The right to judge

I had been meaning to ask a friend of mine, who I know is a very competent tango salon dancer, why she teaches with a guy who dances something - I don't know what it is, but I know for sure it's not tango, yet it's labelled and marketed as tango. Said guy is a nice guy, and I'm sure he's not intentionally tricking people into thinking that what he does is tango. I'm sure that he does not know tango very much. But I know she knows tango, having her roots in Buenos Aires, travelling there once in a while and hanging out with the heavyweights of tango.

She said two things that irked me endlessly: first, that eventually everyone comes back to 'traditional', and second, which I wish to discuss in more detail, that no one has the right to judge anyone's dance. It seems like a trend in the US that tango is classified traditional or modern/nuevo, the latter having a more positive connotation. However, anyone who uses this classification has just put a big label on their forehead that says: I don't understand tango. Because tango is tango; there is no traditional/modern/nuevo. It's either tango or it's not. But more on that later.

The second argument, that no one has the right to judge anyone, irritated me because it seems like it's the political-correctness shield for mediocrity that people who are not confident about their dance use to defend themselves (An alternative argument used is "be open minded". I am very open minded, but crap is crap, no matter how open minded). I told her that she had all the right to judge his dance because she deserves a dance partner that shares her vision of tango, which I hope she has. But it goes beyond that: people learning tango have the right to see what the real tango is, and compare it to what quacks teach and call tango. People who love tango have the right to look down in disgust at those who are spreading something unpleasant looking and giving tango a bad name. Because having a competition of who can do a longer sequence of leg wraps with ganchos and colgadas and volcadas and soltadas is definitely not tango (for this is what the students end up doing, becoming clones of said teacher). People who want tango to be spread around the world the way it should be have the right to judge a teacher who does not know what they teach and harm the quality of local tango communities.

In fact, let me change that: people who love tango not only have the right to judge; people who love tango have the obligation to call out on shitty tango or non-tango.