Milonguear for women

This - recently shared on Facebook - is pretty good advice for leaders who want to "milonguear", but it barely gives the follower any hints. Point 2 is this:

"Dance with a partner who can milonguear.... I usually don’t invite a woman to dance if I’m not confident I can navigate the floor safely with her."

I think the followup post is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn't go beyond the obvious: refrain from silly kicks and don't stick your elbow out.  It makes it sound trivial and ignores everything behind it, which is how people normally talk about women's work. I dance as both follower and leader on a lot of full floors, at various levels of orderliness, so I'm here today to start filling in the gaps.

First the big picture, then the details. Big picture:

1. Be very communicative, so that your partner can always feel exactly where you are and what you are doing. Communication is two-way, continuous, truthful, and uninterrupted.
2. Be very accurate. Your movements, response and expression are at high resolution, so very little space is needed for a detailed and interesting picture.
3. Be very steady. Your partner can rely on you to keep within your own space and your own balance, all the time. They can confidently and accurately predict where you will go in response to their own movements, within a very small margin of error.
4. Be very musical. Your feeling is fully expressed within your movements, whatever those movements are, and regardless of their size. This means complex steps and large movements are options, not necessities. You have your own ideas about how the music makes you feel, and you are expressing them within your embrace.

The actions you would take to get these things working are mostly in common, so you don't need to prioritise them one above another.

I'm not going to talk about things like not habitually flapping your heels around like a halfwit, and not insisting on a rigid, stuck-out arm or a bent-back international ballroom hold. They are obvious, they come under the heading "have a bit of common sense," and one sentence is enough.

Communication

This depends on having a very clear, simple, and reliable relationship between the position of each of your shoulders and the position of the corresponding foot. It's usually called "having a good axis". You don't bend sideways or forward at the waist, drop the chest, push one hip out, pull it in, wriggle, lock one hip or knee, or stand with one leg tense and the foot held stiffly clear of the floor. All these things will break the line of communication. When you are doing it right, your partner can clearly sense the position of each foot in a close embrace. In effect, your  legs and feet are included in your partner's proprioception. Making this possible is 90% a follower skill and only 10% a leader skill.

You can practice and enhance your axis by standing, walking, doing solo pivots, or dancing, with a book or a heavyish bean bag balanced on your head (some dried lentils in a freezer bag are totally fine). This really helps to find the vertical line that you want to move around, feel how it moves in your body as you move, and make it thinner. Change weight, step slowly in all directions, turn gently.

Generally, you want to think about simplifying, firming and straightening your movement so it can be exactly as you mean it to be. Everything else below will also help.

Accuracy and Resolution

This means you can interpret signals for direction, size, and speed over a wide range of each, but particularly at the smaller end. And these dimensions are independent; your smaller steps can have as much colour and detail as your larger steps, and all of this colour and detail is communicated to your partner, rather than being directed outwards.

You can change weight one toe at a time, if the leader is capable of leading that. You can follow a pivot separately from a step and you don't automatically add a step just because you've pivoted. You don't mechanically stick one leg out when there's no reason to do so. You have the freedom to reverse from any point. Your feet move in close parallel lanes, not crossing each other or changing lanes unintentionally. Your free leg does not exaggerate or fly out anxiously in turns.

Get a practice partner to lead small movements, slow movements, and movements that start one way and then retract, and pivots that don't end in a step (they might just stop, or go back the other way).

You'll need to create stillness and quietness, to make a smooth space for the high level of detail. Simplify your movements. Drop any movement that you don't have a clear positive reason for doing. Don't "extend" when there's no reason to do so except stagecraft. And your partner needs to be listening to you.

Steadiness

You can stop, pause, go back at any point in any movement. If your partner loses their balance somehow, you can probably rescue the situation, and if not, you will still be standing there. Your partner can fall over all alone, if they truly insist.

Physically, this comes from a consistent relationship between shoulders and hips and having the position of your centre of gravity well under control. Everything already mentioned will help. You are stepping with your own intent, and not flapping about, wriggling, or putting yourself in any position you can't freeze in. It's not exactly about balance - you can balance in a position where it's easy to push you over. Groundedness is about very rarely passing through a position where it's easy to push you over.

Smooth the transitions between steps, push continuously through the step, get your legs used to the transitions in all directions, and have your feet fall wherever they need to be, under your centre of gravity.

A good (and fun) exercise with a partner is to dance normally and have someone stop the music at random moments. When it stops, you have to freeze in whatever position you are in. If you try to freeze and you have to take another step, then whatever you were doing is probably something you don't do well enough to do in the milonga yet. Both leader and follower are independently responsible for their own ability to freeze. (I am indebted to Andreas Wichter for this exercise).

A good exercise to find out how it should feel is to have someone hang on to a scarf wrapped around your hips, and give you resistance as you walk. Or you can walk in water and focus on keeping upright.

There is a fun test for this. Leaders who are poorly grounded will often lead bigger steps than they mean to, then fail to follow up with the rest of their bodies, unbalancing themselves and their partners. The effect is that the couple skitters around like a foal, and they bump into people even when they think they are leading perfectly sensible movements. Learn to notice when this is happening, and edit it by stepping within yourself and insisting on keeping yourself straight; don't rush around trying to keep up with phantom leads and nonsense. When you get it right, the leader will suddenly feel safe, because two of the animal's four feet are consistently underneath it and going where they intend to go, instead of constantly having to catch and correct. This takes some experience and decent physical condition to do successfully, but mainly you just have to know that it's possible and a good idea.

Of course, some people can lead huge, fast steps without unbalancing themselves. In that case, go ahead and put your big wheels on.

If you struggle with any of this physically, the fastest way to make a noticeable difference to  everything I mention here is about 3 sessions a week for six weeks of practically any training that will strengthen your core. You can use one of those 7-minute workout apps, a samba class has worked well for me, ballet or yoga would work, press-ups, crunches, or any form of upper-body training will work, even running, if you do it right. Or you can do it how they did it in the 40s and just wash and dry all your clothes and bedding without a machine.  If your regular work is not sedentary (for example, if you are a nurse, site engineer, market trader or care worker) you probably won't need to do anything special. You don't need to be super fit or powerful, just strong enough to to be stable without effort. The result is that your partner can feel where your feet are, and the subtle changes in your body as your hips turn.

Musicality

This means that you are using the full duration and shape of every movement to express your feeling about the sound. Your partner can feel this.

The aim is to make it feel as though the music is coming from inside your body, from somewhere roughly in the middle. It's not that you're hearing something and pointing it out visually for an audience; it's internal and coming out because it has to. This is the answer to the beginner question "when am I supposed to do ornaments?". Do them when you can't help it, and otherwise don't worry about them. They are supposed to come from you. Find all your favourite tango tunes on YouTube and just bop along to them however you like. Wave your arms, wiggle, dance around, make faces, whatever, until your body knows what it wants to do and has different ways of expressing that. Learning specific ornaments by heart is tedious and can have embarrassing results, so I suggest not doing it.

You can practice and enhance how this works physically in the dance with some exercises, like refusing a step. They will also improve your communication. Get your practice partner to lead something, and then just don't do it - actively refuse it in the embrace. Stop the step. Hold it up. Slow it down. Do it at different times during the step.  Backlead a little to find out how it feels. Have your partner go with your suggestion, or not. Now try it musically; have your partner choose the movements (keep it simple), but you decide how smooshy or spiky, soft or sharp or decisive, it will be. You will find out what you can do without breaking the connection, what is interesting and fun, and what causes problems or confuses you. Turn your 'musical satnav' up and down. Make as many mistakes as you need, to feel confident that you know what you are doing.

Delivering this physically takes some time, so if you are a beginner, don't let it worry you; just solve the problems in front of you, allow yourself to bop and get excited to tunes and rhythms you like, notice what you like, let your body respond, starting from the heart or centre, and it will get more coordinated with practice.

You want your body to be a window for your emotions.

Note that there are quite a lot of 'good' leaders who have no interest in the follower's musicality at all, except in terms visible to an audience; they want an obedient partner, of the highest available social status, through whom to show off, mainly to each other and themselves. The partner might as well be a car or an overpriced handbag. They are not listening to anything an audience can't see. I think it's dull and silly, but it's up to you to make your own sincere choice about what you want to do.

Mon's Legs

Finally, I give you Monique's Stupendous Legs again. They are full of music, and also apparently full of water. Watch and learn.

A post shared by Eleanor Durrant (@spikylellie) on May 20, 2017 at 3:07pm PDT

You don't have to be especially mobile or athletic; those things give you some extra options in the range and variety of movement, which are very good for dancing with certain people, but you're entitled to expect your partner to dial it back to what you can keep up with.

What happens

If you get it right, some curious things happen:

• It becomes rather pointless to lead lots of steps, which makes the dance less exhausting.
• All the possibilities of leading are still there, up to the couple's skill level, but they are now a free choice, over which you have a great deal of influence. They no longer need to be trotted out one after the other to avoid boredom, or planned in any way. 
• Leading becomes both practically effortless and much more interesting to do.
• The distinction between leading and following becomes somewhat beside the point.
• You may find that you care more about who you dance with and what to.

Leading Conversion Course - Playlist

This post talks you through my YouTube playlist of people I think it is helpful to watch if you are a woman who is a good follower and is learning to lead. Most of this will also be of use to anyone working on their leading; with the usual obvious caveats about who you want to dance with, how you want to dance, and what your priorities are. My own dance prioritises pleasure above prestige. YMMV. There are more videos in the playlist than the ones I'm going to talk about, and I might add more from time to time.

Léna Lamorelle

I suggest watching Léna to give yourself a mental picture of what a woman's body can look like, leading well. I hope it will help you visualise better what you want to do, without the visual confusion of a drastic difference in body shape.

Sin Palabras

Notice the beautiful walk from 02:00 and the turn at 02:17.



More videos - vals and milonga - in the playlist. You may also notice the waterfall* at 02:52, very characteristic of the French dancers for many years and popularised by Carlitos in this no-brakes vals. It took me way longer than I expected to figure out how this is done. It's fun but not necessary.

Oscar Casas

Some of Oscar Casas' teaching summaries are in English, some in Spanish. A lot of them give you simple, reliable ways to do really useful things without overanalysis. The ones with Ana Miguel are generally of higher quality, except for two essential ones with Mary Ann Casas.

Linear Salida

As an exercise, this is a staple of the Nuevo Tango teaching approach. Learn to lead back, side, and forward steps at will, then curve it and wind it up into a turn, then change direction. ("Nuevo" and what is often called "Milonguero" are essentially the same thing with a different sensibility or goal).



Note that this method of leading a cross - the 'lazy' or sideways one - is pretty bulletproof and will usually work well with beginner followers.

Shark Walk

Possibly the most practically useful two and a half minutes of tango video ever made. What Oscar does in this is everything you actually need for tango, vals, and milonga. If you are musical and sensitive to your partner, which you should be if you already follow well and you can learn to keep your place on the floor, you have everything you need for social dancing. Everything else is optional. Some people manage perfectly well with much less.

Analysis of systems

This begins with a simple, reliable way to lead a linear or salon-style cross. You can break it down further and get a lot of different options, but you'll also be completely fine if you just use this one.



Lots more in the playlist. One side note - I suggest ignoring Oscar's technical advice to followers, which he only offers when Ana isn't there.

Alexis Quezada

Alexis is a Chilean living in Barcelona and teaching in France and elsewhere with Celine Giordano. He is a 'lazy' leader, using solid technique and interesting musicality to create a very appealing, pleasurable, low-apparent-effort dance. He does practically nothing useless, superfluous or showy: watch any of it, pick something you like, and try to work out how to do it. You probably won't get it, at least at first, but it's almost impossible to avoid learning something useful while you try.

El Jagüel

The chained swoosh* at 01:05, and in general a wonderfully sensual approach to this beautiful Di Sarli instrumental. One I personally prefer to the 'mundial' style (often branded 'salon') with its intensely tedious, glossy, chilly turns.

Sinsabor

Rocked ochos from 01:39 - and generally, this one is full of things that are brilliant in their simplicity.

Mañana zarpa un barco

Crossed walk from 00:35 to 00:41. This is technically not easy, and risky in social dancing, but it's a brilliant exercise to have on your list of things to try. The tango is followed by a calm milonga in the same video.

Milonga Criolla

I draw your attention to 01:09-01:15 and 02:08 to 02:18. Sure, I can lead those movements (the second is just a well-timed weight change), but would I ever have thought of leading them then? Admittedly both of these require an excellent partner to be worthwhile; they would be utterly wasted on someone who just follows and doesn't dance with you to the music.



Alexis feels absolutely solid to dance with; he is extraordinary at creating stillness and a sense of perfect security and calm, to which the face like a decaf koala contributes less than you might think. On a good day, I remember to aim for that stillness in my own dance.

Melina and Detlef

This is a summary of a fundamentals class. The verbal explanation is in slow French with a German accent, but this is still useful to watch even if you don't understand French well, or at all. I provided a translation some years ago. They discuss posture and embrace, and then give one very simple and reliable way to lead each of a weight change, a side step, and a walk.



Their book provides very useful information about various technical options, with tips for productive practice, and the accompanying DVD includes a good way to practice pivots at home without injuring yourself. You can use it as a comprehensive course, but even if that's not your approach I recommend looking at it if you are in a position of having to teach or mentor anyone, especially yourself. It will save you quite a bit of time if you can figure out how to make best use of it - my full review and user guide is here. Check the troubleshooting checklist hidden on page 156.

Oscar Moyano

A video I find not so much useful, as motivational.  I watch this sometimes to reconnect myself with how I want to dance, and avoid getting sucked into how other people want to dance. My favourite bit is the sensual perfection of 01:35, which is how those are supposed to work.

On using video

I've made this playlist because it contains a lot of things that have been very useful to me. However, bear in mind that it's very difficult to comprehend, visually, a movement that you can't already do yourself. In case you do what I suggested above (pick something you like from a video and try to work out how to do it) I want to prevent you getting discouraged by telling you that at least all the following things will happen, and they are normal and completely OK:

• You will spend hours watching and rewatching, just not being able to understand what on earth is going on. Tip: if you save a copy of the video using something like savefrom.net or whatever you normally use, and then watch it on a tablet, phone, or computer with a free media player like VLC media player, you can play it in slow motion. It will still take ages. Try to work out just part of it and go from there.
• You will spend hours trying to do a mirror-image of whatever it was you saw, which is much more difficult than the original version.
• You will totally misunderstand what was happening and learn something else entirely. Eventually, you will work out what it was you actually led.
• It will just not work because crucial information is missing or something you had overlooked is much more important than the thing you noticed. You will come back to it a year later and find out what the thing was.
• Etc. Don't worry about it. An account of my own approach is here.

---------------------------------
* In this post I use my own English names, like "waterfall", "swoosh", and "rocked ochos" for some things that don't have established names in English. These are just my names for things that need names.  They're probably not the same names you would come up with if you didn't know how they felt to follow. Go ahead and use them if you like them, but don't expect anyone to know them. I think 'swoosh' is obvious, and 'waterfall' refers to the tumbling, chaotic sensation of following it.

Some things I have learned from leading socially

A few things I have learned about dancing, by regularly dancing both roles socially for two or three years. My experiences may or may not be in common with anyone else.

• There is a tremendous range between OK, good, and great followers, of which they are almost all totally unaware.
• Leading poor followers is very difficult; it requires a range of skills, resilience, and physical training.
• Leading OK followers is fun, especially if they are interested or enthusiastic and easy to be with.
• Leading good followers is more fun, especially if, etc.
• Leading great followers is amazing, and you don't feel like you have to do anything, and whatever you do do is totally effortless.
• There are a lot more than those categories.
• Don't bother raiding the cool guys' “harems”, they're disappointing, dance-wise.
• In a good ronda, under good physical conditions, with good followers, leading is cognitively much less demanding than following. The difference is dramatic. Getting the basics to a good standard is quite a lot of work, but if you can do that and then stay within what you've mastered, good and great followers will dance with you, and it is effortless.
• It is possible to flirt with the table of glamorous Dutch lesbians through the medium of another woman's body.
• There exist men who are both hot and good followers. Hang on a minute –

On social maleness

mikeintonbridge, in a comment on the previous post, says an interesting thing:

As a man who likes to dance with both women and men, and to lead and follow I confess I don't think much about what my choice of clothes says about that. It's fascinating to learn how much more this means to a woman - or perhaps just to this particular woman.

I can't make general claims about other women who do this. I may have thought about it more carefully than most, because the subject interests me.  However, there are a few ways of looking at that difference, if we assume it exists.

One is that women generally have a lot more choice of look within the range of what counts as usual female clothing, so automatically we have to make some choice. All clothing means something. While men have to go quite far out of the usual, or be unusually thoughtful and sophisticated, to do anything beyond dressing either well or badly.

A second is that in this context, a conflict exists for me that is, as far as I can see, much less marked for men. When I originally floated the idea of a talk, Ray reframed part of my thought as "can a woman lead [and remain socially female]?". 

As is so popularly observed, gender and sex are two different things; while sex is more-or-less  biological, gender is a social concept, more-or-less performative, and what that peformance consists of can be anything - it depends on the particular place and time and social context. You can perform the gender society assigns you, or another one, to a greater or lesser degree, and other people can accept that performance either more or less. And there is obviously no reason to expect that the kinds or levels of work to perform any given gender in any particular context will be equal; you can't even assume that there are only two genders. Humans can, and do, assign themselves and each other to as many different classifications as they happen to feel are required to understand their world.

In my specific context, it is easier for a woman to perform male gender than for a man to perform female gender. I can do it almost accidentally to a surprising extent by just skipping some tedious tasks that advertise peformance of female gender, like painting my toenails or the customary depilation and exposure of the legs; if in addition, I ably and publicly peform a male-gendered task, I am half way there, and need to think about counteracting it a bit (such as with earrings).

When I lead socially I become, in certain limited but noticeable respects, socially male. For example, as soon as I started leading socially, publicly, to a barely-acceptable standard, I had a strong sense that my social presence and social boundaries were treated with more respect. Of course, the effects are incomplete, and unreliable. But they seem quite noticeable to me.

So I can, and therefore I must, make a choice whether to counteract or to enhance that social maleness with my dress - and there are sacrifices involved either way. The deep, instinctive sense that I sacrifice a valuable social masculinity, and that what I get in return is less valuable, is one of the things that I struggle with in deciding what to wear.

The bottom line is that it takes quite a lot of good dancing, of feeling loved, of the meditative high and skilful challenge of following, quite a lot of pleasant male bodily presence, connection, and attention, quite a lot of male appreciation, even admiration, to counterbalance that sensation of people just mysteriously acting like you actually matter. Even though I love all that stuff. There's a trade-off, and the answer isn't always the same. It depends.

While a man who follows is, socially, just a man who follows. (Men who follow - is this false? Ray suggested that, at least for gay men, it's a bit more complicated than that. I'd be interested to read about how it's false - or not - in your experience).

Where's my mermaid trousers? A wardrobe for both roles

This is a somewhat edited and expanded version of the 15-minute talk I presented to the "Queer Tango Salon", which was two days of presentations and discussion organised by Ray Batchelor, a retired academic who is deeply interested in Queer History and its relationship with dance, and artist Birthe Havmøller, in September. My talk came out of a conversation with Ray about how dress and gender presentation interact with the roles and the social aspects of a partner dance. I hoped to learn by reflecting on my own experiences, choices and motivations and comparing them with the obviously different experiences, choices, and motivations of that community.

I found it extremely interesting to think about this question, and to put together my experiences in some kind of order. This is a very long post, and inconclusive. It's not exactly what I said - that was, necessarily, shorter - but the headings and quotes follow my slides, and the text follows my speaking notes.

Introduction

Hello!

I don’t claim to be part of the Queer Tango community, or any Queer community – that’s up to you – I am just one of the very many women who regularly dance both roles socially in one of the strands of social practice that is not Queer.

I hope this talk will be of some interest, even if only for comparison with your own experiences and thoughts. What do I wear when I go dancing, what choices do I have or make, what experiments have I tried, how do I feel about them, and what, if anything, do they mean?

Tanguera Battle Dress

Final Pista 2015 – Screenshot (video © Aires de Milonga). Click through for original video

“… when all men wear a white tie and a black tailcoat in the evening, the individual character of each man is made more important, not less; and a curious effect then occurs in mixed company. If each woman at the ball is carefully wearing something different ... the faces might as well be all the same, just as if the same doll were dressed in many different ways.” (Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits)

This is the look in relation to which everything else is gets its meaning. Anything I wear to dance tango does whatever it does in relation to, and by contrast with, this look. In as far as any look is prescribed to me by authority, this is it – although the rules of the Mundial specifically say that they don’t prescribe it.

In fact, this is a two-part look. The women have one part, and the men have one part, and there is such a gulf between the two that it seems they are trying to look like different species. It’s tempting to suggest that the men’s part would also be appropriate in a gathering of only men, while the women’s part would be out of place in a gathering of only women, but I expect that’s not true for everybody.

I’d like to introduce Anne Hollander, who wrote books about the history of fashion, considered as a genre of western art – I don’t claim her ideas are right, I don’t know, but I have found them helpful in understanding my own experience. I recommend Seeing Through Clothes, Sex and Suits, and Fabric of Vision, the catalogue of the wonderful exhibition curated by her at the National Gallery.

Hollander’s argument is that the overall look of men’s and women’s dress, considered as genres of European art, diverged from the seventeenth century, so that surface decoration, visible complexity, colour, exposure and detail became reserved for women, and as a result, became coded as un-serious. She then says that they started to re-converge in the early twentieth century, with women reclaiming seriousness, and then in the later twentieth century with men reclaiming visible complexity, decoration and detail.

My Tanguera Battle Dress

© the author

© Emilia Patruno – Estoi, 2016

I have a complicated, on-off relationship with this look.

For me, most of the time, this look feels like an armour, a cloak, a symbol, a subterfuge, a surface, a distraction. I may feel good, I may feel pretty, I often get compliments and much more overt interest from men than I do otherwise, but I also feel that the purpose it serves is to say “I am other” – a different species from you – and no threat. There certainly are many men who will not even perceive my invitations if I don't “other” myself sufficiently by wearing a dress. They don't care at all that I lead – or even, often, notice – they only care or notice what I'm wearing.

But those men are not much of a loss compared to the women gained; the best dancers will almost always have the confidence to invite and respond to invitations; and in some situations this all works entirely to my advantage.

"Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." (Boswell, Life of Johnson)

I mention Johnson's famous line because this look mainly draws attention to the fact that I am a woman, and distracts the eye rather dramatically from how I dance. There is, perhaps, a partial exception when I dance milonga with an excellent follower and both of us are wearing heels. The whole point of heels is to look spectacular, and two pairs apparently being worn by a single animal dancing a fast-or-daft milonga will, by their designed function, get you a few vocalisations of applause. Or you could consider it as just more of the same thing.

The Mezzo-Soprano Trouser Role

© Charlotte Hammer - Lillehammer, 2015

This is a tactical look, a transitional experiment for me that was all about social signals.

This picture is from a three-night weekender before everyone knew that I danced both roles. I’d specifically promised the organisers that I’d lead about half the time, which really helps them at role balanced events, so I wanted to make sure I could achieve that. I wore wide, tailored trousers made of a substantial fabric, with a waistband at the natural waist, and a full blouse tucked in. The effect is slightly Romantic, and certainly influenced by theatre. I wore this for the first half of the milonga, focused my invitations on the women, and led exclusively. I then disappeared for a tanda, changed, and came back in battle dress. This only really works at a long milonga, because you lose a few tandas in the change.

It is a lot of logistical effort. I didn't change my hairstyle, since if there are more than about 150 people present, those who didn't know me might have thought I was two different people.

My problem with this look is that the tailored trousers go a little too far towards being read as socially male. If I go too far towards this look in general social dancing at home, I start to resent that. I feel like I’m pretending to dress in a masculine style for theatrical effect – just a bit inauthentic, as though the costume is doing too much of the talking, and I feel cut off from my own sexuality. Having tried it, I find that it’s not self-expressive for me.

As I got better at leading, and better known, this strategy became unnecessary, and I probably won't wear it again – I'll come back to what I do now in similar contexts. The trousers were rather expensive, but luckily I can wear them to work; and I've found a couple of tops that can take them in a different direction.

Alternatives - a road not taken

Peninsula Cho and Jinsuk Muchacha,
video still, Lihui Tango - click through
to the original video

I thought briefly about going in the suit direction, but I quickly abandoned the idea. This look would feel even more theatrical and inauthentic to me; even if I entered the Mundial, I wouldn't wear it. (What I would wear is an interesting question, but hypothetical, as it's really not my style). This look would not get me a single dance that I wouldn't get anyway, and I wouldn't feel sexy, so there's no point.

For me, it also has, sort of, the same effect as leading in heels. It neutralises the threat. The message to the men of leading in heels is “I am a different species, and no threat”. The message of this is “I am one of you, and no threat”. But for me, of course, I am a threat, and that's not a million miles away from the point.

I do have a made-to-measure corduroy jacket that looks very classy with my jeans, and has the full set of pockets like a man's jacket (1), and I often wear it for dancing outdoors. I also own a couple of good suits for business, and they look great, but they're too long in the leg – they are made to be worn with  heels.

Dressing as a woman in exactly what the men wear

Paquita 2016-17 © Letizia Gianni

“… When two women wear the same dress, however, the first thing you see is how different the actual women really look.” (Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits)

At a certain point, it struck me that in some situations – especially afternoon milongas at festivals – I could look sort-of feminine and definitely-hot by wearing precisely what most of the men wear – well fitting jeans and a striped or checked shirt. Here I am dancing in this outfit with a partner who is wearing the version with chinos.

Notice in the background, my friend on the stage is wearing the same outfit as me - cheerful stripes and jeans - but quite a bit more cleavage.

By not doing 'femininity’, except perhaps with earrings and hairstyle, I almost accidentally visually emphasise my femaleness: how our individual bodies really look in comparison to one another.

It functions almost like the leading lady look (which is next), but it feels subtly different to me.

Leading Lady Style

Video still: Praesenjit Saha,
Esta Noche de Luna
Click through for original video

Demanding a man's status, but as a woman, not as a man: My body as “a visibly working, self-made and unified instrument” (Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits)

This is more like what I usually wear at practicas, and is more or less what I feel most comfortable leading in. For social dancing, I usually “feminise” this look with bare shoulders, or lace. I want a simple shape and a matte texture, colour by all means, but a smooth envelope over separate and articulated legs, so you can see what I am doing with legs and shoulders. It functions like a suit, without the bulk (and it’s much more revealing).

What I feel about this look is that it exposes the quality of my leading. In the video, which is from a couple of years ago now, I’m not leading particularly well, but I and everyone else can see exactly to what standard I am doing it, without distractions, and because I am ambitious to do it well, and willing to put the work in, that’s exactly what I want.

I get a beautiful cognitive dissonance from seeing pictures of myself leading: I look so small compared to the men. Inside my head, I'm the same size as they are.

Leading Lady - Léna

Léna Lamorelle and Marie Primat (Clermont Tango)
at Saarbruecken, 2014. Click through for original video.

To explain why I like it so much, I'd like to show you how this look functions at its best. This is Léna Lamorelle, leading. I admire her dance: and her look, in this, is what I’d most like to be wearing when I lead.

It says stability, dynamics, and power. For me what this look does is demand to be taken seriously and emphasize the physical power of the female body. To make it look good, you have to deliver, dance-wise. I’m not really delivering in the previous video from Provence, it's just barely ok, but I’m fine with that. I will one day. Lena does.

I encourage you to click through to the video and watch the whole thing, but with particular attention to the walk from 01:58, ending with the "Wonder Woman" turn from 02:17 to 02:27. Why would you watch any stage show when you could watch that?

She dances basically the same style and technique as Carlitos, but it looks totally different because her body is totally different, and this look reveals that difference instead of replacing and concealing it with another, artificial one.

The problem with this style is that although it's not remotely masculine, and it also looks great, it is still read as a leading look. It’s also just not what I’d most like to follow in. The problems can be overcome, up to a point, by changing shoes, but it puts too much on the shoes, practically speaking. If I really want to spend half my time following (or more), in most social situations, I need to do something more complicated.

The Mermaid

John William Waterhouse, The Mermaid (1901)

Nudity above and scales below: “It is really no wonder that women seeking a definitive costume in which to enact their definitive escape from such mythology should choose trousers … women have ordinary working legs, just like men (not … flashing under tinselly froth) … ” (Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits)

So I am often searching for a compromise:

If I wear a dress, I will get new dances as a follower. If not, I will mostly only get old ones. I will generally get new and old dances as a leader no matter what I wear, if conditions are otherwise good in the sense that there are plenty of people I want to dance with and they know enough to watch the floor and look for invitations, and provided I can get the first one.

I want an outfit that looks like a dress to the men, feels like a dress to me, in the sense of formal, glamorous and appealing (complex and questionable concepts I don’t have time to unpack in a 15 minute talk or in an overlong blog post), but at the same time gives me a unified outline, looks 'right' with both heels and flat shoes (2), and steps away from the Mundial look, because the Mundial look mostly does my head in.

Recovering 'femininity" in mermaid trousers

Milonga with Andreas Wichter
at Abrazos 2017. Click through
for video (3) © Matthew Cooper

Ballet slippers. © the author

This outfit is a pretty good compromise, but not the final word. I have this in black, in purple and silver, and in peacock blue and green, with or without midriff exposure.

It's extremely comfortable and cool to wear, and the rather 1910s shape works well on my figure. It looks relatively serious, but can be very colourful. It looks equally complete and harmonious with heels and with ballet slippers - just not with my 'good' leading shoes.

It even has pockets. They're concealed between hip and knee,  and are more than adequate for a tissue and, if necessary, my glasses.

I feel totally comfortable following, and pretty good leading. It’s what I wear at festivals where following is a priority for me, but I will still want to lead.

Men understand that they can invite me, but they still think they need to look at the shoes – and indeed, sometimes this is exactly what I want.

I do change shoes, but not always. And here, we get beyond how I decide what to wear, into how I decide what to do. I wear this look when that decision is going to be made on the fly, and is going to be difficult. I decide who I want to dance with - both partner and role - based on availability, partner, and music. That's a lot to fit in to a few seconds, but it can be done. Each person has a different feeling depending on the role as well as the music.

For other occasions, I find that I now usually wear some sort of ‘leading lady’ look; unless I’ve made a decision to sacrifice dances as a lead to the waiting-around time required to get dances as a follower, for instance because it’s my first visit to a place and I’m going “undercover”. (4)

So, when I get dressed to dance, I am usually embodying some sort of compromise. How complicated the decision is depends on many things, including the time and the place, who else will be there, my self-expression, their possible interpretations, how I feel about the event, and how I feel about whatever I am doing. The process of creating my solutions over time is a constant and stimulating artistic endeavour. 

Dressing as a man, in (almost) exactly what (some of) the women wear

“ ... trousers and tailoring and short hair are now wholly female in themselves … it follows that current male clothes have less of a uniquely masculine meaning even when men wear them … during the second half of the twentieth century, women finally took over the total male scheme of dress, modified it to suit themselves, and have handed it back to men charged with immense new possibilities.” (Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits)

Signing off, I’d like to reflect and remark for a moment on what the men do. I’ll show you my two friends here (both of whom follow socially a lot) and point out that what they are wearing is very stylish, but nothing like the men’s “Mundial” look. They are both just very well-dressed; with lots of personality, but no eccentricity. And as far as my observation goes, that's true of almost all the men who actually get dances as followers at the kinds of events I go to. And I find, when I honestly reflect, that it is exactly what gets my attention if I want to lead them.

What we actually see on men in social dancing – not just those who follow – is a riot of colour, texture, and interesting detail. Floral prints, contrasting piping, bright linings, stripes, suede, snake-skin, colourful shoes – I’ve seen hologram glitter – night-time satin shirts, tailored “milonguero trousers” with complex construction and flattering unnecessary seams, bright bits of pocket lining, embroidery, and a special extra pocket for the fan. The women are much more likely to wear smooth and unified black.

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Footnotes
(1) If you want one, ask me and I'll get you a referral code for modest discount. If you are a woman, it's best to ring them up and request the internal pockets, rather than just order online, but it doesn't cost any more. 
(2) The questions of how clothes look "right" or "wrong", and what that really means, is extensively discussed by Hollander in Seeing Through Clothes, in which she treats it as an aspect of the history of Western visual art. I am not sure that the conclusions are fully supported by the evidence, but I found it full of beautiful and inspiring ideas. 
(3) If you click through this video you may notice the leader in front of Andreas and me, whose solution to the same problem is different from mine.
(4) Reflecting as I edit for the blog, there's definitely something that I haven't unpacked about the connection between femininity and youthfulness, and how that creates a tension with what looks 'right' for leading. There are lots of trousers that are wholly feminine, but specifically not youthful. We might say that both split skirts and skinny jeans, when worn by a woman, are both youthful and feminine because they expose the knees; however, the aesthetics and physical requirements of the dance generally suggest that the motion of the leader's knees should be somewhat heavily glossed over. All types of harem trousers, and a lot of lamé, could be seen as sidestepping the conceptual youthfulness of female knees. I don't know what the answer is, for the present. Maybe it's a basque, or something.

Following and information

Having the opportunity to learn to follow before attempting to lead - which women do by social right, and men once did for practical reasons - is not only a matter of having better information than someone who comes to it 'cold'.

It also allows you to solve about 90% of the big physical problems of posture, axis, embrace, balance, coordination, control of momentum, cognition and proprioception, before you start worrying about any of the much smaller number of problems that are specific to leading. 

For me, leading is mostly just one quite challenging problem, which is training my brain to perceive and command a lot of quite complex and unexpected movements that my body can already easily do. And solving that one problem gets slowly but steadily easier with practice. 

Most of the other problems are relatively straightforward, when taken in isolation from the problems that are common to both leading and following. You can focus properly on the specific problems and solve them without confusion.

Another benefit is that you have already developed an accurate idea of what you might want to do, and why, which makes you unlikely to waste much time on classes that are not useful. I don't bother learning to lead anything I don't personally like to follow.

A third is that you have access to good followers and are in a state where you can avoid annoying them, if you have any trace of sense, and repay their investment in you quickly. 

And a fourth is that, with luck, you may also have found, or even become part of, one or more communities where the leaders behave nicely on the dancefloor rather than some combination of charging about like ants on coke, wrestling and pouting. This will reduce the stressful side, and also give you access to crucial information.

All these are blessings. But if you learn to follow well and then start leading and take it seriously, you damn well ought to be better than average in a couple of years, or you're doing it wrong.

Judging Correlation in the Mundial de Tango (more Fun with Data)

Ok, in the previous post I said that there's no agreement among the judges during the final of the Mundial de Tango (Pista) or Tango World Championship. I showed you the charts that convinced me, but I didn't properly measure and show the degree of disagreement.

This second Power BI report has a page for each year available. You can select any two individual judges and see how far they agreed with each other about how to rank the couples. So, if you think, for example, that two of the judges dance a similar style to each other, you can see* if their opinions about the finalists' quality of dance correlate with each other. (Spoiler: nope.)**

To change the year, move to the next page using the arrows at the bottom centre. If the report is too small, misbehaves, or won't fit on your screen properly, try popping it out with the diagonal arrow thing at the bottom right hand corner. You might have to scroll the selectors right and left to see all the judges.


The judges' rankings of the couples do not correlate with one another.

1.00 is a perfect correlation: each judge agrees perfectly with him-or-her self. A low correlation between two judges means they didn't agree much, and a negative correlation would mean they ranked the couples in the opposite way to each other. There are one or two cases of small negative correlations.

I'm sure all the judges' opinions on people's dancing, in various circumstances, are highly valuable - that's why they were picked to judge - but they have nothing to do with one another, and their collective decisions are therefore, to put it mildly, not much help to anyone else in distinguishing between the finalists.

One reasonable interpretation of this result is that the judges have an impossible task; all the couples in the final dance in much the same way, and there is no real difference between them that the judges could possibly agree about. It is as though you, I, and five of our mates solemnly and conscientiously gave scores to the aesthetic qualities of six eggs from the same nest.

Why are the eggs all from the same nest? Perhaps because any excellent dancer with a visually-apparent difference of style and musicality would, on the face of it, have much to lose and nothing to gain by entering this competition. But even if the dancers were different, while all good, it's not clear that would help; it might be even more meaningless to decide between them.

There may be different interpretations: go ahead and put them in the comments, and let's see if we can think of a way to tell which is right. One would be that there are real differences, but the judges don't agree about which ones are important; they are using totally individual and independent criteria. No information is published about what criteria they use.

In order to distinguish between the couples, the judges would have to agree both on what differences exist and on which ones are important. For example, because of the way the couples get to the final, one of them is usually much older and less mobile than the others. It seems to me that the judges have agreed that the differences which go with that are not important, although I don't have the couple-number data to show that; the only way to get it is to watch the video.

As for what it means, and whether it is a good thing, we began to talk about this in the comments on the previous post.

I think it is a good thing that the Mundial is not like a ballroom competition, with the rigidity and the arms-race that implies; that could be very toxic for something that wants to remain a living social dance.  I don't think that finding the best dancers out of a good bunch is what the Mundial is really for. As I said before, it makes more sense to think that its purpose is to bring a steady stream of decent young salonsters to public notice, while honouring the occasional veteran; it's a very pretty industry-promotion and heritage-publicity thingie, not a sport.

Indeed, perhaps the Mundial has a somewhat paradoxical role in protecting tango from ballroomisation. All the finalists indisputably have good looking technique, whereas there are ballroom schools teaching a genuinely ballroomised argentine tango with a totally different  technique and approach, completely clueless about the social scene. The international dance associations even include it in some of their competitions (and that, for UK readers, was what Vincent and Flavia were up to with their "Tango World Champions" thing, which I've explained elsewhere). We can fairly confidently say that nobody dancing that way would ever get to the Mundial final, at least not in the Pista category - and that is a good thing. It's good that the Mundial exists and people can discover, quite easily, that the ballroom competitions are not it. But the relationship between regular ballroom schools, various international dance organisations, and Argentine tango, is another interesting subject for further research.

It would be great to have judge-level scores from earlier rounds. I'd expect to see a lot more agreement at the lower end; if we could combine that with video, we'd be able to learn something about what criteria are really being applied. And, if so, I'd expect to find that those criteria are by their nature useless in the final. Unfortunately, that data isn't published. If you think you can obtain it, please comment.

Bottom line: there's no evidence here that there's any point in remembering who won.

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*You'll notice some straight vertical and horizontal lines in the charts. Judges rank a lot of couples equal with one another. They don't give forty different marks to forty different couples. I haven't done the calculations over the marks seperately from the rankings; I thought doing rankings would be clearer, as the judges don't work around any common average. Some judges give out marks only from a restricted set of integers, but others try to make fine distinctions. They see each couple dance three tracks. The see them in groups of ten to a dozen couples, and the couples don't all dance the same tracks - have a look at the post on Music in the Mundial for a description of the procedure, and links to video. 
** To be fair, there is one case of a nearly 0.7 correlation, which is very impressive compared with all the others, and you probably could say the two judges involved went together. I won't spoil that one, as it would be much better if you tried to predict who it would be and then looked. Maybe it's real, or maybe it just had to happen accidentally somewhere. There are also some cases of unimpressive 0.3 or 0.4 correlations looking strong against a background of zero to negative correlations. People who are personally acquainted with the judges might feel there was something to say there, but I'm sceptical that it isn't pure chance.

Judging in the Mundial Final (Fun with Data)

You would think it would be easy to download the scores for a fairly simple dance competition. There are forty-odd pairs of competitors, there are seven judges, the judges observe the competitors doing their thing, and each judge utters a score for each pair. The scores are recorded and tabulated, an average is calculated for each pair, and they are ranked accordingly. It's that simple. They don't even do a 'sporting average' - which would mean they knocked off the highest and lowest scores before calculation. Repeat yearly.

As it turned out, it's rather a pain, but the data for 2015 was published by someone who apparently knew what they were doing and could create a relatively sensible PDF table of results, so I started there. But below, you can explore results for each year from 2012, which is where we start to get half-way useful data. [Edit: I forgot to mention that I use, here, only the Tango Pista (improvised Tango de Salon) competition in the Mundial. I do not look at Tango Escenario (choreographed 'Stage Tango'). That might be a useful comparison.]

The data is not perfect; in particular there are errors in the names of couples where I had to look these up from different documents that were very poorly formatted and I didn't have time to fix all the problems. There are lots of messed-up accented characters, and some town or country names mixed in with the couple names. But relationship between couple ID number and score should always be right, and the name recognisable, where it's available at all.

It's possible that there is cleaner data somewhere else, but I decided to go entirely from the official website and do the data cleaning myself. If two people do this independently, that's no bad thing.

Before starting, I had some questions.

1. How much agreement is there between the judges about which couples are better than others?
2. If the highest and lowest scores were rejected before calculating the average, as is done in most competitions with subjective scoring, how much difference would it make to the results? 
3. Supposing there is agreement between the judges, is there anything we can observe about the couples that explains high or low scores?

Below, I've embedded a Power BI dashboard addressing these questions.

It's interactive. You can navigate between the pages using the arrows at the bottom, and select the year using buttons.  It has a page of notes, but I'm going to repeat the gist of them below. The big tables take several seconds to load. If you can't see it well, it may behave better if you make it full screen using the arrow thing at bottom right.



The data all comes from http://festivales.buenosaires.gob.ar/, but you can download my cleaned-up compilation instead (from a few minutes after posting time).

For some years, the names of the couples are not given in the final rankings, only their competition numbers. Where possible, I have looked up the names from the published scores of preliminary rounds. I assume that the couple's ID number stays the same throughout the competition. Not all couple numbers appear in the scores of preliminary rounds, perhaps because they reached the final via other rounds in other countries or other competitions. In these cases, the couple name reads "Not Provided" with the year and ID number.

In this report, as well as the official average, I also calculate what I call the "sporting average" as used in most subjectively scored competitions; that is, the average if you ignore the couple's highest and lowest score. Finally I calculate the standard deviation of the scores.

The pages are as follows:

1. Scores chart - shows the scores given by each judge in the selected year.
2. Hi/Lo chart - shows the high and low scores averages for each couple.
3. Ranks chart - shows how far the judges agreed on how to rank the couples.
4. Scores table - shows how many places each couple moves if you ignore high and low scores in calculating the average.
5. Ranks table - shows detail of how each judge ranked the couples. If they gave two couples equal scores, those couples get the same rank.
6. Competition ID - we'll come back to this below.
7. Notes, basically this information.
8. A table of all the data, not as it looks in the underlying spreadsheet, but as it looks after Power Query mashes all the years into one data set for calculations. This also shows the average score and the standard deviation calculated over the population as a whole; you can select individual years and judges.

Question 1: agreement between the judges

There is not very much consensus between the judges on either the score or the ranking of any particular couple. They make it difficult for themselves to make fine distinctions by not awarding the full range of marks. Marks are out of ten, but the lowest that appears in any of the clasificatorias (not shown in this data) is 3.75.

I see a floor in the marks for the final; in 2015 the flat lines at 7 stand out in the scatter of scores, as though the judges felt collectively that anything lower would be impolite.

The second-placed couple in 2015 has a high score of 10 and a low score equal to that of the lowest couple. The first-placed couple were not ranked first by any judge. The only couple ranked first by more than one judge was placed 9th. To find the lowest-ranked who were placed top by at least one judge, we have to go down the couple ranked 25th overall. The lowest-ranked couple with a top-three ranking from at least one judge were placed 39th of the 41 couples. Looking at the other years, 2015 does not look atypical. In 2012 and 2013, exactly one of the top five was placed first by more than one judge, and in 2014 two of them were, including the winners.

There seems, looking at the Hi-Lo charts, to be slightly more consensus at the bottom than at the top, but this could be just because of the unofficial floors (which it looks as though not every judge agrees on). When I look at the chart of rankings, rather than scores, I don't see any more agreement at the lower end than the higher end.

In the ranking table, you can de-select a particular judge or combination of judges to see how your favourite couple might have done without them.

On only two occasions from 2012 has any one of the top five couples been placed first by more than one single judge.

On the final page of the report you can look at the standard deviation in the scores awarded by individual judges. Some judges appear in more than one year, sometimes with their names formatted differently, as full names were given in only one year. If a judge has a higher standard deviation, it means they awarded a wider range of marks; presumably, they were more convinced that some couples were better than others. A lower standard deviation means they awarded similar marks to everyone. Unfortunately the judges don't seem to agree on which couples they are, or are not, so convinced about.

Question 2: Sporting Average

Because the marks are, in my view, all over the place anyway, eliminating high and low scores before calculating the average doesn't make a lot of difference to the competition overall. It does make a difference to individual couples: it would have reversed the top 2 in 2015, and the couple placed 30th would have risen 8 places. This is the largest gain in any year, and also occurred in 2014. The largest loss is 12 places in 2012, and there seem to be bigger losses than gains for individual couples generally; someone goes down by a lot and everyone they drop below gains one. This seems consistent with the observed 'marking floor'; when a judge disagrees with their peers, they apparently tend to do so by awarding a very high mark rather than by going below the general 'floor' for that year.

Question 3: Is there anything we can observe about the couples that goes with high or low scores?

There isn't, in my view, enough agreement between the judges - or enough good video - to say much about this question.

I noticed is that there was a pattern to the numbers pinned on the couples' suits; there are a lot more lower ones. Closer inspection of the source data shows that this probably has something to do with the geographical origin of the couple and their route to the final. The system of awarding numbers is not covered in the published rules, but it seems the lower numbers are given in Buenos Aires and the higher numbers further afield.

So, taking this as a proxy for where couples came from, I checked to see if it was also related to their scores, and this is shown in the final chart, "Competition ID". Answer: not really.

The line in the same chart shows the average score for each block of 10. There are more couples with lower numbers, so perhaps we'd expect their average score to end up closer to the overall average of all couples than it is; it's rather higher. But those couples are also likely to have had more serious competition in previous rounds, which should also drive their average up compared to everyone else arriving via other routes. There isn't an obvious relationship between couple number and score as such. The foreigners are fine too, there just aren't that many of them.

More precise geographical origin of the couples is at least partially given in the source data, but as it's mostly in the form of tiny flags in graphics it would be a lot more work to get it, which I haven't done.

So, basically, no, there isn't anything I can say about how to do well, based on this data. There's no couple who did so clearly well or so clearly badly that you could watch and learn.

General remarks

In my own opinion, it's rather unrealistic of me to look at the Mundial as though it were a sporting competition. If it were you were really going for an exciting sporting competition, or some sort of mechanism for identifying the best dancers, then you would probably design a rather different event. It might, for example, include challenging tests of the ability to dance well to a variety of music, including milonga and vals, on a floor more than one-third full. There might be more rounds, with the judges taking longer looks at fewer couples in each. Judging criteria would be a matter of public record, rather than rumour. And there would be a system for creating agreement between the judges over time, beyond simply agreeing that scores below 7 were impolite. What it is, rather, is a marketing exercise for the 'Tango Salon' industry, designed to honour the heritage and disseminate awareness of the music and dance, while bringing lots of young couples who dance in a certain popular, standard-ish way, to public attention and prosperity.

If you are choosing a teacher, having reached the final in the Mundial indicates that a couple dance well in a particular style and have good tango technique, at least when dancing with their competition partner - as opposed to the very different sort of technique that is used for "Argentine Tango" on Strictly Come Dancing. It is not evidence that even one judge in the final thought they were the best. They may have been, but the chances are the judges didn't know - or if they thought they knew, they certainly didn't agree - in which case, I definitely don't know, and you don't know, either. Their ranking within the final says very little, if anything at all.

This is, in my opinion, pretty much how it should be. I don't think a true sporting competition in these circumstances would necessarily be a good idea. It didn't do ballroom any good, as a social dance.

In particular, I think it's probably a good thing that the judges don't agree. Standardisation would be toxic.

I do have a couple more questions.

• Can we seperate the level of disagreement between the judges from the question of whether there is any real difference between the couples that they could possibly measure? I can compare the real data with simulated data based on having and not having a real difference, and the results are amusing, but I think I end up assuming what I set out to prove. It might be more interesting to compare the Campeonato de la Ciudad.
• Does the order in which the couples are called - in four rondas - have any relation to their scores? I do have at least partial data for this, but putting it together requires some more work.
• It would be nice to have tidy data about geographical origin, but again, it's a lot of work to peer at all the little flags in the published data and write down what they are, and it probably doesn't tell us much more than the competition ID numbers do; most of the people who are both interested in entering this competition, and competent enough to do well, are Argentinians.

Anyway, enjoy interacting with the report, and go ahead, share and comment. I'll upload the data so you can download it and do your own analysis.

Mundial Dialogue (Fun with Data)

This dialogue is an imaginary summary of at least a full day of faffing about trying to get the data together.

HEDGEHOG

Hello. I notice there is rather a lack of anything fact-based about how the Mundial actually works, the judging, and so on. I'd like to download all the published results from previous years and analyse them to see if I can say anything interesting about it.

MUNDIAL

Hello. We have a website that covers each year since 2009, and most of the results are probably there somewhere, except for 2009 when they aren't.

HEDGEHOG
Great, I can get all the files and mash up the data with Power Query.

MUNDIAL

We don't publish any individual judge scores, even for the semifinal or finals, before 2012.

HEDGEHOG

Not to worry. Four years is a good start.

MUNDIAL

Before 2012, the results are sensible tables. From 2012 onwards, the semi-finals and finals are just PDFs of pictures of the scores. We don't name the couples. For 2014 and 2015 we do name the couples, but seperately from the scores, and in different formats.

HEDGEHOG

I have access to some pretty good OCR technology, I have a great text editor, I know Regular Expressions, I have Power Query, and if it comes to that, I can put the PDF on my tablet on a book-chair and retype it all at 50wpm. I bet you named most of the couples in the classification rounds.

MUNDIAL

The links for the 2012 Final and Semifinal are broken. Those documents are just Error 404s.

HEDGEHOG

But I know exactly how these things work, and I can guess, by analogy with documents that are there,  that for the final, instead of http://www.tangobuenosaires.gov.ar/festivalymundial12/web/resources/FinalesTangoSalon.pdf

you meant http://festivalesanteriores.buenosaires.gob.ar/tango/festivalymundial12/web/resources/FinalesTangoSalon.pdf. And for the Semifinal, instead of http://festivalesanteriores.buenosaires.gob.ar/tango/festivalymundial12/web/es/Semifinal_Salon.pdf, you made a different mistake and you actually meant http://festivalesanteriores.buenosaires.gob.ar/tango/festivalymundial12/web/resources/Semifinal_Salon.pdf.

MUNDIAL

Do you think this is a good idea?

HEDGEHOG
Do you think you're going to win this?

Music of the Mundial Final

This post studies the music used in the final of the Mundial de Tango in the years 2012-2015. I have no information about how or why the music is chosen, or whether any guidelines exist for the person or committee choosing the music. In this post I simply observe what they actually chose.

Data

I compiled this data by watching the videos in this playlist. They are kindly provided by Aires de Milonga, a website I recommend; they provide these videos for nothing, but they offer additional services to those who subscribe a very small annual sum via Paypal.

Each final consists of approximately forty couples, and is divided into four Rondas. For each ronda, three tracks are played. Only tangos are used; no milonga or vals.

Over the four years, this gives a total of 3 x 4 x 4 = 48 tracks, but there are actually 49, because in the first ronda of 2013 something happens off-camera during track 3 that bumps the floor and disturbs the competitors' concentration. A fourth track is played, in the same style.

To begin with, I noted the orchestra, singer, and title of each track.  I then searched for the tracks on tango.info and on YouTube until I was reasonably satisfied that I had identified them correctly.

The full data set can be downloaded here: if you notice an error, please describe it in the comments. The tracks are announced at about the 3-minute mark of each ronda, immediately after the couples do their preliminary walk around the floor so the judges can see their numbers.

Observations

Style rotation

I perceived the tracks for each ronda as covering a predominantly dramatic style, a predominantly rhythmic style, and an in-between, lyrical, or other style, in no particular order. I have added these wholly subjective categorisations in the full data set. You will probably disagree with at least some of them, perhaps many. The word "Lyrical" is fairly meaningless and just refers to the in-between or mixed or melody-led style of track that isn't either of the others; often it is the track that would allow competitors to show off the technical achievement of a slow, smooth, graceful walk. I may update my classifications to make them a bit more meaningful and regular.

The use of these three broad styles in each ronda makes sense on the basis that each couple gets the chance to show off a broad range of technical and musical powers. Each ronda in each final obviously needs to be stylistically similar to the other two. I note, though, that 40 couples seems a lot for a 'final'; the naive observer might have expected to see, say, only ten different couples, and see them dance for a little longer or to a wider range of music.

Orchestras

The orchestras used looked like this.

Orchestras of recordings used in the final of the Mundial de Tango, 2012-2015

It seems notable to me that there is absolutely no Biagi, and absolutely no Canaro.

Given the volume and excellence of their output, if they were going to be used at all, you'd think they'd be in there somewhere, over the four years. If you were practicing for the final, and you didn't have this data, you might spend time with those guys; but it seems you'd be wrong.

It can imagine a pretty good argument for not using any Biagi. There's no reasonable substitute, so if you used, say, one of the great Biagi instrumentals in one ronda, it might seem very unfair not to use another in each of the four Rondas. Everybody needs a roughly equal chance to either shine or make fools of themselves; and that would make Biagi too prominent and would mean you had to sacrifice something else. I hypothesise that if there were a vals competition, there'd be plenty of Biagi in there.

There is already a widely-held belief that Argentinians consider Canaro a bit 'common'. Nothing in this data really supports or dispels such an idea; but they don't use any in the final. Nor do they use any of the orchestras that come to mind as stylistically similar to Canaro's most currently-popular output; Lomuto, OTV, Carabelli, Típica Porteña, etc. So it does support the idea that this style of music is not considered appropriate for competition. And again, if there were a milonga competition, we'd see Canaro.

Years of Recording

This is what the years of recording look like.

Year of recordings used in the final of the Mundial de Tango, 2012-2015

It's notable that there's a long tail to the right, stretching all the way to 1959, but nothing at all on the left earlier than 1934.

Decade of recordings used in the final of the Mundial de Tango, 2012-2015

It's no suprise that most of it is from the 40s. But the notable thing for me is that more than a fifth of the recordings are after 1949; they slightly outnumber the ones from the 30s.

Commentary

If you were doing well in the Mundial and you were practicing for the final, it would make a lot of sense to spend about a fifth of your time on each of D'Arienzo, Di Sarli, Pugliese, and Troilo, and the other fifth on exploring how what you have learned applies to whatever else you like among tracks that can be used as stylistic subsitutes for those four; provided that it is not Biagi, not Canaro, and not anything recorded before 1934.

You would also think about three (or more - this is very subjective) broad classifications of style, and you would focus on forming a range of improvisational habits that worked well for each style, regardless of the orchestra.

If you dance socially in Europe, it might also make sense to spend some extra time improving your dance to the 50's output. There's some support in this data for the widespread idea that the Argentinians think the Golden Age of tango music began and ended five to ten years later than the Europeans think it did. You may be less familiar with the nearly 30% of these tracks that were recorded after 1945, and you will probably have no chance to show what you can do with anything before 1935, so that experience is somewhat wasted. Being able to hit 80% of Biagi's off-beats will also be 100% useless, while being able to dance to 50's tangos generally without getting the giggles could be something you need.

Further research, or exercises for the interested reader

Yesterday I attended the first round of the related competition organised in London (there were 14 couples, one from the UK). You might be wondering if the pattern I've seen here was followed, or if it is followed in your own local competition, or the European competition, or anywhere else. I haven't gone through my notes yet, but the data so far says no. Despite dividing thirteen couples into a rather excessive three rondas, I don't think they followed the rotation of styles, and Pablo played both Canaro and OTV. I probably won't attend rounds 2 or 3, as it costs £25 to get in, and that adds up to a bit much, but if you feel like having something to focus on while you're there, go ahead and collect the data. It would be good to note the couple numbers in each round, too, along with your personal top six, and the results.

My guess is that no guidelines are published anywhere about the music, so the practice in local competitions is probably completely unrelated to what's done in the final. I have not tried to collect data for the semi-finals, either, and there's no reason to assume it's the same.

An interesting exercise for the reader - or for further research - would be to consider what three tracks you would use if you wanted, by observation, to identify the best dancers - by your own definition - in a room.

[Edit: I think the announcement at yesterday's competition was that there were 13 couples, but my notes show 14 different numbers; so I've changed it to 14. I could be wrong].