Intentionality and Tango The term intentionality refers to the »philosophy of mind« by Brentano and the speech-act theory of Searle. Human interaction requires perception - the mental ability to notice, decode and interpret actions of the social environment to create intentionality as its mental representative. Intentionality designates the mental presence of objects and actions of the »real« world on the one hand, on the other hand it ́s not only a passive reflection of the concrete world but an active intervention on it motivated by action intentions. In Tango the action intention appears as an subjective imagination of dancing figure sequences. Due to the absence of verbal communication the collective intentionality of a couple becomes apparent in a body language expressed by steps sequences, turns of the torso or the subtle use of arm movements by the »closed embrace«. »the flow of sound, music and dance, for example, has striking resemblances to the flow of meaningful human discourse.« Erkki Soininen,

http://www.erkkisoininen.fi/aestetic.php Intentionality and Vintage Tango The dancing language of the traditional Tango is a closed dialogue curcuit with a classical sender-receiver-model of (male) leaders and (female) followers. The dancing intentionality primarily refers to a sclerotic pool of dancing figures (and their framework conditions), which dancers acquired through long-time exercises in workshops and »practicas«. This collective communication system is an indespensible prerequisite for the development of intentionality. The learning process is supported by framework conditions like the hierarchically dancing roles of leaders and followers, the closed embrace and the dancing circle on the dance floor. Intentionality and Neotango The dancing concept of Neotango turns its back on this restrictive set of dancing regulations and replaces it with a system of free improvisation. Instead of following a predefined arsenal of figures a permanent sender- sender feedback process creates impulses of movement. Additionally the dancing repertoire expands to free-flowing, multi-facetted meshes of moves by integrating contemporary dance concepts like Contact Improvisation, Butoh, Modern…

A few years ago, tango began a retrenchment. I first noticed it oozing from New York dancers visiting Boston in 2009, but soon saw it in Buenos Aires, felt its venom in Wellington and Sydney, and am now confronted with it regularly even here in radical Berlin. The retrenchment takes the form of extremely simple dancing in which the focus of the dance is not on interesting improvisation, but on musicality, and specifically rhythmic musicality accompanied by quite bigoted claims about any other values and priorities which could be pursued while dancing tango. It also involves an extremely narrow subset of tango music, eschewing contemporary orquestras, post-1950s compositions, and world music. In Berlin one gets the sense that the line of dance is more important than what you are doing in it. This is called “social tango”. That is the form. But I believe the substance of the retrenchment is sexism. Last week I interviewed Andreas. I love to dance

with him because he’s one of the few people who operates in a tango context with something approaching expressive freedom. It was he who used the term ‘Victorian’. I’ve been dancing about 8 years.  Here in Berlin there used to be much more creativity in the dancing.  Now there is a new tendency to  limit the range of moving the body in spite of all the skills we learned from 100 years of contemporary dance or Modern dance, (M. Graham, M. Cunnigham, P.Bausch….) and Tango Nuevo to open the body, to liberate the move, to explore movement in any direction, to learn from other disciplines.  And what’s strange is that it’s mostly the young people!  The dance in the classical scene remembers me sometimes of a new kind of Neo-Victorians.  The new ideal is not to open their legs too much, to make small, elegant, controlled movements.  They don’t want their bodies to move too much, too big, too expressive;…