Gotta Tango - Alberto Paz and Valorie Hart

Gotta Tango

by Alberto Paz and Valorie Hart

NEW, 216 pages plus DVD

Get other Dance books here

About Gotta Tango

Gotta Tango is a superior instructional package for learning how to dance the authentic Argentine tango at a social level. Master teachers Alberto Paz and Valorie Hart take you on a journey through the rich culture, history, and music of Buenos Aires that inspired the romantic passion, alluring creativity, and natural elegance of the Argentine tango dance. You will learn the fundamentals and roles each partner plays in this exhilarating and intimate social dance. 

The book describes, illustrates, and explains the fundamental concepts and techniques, while the DVD visually demonstrates real dance situations with a partner. This combination provides tango lessons that are infinitely more effective than a stand-alone book or video product—and will have you dancing with confidence in less time than you thought possible.

Each tango dancer has a unique way of expressing movements. Gotta Tango offers a logical, structured approach that will help you learn quickly how to move spontaneously with a partner and with the music. It provides the tools you will use every day as a tango dancer as you immerse yourself in the experience, pleasure, and addiction of dancing the Argentine tango. 

About Alberto Paz and Valorie Hart

Alberto Paz and Valorie Hart own Planet Tango, a company dedicated to preserve, foster, and advance the traditional values of the Argentine Tango culture, with a school and tango salon located in New Orleans, LA. They produce the widely successful New Orleans TangoFest each year. Together, Paz and Hart conduct master Argentine Tango classes, as well as lectures and workshops in cities across America and the world. They also publish El Firulete, an online international Argentine Tango magazine in English, and they have been featured dancers on the Buenos Aires TV show, Tango around the World. With their Web site, www.Planet-Tango.com, Paz and Hart provide dancers the opportunity to network on an international level.

Paz is a native of Argentina and grew up in the city of Buenos Aires, while Hart was born in the United State and is ballet trained with experience in both off-Broadway and summer stock. The two met in 1995 during a tango conference and workshop at Stanford University. Since then, the pair has made Argentine tango dancing their business.

They have developed a methodology based on the fundamental structure of the dance combining traditional and modern concepts of improvisation originally developed in the 1930s, updated in the 1990s, and successfully utilized in workshops in cities across America and around the world since 1997.

They have become knowledgeable educators with a proven record of providing expert instruction while examining the romance, passion, and emotion that fuel the authentic Argentine tango. 

About Dance

Dance is an art form that generally refers to movement of the body, usually rhythmic and to music, used as a form of expression, social interaction or presented in a spiritual or performance setting.

Dance may also be regarded as a form of nonverbal communication between humans, and is also performed by other animals (bee dance, patterns of behaviour such as a mating dance). Gymnastics, figure skating and synchronized swimming are sports that incorporate dance, while martial arts kata are often compared to dances. Motion in ordinarily inanimate objects may also be described as dances (the leaves danced in the wind).

Definitions of what constitutes dance are dependent on social, cultural, aesthetic, artistic and moral constraints and range from functional movement (such as folk dance) to virtuoso techniques such as ballet. Dance can be participatory, social or performed for an audience. It can also be ceremonial, competitive or erotic. Dance movements may be without significance in themselves, such as in ballet or European folk dance, or have a gestural vocabulary/symbolic system as in many Asian dances. Dance can embody or express ideas, emotions or tell a story.

Dancing has evolved many styles. Breakdancing and Krumping are related to the hip hop culture. African dance is interpretative. Ballet, Ballroom, Waltz, and Tango are classical styles of dance while Square and the Electric Slide are forms of step dances.

Every dance, no matter what style, has something in common. It not only involves flexibility and body movement, but also physics. If the proper physics is not taken into consideration, injuries may occur.

Choreography is the art of creating dances. The person who creates (i.e., choreographs) a dance is known as the choreographer.

Dance does not leave behind clearly identifiable physical artifacts such as stone tools, hunting implements or cave paintings. It is not possible to say when dance became part of human culture. Dance has certainly been an important part of ceremony, rituals, celebrations and entertainment since before the birth of the earliest human civilizations. Archeology delivers traces of dance from prehistoric times such as the 9,000 year old Rock Shelters of Bhimbetka paintings in India and Egyptian tomb paintings depicting dancing figures from c. 3300 BC.

One of the earliest structured uses of dances may have been in the performance and in the telling of myths. It was also sometimes used to show feelings for one of the opposite gender. It is also linked to the origin of "love making." Before the production of written languages, dance was one of the methods of passing these stories down from generation to generation.

Another early use of dance may have been as a precursor to ecstatic trance states in healing rituals. Dance is still used for this purpose by many cultures from the Brazilian rainforest to the Kalahari Desert.

Sri Lankan dances goes back to the mythological times of aboriginal yingyang twins and "yakkas" (devils). According to a Sinhalese legend, Kandyan dances originate, 250 years ago, from a magic ritual that broke the spell on a bewitched king. Many contemporary dance forms can be traced back to historical, traditional, ceremonial, and ethnic dance.

Gotta Tango