about the
proposed notation, and questions.
My email address can be decoded from the following: manuel ät
bodirsky dot de
