Villa Urquiza Style: Marketing Buzzword or Actual Style?
Everyone has heard about the traditional Argentine tango. It's a passionate dance often associated with smoky tango clubs and late nights.
There's also the ballroom tango, which is tango branched out into a competitive sport with strict rules.
But what about the Villa Urquiza style?
Beginners can easily become overwhelmed with the different tango styles out there. The tango masters have definitely gone through the same thing, questioning everything just to get a deeper understanding of the dance. One of the questions posed in the world of tango is:
“Is Villa Urquiza an actual style of tango, or is it just a marketing buzzword?”
Let's take a closer look at Villa Urquiza style and try to answer once and for all.
Villa Urquiza, the Barrio
When learning about the “Estilo Villa Urquiza,” the first thing to know is that it's related to Villa Urquiza, a barrio near the northern border of Buenos Aires.
Today, the barrio is a highly residential area, home to many beautiful old houses and modern apartments.
The barrio was founded towards the end of the 19th century by Francisco Seeber, made up of three smaller barrios named Villa Catalinas, Villa Mazzini and Villa Modelo.
On October 16th, 1901, the barrio was officially christened “Villa Urquiza,” paying homage to a President of Argentina from 1854 to 1860, Justo Jose de Urquiza.
Villa Urquiza might seem like just another barrio in the lively city of Buenos Aires. There are two long-standing milongas in the barrio, well-known to visitors worldwide: Sin Rumbo and Sunderland Club.
While many can say that it's typical to find milongas anywhere in Buenos Aires, Villa Urquiza actually has an edge. It birthed a tango style.
Villa Urquiza, the Tango Style
“Villa Urquiza” is the term used to identify a tango style that was popular in the barrio of Villa Urquiza during the 1940s and 50s. It became a trend in the tango world in 2006.
According to Irene and Man Yung's Tango Blog,
Tango videos had recently started to become widely available on Youtube and a few clever Tango entrepreneurs used the label on themselves and on a certain “look” and style of dancing in those videos as an indication of the highest quality of authentic Tango.
Tangueros and tangueras all over the world just lapped it up and soon everybody and their mother said they were dancing “Villa Urquiza” style.
What is the Villa Urquiza style and how do you know if a couple is dancing it?
Origin
Tango Fashion News shares the origin of the Urquiza tango style, introducing
Luis “Milonguita” Lemos, also known as “the Mystery – el Misterio de Urquiza,” as its founder.
Some of their friends once said about him:
His clothes and shoes were tailor-made, he looked uniquely elegant and as a dancer he was like an angel.
For everything “Milonguita’s” saw, he found a way to do it differently.
His vibrant, powerful and sleek elegance has renewed existing steps, combinations and reinvented others. With this effect in his dance, the Urquiza style was born.
Milonguita was known to travel around the various districts of Buenos Aires, which means he visited all the milongas he could. In every milonga, he came up with something new. At that time, the tango world was going through a strong development in the choreographic repertoire, with the impulses of the dancers “Lavandina” and “Petroleo.”
Characteristics
Estilo Villa Urquiza — as described by the Tango Voice — displays elegance, smoothness, and precision in walking.
All these are achieved by walking close to the ground, leading with your toes when walking forward.
Dancers of the Villa Urquiza style hold an upright position and keep the embrace closed when walking. When doing turns or ochos, the embrace may be opened with elaborate footwork. The style can include the sandwich, arrastres, sacadas, toe taps and touches, dibujos, and boleos. The elements absent from the style are colgadas, volcadas, and ganchos.
The Villa Urquiza style is said to be the dance of the movement-oriented, who are fond of fancy steps.
As Stephen Brown said in the Styles of Argentine Tango from Tango Argentina de Tejas:
The embrace is typically closed, but the couple loosens the embrace slightly to accommodate the turns and allow the woman to rotate more freely. The more the woman rotates her hips through the turns independently of her upper torso, the less the embrace needs to be loosened. Because both dancers look toward the clasped hands, the embrace may create an impression of a slight V, in which the woman's left shoulder is closer to the man's right shoulder than her left shoulder is to his right.
Even though the style is specifically called Villa Urquiza, it is danced throughout many of the neighborhoods in Buenos Aires.
It’s easy to guess if a couple has Villa Urquiza-style dancers if they display the characteristics mentioned earlier. However, if you consider other terms in the world of tango — like the Tango de Salon — you might come to the conclusion that Villa Urquiza is just a marketing buzzword.
Tango de Salon, Villa Urquiza, and Milonguero
The Tango Voice discussed the Tango Estilo Villa Urquiza and Tango Estilo Milonguero within the variation of Tango de Salon, which brings even more tango terms that might muddy the Villa Urquiza waters.
Tango de Salon — as defined by Tango Bug — is tango as it is danced at milongas or social tango-dance events.
It comes in a variety of sub-styles, with the dancers relying on improvisation rather than step sequences. The Villa Urquiza and Milonguero are variations of Tango de Salon, distinguished by their embrace and posture.
The posture tends to be more upright and the embrace is looser in Estilo Villa Urquiza; that is, the arms are less extended around the partner, which allows for easier opening of the embrace for ochos and turns,
whereas in Estilo Milonguero the embrace is closer (arms reach further past partner’s midline) and opened only slightly on the man’s left side to allow the woman’s movement to the cruzada that can come from a pivot (‘milonguero forward ocho’) or side rock (ocho cortado).
Villa Urquiza also features more footwork.
Nonetheless, the two variations — as labeled and promoted by tango instructors — are just two points along the continuum of variation in several dimensions that exists among dancers in the milongas of Buenos Aires. That means they’re not an actual style, but rather a way of dancing that can be distinguished from other ways of dancing.
That means they’re not an actual style, but rather a way of dancing that can be distinguished from other ways of dancing.
Even if dancers see Villa Urquiza in dancers like Carlos Perez and Rosa Forte or Ramon “Finito” Rivera, the community still dances around the question of whether Villa Urquiza is a style or just a marketing buzzword. Tango High and Low asks another question that can help the tango world find an answer:
“Are there individual styles in tango when it is danced socially and not for the stage?”
Barrio vs Style
The barrio Villa Urquiza is a significant part of tango's development as a dance.
Villa Urquiza — the tango style — was the popular style in the barrio during the Golden Age, representing the barrio since the Tango Renaissance. But are the dance's characteristics limited to the barrio alone? No. There are some recorded dances of this style from other barrios like Mataderos, Caballito, and Palermo.
One irony of attaching a barrio label to a particular stylistic variation of Tango de Salon is that the classic Estilo Villa Urquiza style is no longer even the most commonly danced style of tango in the milongas of the barrio of Villa Urquiza...
Tango Voice defined Tango Estilo Villa Urquiza as an interpretation of the style of tango danced predominantly in the outer barrios of Buenos Aires.
It resembled the tango in the annual Campeonato Mundial de Tango in Buenos Aires, which enabled its spread to the world. Villa Urquiza was marketed as another tango brand in first-world countries in the mid-2000s.
The One Tango Philosophy — developed as a marketing strategy in the latter half of 2000s — attempted to resolve conflicts between different genres and styles of tango. It subsumed all variations under the phrase: “There is only one tango.”
In the application of this philosophy tango promoters were able to increase market share by simultaneously promoting several Tango-Brands while generally avoiding the reality that different genres of tango are adapted to different environmental niches (stage, practica, and milonga). In doing so,
promoters of the One Tango Philosophy have been able to appropriate the ‘tango’ label for all Argentine tango dance variations, thereby competitively excluding and thus marginalizing promoters of Tango de Salon as the only tango suitable for the milonga.
The Villa Urquiza falls under the tango brands fiasco in the world of tango, which furthers the idea that Villa Urquiza is nothing more than a marketing buzzword. Irene and Man Yung's Tango Blog about Villa Urquiza says that they are not going to tell us what Villa Urquiza is or what it isn't, but they think it was a great marketing tactic, making the dancers who thought they were dancing Villa Urquiza tango feel great about themselves. It made dancers feel more superior to other dancers who danced anything that was not Villa Urquiza.
Unfortunately, the tactic also led people to want to dance “the same.”
Winning competitions that have put tango into a neat little ballroom box have become a moment to say that they are dancing the Villa Urquiza — but they’re not completely understanding its essence or what it really is.
Villa Urquiza: Tango Style or Tango Marketing?
It is hard to say Villa Urquiza is an actual style when it was created as a way to market tango to first-world countries. In fact, labeling tango styles and tango marketing is hard in general. If a “style” is a series of traits or features that characterize a work, Villa Urquiza lacks a set of particular traits that make it completely different from other tango styles.
Perhaps “Tango Estilo Villa Urquiza” and “Tango Estilo Milonguero”are helpful in identifying a set of characteristics among dancers in milongas.
People can use them to communicate this information in advertising, allowing tango consumers to gauge their expectations. It's vital to remember that there are no distinctly different stylistic categories within Tango de Salon. This makes Villa Urquiza not a style of tango, but a marketing buzzword.
Dancers can use the Villa Urquiza as an understanding that we can develop a way of dancing that's similar to a style.
While this way of dancing feels uniquely personal, like any other style, Villa Urquiza is open to interpretation. This gives it more value as a label or a point in history that shows how tango developed in different areas in Buenos Aires. As Tango High and Low expressed:
To develop a style requires a conscious effort to achieve some kind of artistry. It involves a form of self-expression that operates within a system of sorts, with its own codes and strictures.
The core of tango might be lost as new generations of dancers interpret it in their own ways, but that's the nature of any art form as it constantly changes and adapts to the people who experience it. No matter how many questions arise about tango, the tango styles and their origins, and the variants, the one thing we can always count on is that tango lives in whoever is dancing it in the present moment.
Milongas will still gather dancers who love to tango the night away, and Villa Urquiza will still be a stop on the map of tango's journey.
The responsibility of upholding the tradition and values of tango falls on the shoulders of those who love it. What's most important is the dancers never lose their connection to the music, the embrace, and each other.
While Villa Urquiza might be nothing more than a marketing buzzword to some and an actual style to others, it's still an important part of tango's history.