UK Tel: 01209 211 800
Intl Tel: +44 1209 211 800
CESA House
Pennance Road
Lanner
Cornwall
TR16 5TQ
Great Britain
t: 01209 211 800
Intl t: +44 1209 211 800
f: 01209 211 830
Founder member of the Year Out Group and the International Association of Language Travel Agents.
Spanish & Tango
The Argentine Tango is one of the most passionate and intense dance styles to come out of Latin America. The dance originated in Buenos Aires in the late 1880s, but was very much the dance of the bordello and looked down on by the well to do in society, however it gathered fans in Paris and then returned to Buenos Aires as a respectable dance, experiencing a "Golden Age" in the city, in the 1950's, prior to the fall of the Perrons, but was then suppressed as politically dangerous until enjoying a renaissance in the early 1980's.
The Argentine Tango is mostly danced in either open embrace, where the leader and follower connect at arm's length, or close embrace, where the leader and follower connect chest-to-chest.
To learn the basic steps of this impressive dance or to further develop your current skills there is no better experience than living and studying the dance, whilst learning Spanish in Buenos Aires.
The Tango college used is only 8 blocks from the language college and talented instructors (all of whom are bilingual)will provide you with 2 private and 2 group classes per week.
Spanish & Tango classes: Students can study Spanish for 2 or more weeks, in combination with Tango classes for each week of their course, or can simply book one week of tango classes in combination with a language course of 2 or more weeks.
Further information:
For fabulous Tango pictures and images of Buenos Aires we recommend you look at Tango Lirico if this site doesn't inspire you to get your dance shoes on - nothing will!
There are nowadays two main strands of Argentine Tango...
Salon Tango
Salon Tango was the most popular style of tango danced up through the Golden Era of the dance (1950's) when milongas (tango parties) were held in large dance venues and full tango orchestras performed. Later, when the Argentine youth started dancing rock & roll and tango's popularity declined, the milongas moved to the smaller confiterias in the center of the city, resulting in the birth of the "milonguero/apilado/petitero/caquero" style.
Salon Tango is characterized by slow, measured, and smoothly executed moves. It includes all of the basic tango steps and figures plus sacadas, barridas, and boleos. The emphasis is on precision, smoothness, and musicality. The couple embraces closely but the embrace is flexible, opening slightly to make room for various figures and closing again for support and poise. The walk is the most important element, and dancers usually walk 60%-70% of the time during a tango song.
Tango Nuevo
Tango Nuevo is a dancing and teaching style. Tango nuevo as a teaching style emphasizes a structural analysis of the dance. By taking tango down to the physics of the movements in a systematic way, a method was created of analyzing the complete set of possibilities of tango movements, defined by two bodies and four legs moving in walks or circles.
In walks, their explorations pioneered "changes of direction" or "cambios". In turns, they focus on being very aware of where the axis of the turn is (in the follower/in the leader/in between them). This tends to produce a flowing style, with the partners rotating around each other on a constantly shifting axis, or else incorporating novel changes of direction.
Milongas: There are two meanings (you've been warned!)
Milonga is essentially Tango; the differences lie in the music, which has a strongly-accented beat, and an underlying "habanera" rhythm. Dancers avoid pausing, and often introduce syncopation's called traspies and broken rhythm into their walks and turns. Milonga uses the same basic elements as Tango, with a strong emphasis on the rhythm, and figures that tend to be less complex than some of those danced in some varieties of Tango.
Milonga is also the name given to tango dance parties. This double meaning of the word milonga can be confusing unless one knows the context in which the word "milonga" is used. People who dance at milongas are known as milongueros.