There seems to be
something missing in the tango world, something I can't find anywhere, and it's
foxtrot. We have it from older dancers, especially from Osvaldo and
Coca (in the MP interview I think - I don't have time to check it out) that
foxtrot was one of the dances that defined Argentine social dancing
in the 20s and 30s and 40s. I think Osvaldo said that any
'milonguero' who claims to have danced tango in the Golden Age and
can't foxtrot just wasn't really there. & yet...
where's the video of Osvaldo and Coca dancing foxtrot? I've never
seen a couple dancing anything that seemed to me remotely like
foxtrot during a jazz or rock tanda in Buenos Aires, and I've never
come across it in films of milongas either. If there is a video of
Buenos Aires foxtrot please let me know! I've looked but can't find
it.
It
was big! It's not just Osvaldo talking. Francisco Canaro recorded a lot of foxtrots like this, and also a charming foxtrot Chá para dos, better known in English as Tea
for Two: sadly,
the audio quality isn't great.
It's
curious
that Canaro's syncopation in
foxtrot is
really lively,
but he doesn't
use it much in the tangos he recorded around that time,
as if he felt it out of place. His
jazz band recordings started around 1923, and there are plenty of
them over the following years, although tango remained his main
output.
I
came across this video of Oscar
Casas and Ana Miguel.
The
title calls it 'La
colegiala (fox trot)'
. La
colegiala seems
to be a popular song from a Columbian band, recorded in 1983, but I'm
not sure
it's really
foxtrot music*.
As
to the dance, Oscar
would be in a position to have learned foxtrot
from
the older dancers, but
I think his dance resembles
tango as much as anything. But
perhaps
the two dances are similar?
Foxtrot
was one of the dances of the American jazz scene in the early 1920s, but it was taken
over and popularised
as
a ballroom dance at some stage, with
the characteristic open embrace. There are a few old Pathe clips of foxtrot on YouTube which suggest the original dance. To me,
this, danced in close embrace, remains the best: others are more
flamboyant and showy. It also seems to show patterns that aren't that
far from stuff that's danced in tango and I get the feel of a relaxed
musicality, although the bouncy tip-toe style is very far from salon
tango. These
Pathe videos are early all right, but that means from the silent era,
so the music was added later. &
there's a foxtrot lesson here, taught by 'Santos Casani, the well-known Teacher of Dancing', using an novel 'special glass floor', from
1931. Maybe something of the old version survived: the great photographer Don McCullin talks in a documentary about dancing foxtrot, 'the naughty kind, not the ballroom
version' when he was growing up in the UK in the late 1940s.
But
the Buenos Aires version? I'd be very interested to see it.
* See comments!
* See comments!
