with Graham and Nathalie
When you first start to learn tango you soon begin to hear lots of unfamiliar words, such as ganchos, ochos, giros (although your teacher will insist it is pronounced ‘heroes’), sacadas, and more. If you speak Spanish you may recognise some of them – although probably badly pronounced, but what do hooks, eights, turns, and ‘taking away’ have to do with anything? And why do different teachers seem to use them to refer to slightly different things?
Most dances are based on a variety of steps that are strung together – or choreographed - into a sequence. The steps all have names, and there may be some sort of agreed standardisation of what a particular step must look like. This is particularly true for dances that have exams or grades, but even for less formal dances there are often commercial interests or agreed standards that teachers are expected to follow.
Tango, however, is different. There are many different styles of tango in use around the world, and yet not only are they all still recognisably ‘tango’, but dancers who learn one style can almost always dance successfully with dancers from a different style. This is because tango is not based on steps, but on ‘technique’, and regardless of the visual style of tango the technique remains the same.
The names you hear do not refer to particular steps, but to techniques used by the leader to communicate a movement to the follower, and by the follower to indicate their response to the leader. This forms the ‘language’ of tango, and the labels are used as a shorthand to refer to these various techniques. Because teachers tend to teach using specific examples of dance sequences (or steps), their students tend to associate these words with specific movements. Then when they go to a different class and find that the new teacher does something different for a “sacada” or a “boleo” that does not look the same as they are used to they get confused.
Names are useful as they help us to remember what we did and replicate it later, but focus on the technique used rather than the specific movement and you will really start to understand tango.
There is a glossary of common tango words on our website. If there is something missing that you have heard somewhere and did not understand then let us know and we will try to add it.