Secrets of Tango Vals

We are pleased to announce that we are starting brand new class ‘Secrets of Tango Vals’ – Mondays 7:30 – 9:15pm followed by non obligatory and not guided practice till 10:30pm.

Start date?
February 5th 7:30pm-9:15pm

Why Vals?

When the Vals tanda comes on during average Milonga you can immediately see attendees being divided into few groups.

One – those who don’t really hear the music and don’t even notice that the music changed happily proceeded with their Tango assuming that Vals is nothing but happy and faster tango.

Two – those who hear the difference and have enough knowledge or/and common sense to realize that there must be the difference in cadencia and interpretation of music between Tango and Vals. Since they hear and are capable of realizing that they lacking the knowledge they stay at the safety of their tables observing the brave ones on the dance floor.

Three – Those Who Know and Can Dance Vals.

The Monday class main goal will be to get into exclusivity of group #3: Those Who Know and Can Dance Vals.

Vals is probably the most joyful from three tango genres (Tango, Milonga and Vals) with it’s ¾ happy feel of spinning and floating.

The basic difference is hidden in its rhythm. Vals is written in ¾ notation, which means that one measure consists of 3 quarter notes. Since quarter notes can be divided in many other 8-, 16- 32-, 64-, etc value notes lets leave all this for the musicians and see what it means for us.

In Tango we count each measure as 1-2-3-4, but we only step on 1 and 3.
The Vals is much faster so even though we can distinguish 1-2-3, in the very basic interpretation of Vals we are only stepping on 1 and completely ignore the 2 and 3. How lazy of us….

What happens is that if we are only dancing on 1 and the phrase is still equal to 8 (or multiplications of 8) measures it is fairly easy to dance slow tango to vals music. Everything fits. It just seems slower then usual, but not extremely slow. That’s why we have all this confused souls from group 1.
READ MORE at http://www.UltimateTango.com