Here’s a controversial topic that some won’t even realize is controversial:
The Topic > STANDARDIZATION.
This has been discussed ad-naseum for years. But here’s an over simplified recap:
Statement: Tango needs to be standardized so that we’re all drinking the same cool-aid.
Rebuttal: Standardization will kill all individualization and creativity of the dance. Every couple will start to look the same. Social Tango will disappear and we’ll all be dancing performance Tango.
All caught up now ?
Spoiler Alert: That Train Has Already Left The Station.
The fact is that for YEARS Tango has been moving steadily towards gentrified tango. Further still it has been largely infected by Performance Tango being taught as Social Tango! Extending that further > Tango Performers look the same. The dance IS ALREADY standardized to a degree. Couples DO look very similar to each other. There are ALREADY massive similarities across the form even into different ‘styles’ or ideas of Tango.
The Devil, as they say, is in the details.
On the surface these things are already true. However, the detail here is that, people are gonna do what they’re gonna do because they’re being (ahem) ‘creative’, rebellious, or whatever you want to call it. Which is to say that individualism will still happen, and continue to happen. It’s not like Standardization stopped that from happening in Ballroom. In fact it made it stand out even more! Like it or not Standardization has already taken place, to a degree. And at this point there are only a few logical steps remaining: 1.) Teacher Certifications. 2.) Dancer Qualifications. 3.) Grading the form to those levels of qualifications. 4.) A Registry of Teachers AND Dancers Skills and Qualifications. 5.) Events danced to those levels! All of those things are coming. Imagine a Tango event where you can’t get into the event because your skill level has not been upgraded ?
The reality is that we’re already half way there. How’s that ? The surviving Tango Schools (after Covid) are already teaching Tango Performance as a skill! Some Tango Teachers are differentiating themselves based on the fact that they won a competition. Worse is that they have students lining up to ‘study’ with them because of that ‘win’. Even though, as I have said before, the skill to teach, and the skill to dance, and the skill to perform are radically different from each other. And > Winning a dance competition does NOT guarantee that you can teach or can improve someone else’s dance! All it says is that someone else thought that your dancing skills were exemplary above others in the competition AT THE TIME.
Further still you have people that are currently teaching the form arguing for Standardization that we all need to be drinking from the same cup. So that there is less confusion in the form. The thinking is that you can go from teacher to teacher and pick up the same information! Some argue that without teacher qualifications there’s no way to judge someone’s ability to teach you what you need to know. That’s exactly what is happening now and has been happening for decades and the form survives. There’s been a number of movements over the years towards teacher certifications. And we are on the cusp of that happening, again, even now. Most of the competition events are moving in that direction. Sadly.
My belief is that the train of Standardization has already left the station. In a few years you won’t recognize the form at all. I certainly don’t recognize it from when I started. I look at dancing today and I see it’s taken a turn into a past that maybe never existed. I say that because a lot of people romanticize the dance into thinking that Milongas and Tango Only events of Buenos Aires of yesteryear were all night events. And that’s not the case at all. The Tango Only Milonga is a RECENT construct, as early as the 70’s and 80’s. The Milonga event used to be MULTIPLE styles of dance that you had be proficient in, not just Tango. I digress. The romanticization of the dance is this belief that it’s always been an elegant experience to watch. And that’s not the case at all. There are Pathe videos of Argentina in the 40’s, which is right in the middle of the golden era of tango, where the dancing looks similar to today but there are differences if you know what you’re looking for. Yet if you look at dancing from the 60’s and 70’s it looks VERY different, the same is true of dancing from the late 80’s thru the 2000’s.
There is good news on the horizon: My belief is that idea and practice of ‘Social Tango’ will eventually split off of the mainstream of what you now know as ‘Tango’. Where you have teachers like myself, or Detlef Engel, Melina Sedó, Daniela Borgialli, Daniela Feilcke-Wolff, Robin Graeme Thomas, Alex Krebs, and many others teaching the ideas of Social Tango. You will have Social Tango ONLY events and Performance Tango will NOT be allowed on the floor … at all! And THANK GOD, that noise clogs up the Line of Dance.