Tango and Chaos (rebuilt)

Training the Eye Sometimes I check out the tango videos that people post on the Internet. They're often accompanied by comments about how spectacular the dancing is—but I usually don't find them very interesting. And if I ask Alejandra to take a look, she usually feels the same way. I think Alej and I must be looking for different things—so I’d like to take another look at a video we posted earlier to see if we can show more clearly what it is we look for in tango. It’s a short clip of Alejandra and Pocho we used in the  Entrega  article ( page 19, Chapter 3 ). When I first posted it, Alej didn’t like it much. She said, “I remember that one. It’s just normal dancing. I hadn’t danced with Pocho in a long time, and you can see I’m not sure which way he’s going to go after he pauses.” But that’s not really important. We used it earlier in Chapter 3 to show some of the elements of women’s technique, and now I'd like to use it here for something else: What Alej sa...

The Perfect Tango I know... tango isn’t science. You can’t measure it by any objective standard. But I have seen two dances that are so good that I simply can’t imagine a way to make them better—so for me, they're "perfect". We've already shown one of them. It's the first video we posted of Ismael dancing to  No Me Extraña . Now, here is the second one. It's a video of Miguel Balbi dancing to Biaggi's  El Trece  at a party in  Almagro . Watch how he moves to the music: At the end of the video you can hear Alberto Dassieu comment,  "Muy bien pareja de bailarines." — "A very good pair of dancers". For the milongueros, this is the absolute essence of what dancing tango is about: a pure, unadorned expression of the music; unpretentious and simple on its surface, but profoundly complex in its use of cadence and melody. To see what's really happening here—to actually get a feel for it—you should first just listen to this tang...