I've been trying to get into some dance routines, starting with some simple ones like Swing or Canasta Tango, and I stumbled across a conundrum. The Canasta Tango, according to the pattern, has 28 steps. Twenty eight. 7x4. I'm no expert on tango in general, but my general knowledge of music patterns and those few clips of tangoes I found online say they are more or less simple 32-beaters, sometimes with a catchy 8-beat question-and-answer motif - all in all, the most typical 8x4 beat or a multiple thereof. And yet there's the 7, and people go and dance a 2x14-step pattern, seemingly ignoring the fact that they're shifting in regard to the music. Oh, there's also a 24-beat variant with some steps skipped, but that's only a bit better... So either the world has gone crazy and people dance with little concern for alignment with music, or I'm missing something. So which is it?
Edit: So Willow Waltz is 9x6 steps, which means that if the music has the usual 8-step verse, you steal one step from the next verse. 14-Step has 5x4 steps. But the Dutch Waltz, Swing Dance, Cha Cha, Fiesta Tango all follow a nice, proper 8x4/6. This is crazy.
Edit: So Willow Waltz is 9x6 steps, which means that if the music has the usual 8-step verse, you steal one step from the next verse. 14-Step has 5x4 steps. But the Dutch Waltz, Swing Dance, Cha Cha, Fiesta Tango all follow a nice, proper 8x4/6. This is crazy.