Varieties in Vals
Traditional Tango music is generally categorised as either Tango, Tango Vals (or Vals for short) and Tango milonga (milonga for short). There are sometimes even finer divisions, which I won’t go into here.
Just as in the more commonly-known Waltz, Vals has the familiar ‘1-2-3’ rhythm, with ‘1’ being the heavy beat. However, that is where the similarity ends. In Vals, unlike Waltz, the timing between the beats is not universal, and can be faster or slower from one song to the next. I am not sufficiently trained musically to offer any satisfactory explanation for this, but I can assure you that this can be felt very intuitively.
Firstly, the music
Attended a workshop by Gladys Fernandez and Ricardo Gallo tonight. Hard to believe it, but this year actually marks their fifth in Singapore! How time flies…
The content of the course can be summed up in a few words: feel the rhythm of the music and express it. The dynamics in Tango were expressed using the simple framework of slow-slow-quick-quick-quick, to some songs from Biagi and D’Arienzo in particular. But how they danced with so much feelings and expression using very simple steps! As they kept saying, the Tango is danced with the whole body, not just with the feet, and not just with the brain.