Neotangology

A Journey Through Tango

It was over 15 years ago when I began to learn tango, and from the moment I took those first steps I fell completely in love with the dance. It is versatile, expressive, and adaptable to a wide range of music, It can be personal and subtle, or dramatic and showy. It can evoke the atmosphere of a club in the 1930s, or be modern and contemporary. Yet whatever form you choose, it is all still tango.

Unlike with most other dance styles, tango does not lend itself well to being taught as a sequence of steps that you learn by rote. It is improvisational, expressive, adaptable, and no two dances will ever be truly alike. This presents unique challenges for both teachers and students as the concepts and rules that make tango so unique cannot easily be taught in isolation.

When I moved from just learning tango as a student into teaching my own classes I could only draw inspiration from the classes I had previously attended. I was a qualified dance teacher for Le Roc, but with no equivalent teaching qualification for tango in the UK I had to devise my own methods, initially with variable success!

I quickly realised that in order to teach tango I had to fully understand it, and that meant researching its origins, its history, the principles by which it works, and the ways that students interpret the classes when they take it back to the dance floor.

This was the beginning of what I later came to call Neotangology.

I had originally intended to write and publish all this as a book, but I kept getting distracted and eventually realised that I would never get the time to get it to a state where I was happy to commit it to print. But as I already had some 60,000 words of research, opinion, analysis, and teaching notes written, I knew I had to do something with it.

And so here it is, serialised, with an accompanying podcast where I will read the individual sections and add any notes and discussions that help it make sense.

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The book is broken up into bite-sized sections, with an article and a podcast episode for each one. Because this is a book not a blog the episodes are shown below in reading order, so you can start at the top and work down. But there is also a Contents table with links to each of the main sections if you want to jump right in.

A Journey Through Tango

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Contents

Introduction

My First Tango

The Origin of Tango