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About Foxtantino: Foxtrot Elegance with Argentine Tango Romance

What is a Dance?

In its broadest sense, a dance can be any type of movement that rises above the ordinary walk and movements of everyday life. Dancing dates back to the earliest records of mankind. Dancing can express who we are, what is important to us, who is important to us, our culture, our visions, our dreams, our aspirations and the meanings we give to life. There is no limit to what a dance can be and what it can mean.

As people have created new dances, others have watched and wanted to learn. And as creators have attempted to teach others how to do what they created, communities of people have gathered around new dances and infused them with their culture and sociality.

Partner dancing has come from a tradition of teaching, learning and community. In essence, the partner dances seek to teach leaders and followers around the world how to dance a specific way so that anywhere you go, you can walk into a dance ballroom or club and ask someone to dance and they will be able to dance with you. Many of the partner dances we do today, have more than a hundred years of history that have gone into the development of the dances and the communities they are danced in. Two dance communities in particular are important to the roots of the Foxtantino. One is the Argentine Tango community and the other is the Ballroom Dance community.

The Argentine Tango community sprang up around the partner dance creations of dancers in Argentina at the end of the 1800's. Its story has been told many times and in many ways. Today, the Argentine Tango community has developed into a group of people who are passionate about the dance, the music, the culture and the embrace and feeling of the Tango. They don't usually call their dance, Argentine Tango. It is called Tango, for to them it is the first and only Tango and all offshoots are not Tango. Argentine Tango is primarily an improvisational dance that emphasizes musicality and emotion in dancing. There are strict etiquettes in Tango communities as to the way the people interact in the dancing. When you attend a traditional Milonga (an Argentine Tango social dance), you will hear mostly Tango music the whole night long. Neo or Nuevo Tango dancers have Milongas with a variety of music styles, but they are still mostly dancing the Tango through the evening.

The Ballroom community has been strong and expanding for more than 80 years. Ballroom dances are formalized dances where steps are put together into dance figures and given names and taught in a similar manner in every ballroom around the world. Ballroom dances have come from the native dances of many cultures. When these dances were formalized into the Ballroom dance syllabus, they were changed to appeal to the values and styles that ballroom dancers were most familiar with. If you go to a ballroom dance party today, there will be a variety of dance music played during the night, including Swing, Waltz, Rock, Salsa, Latin and Tango music. Ballroom dancers have assigned specific dances to each style and tempo of music. It is common that most of the dancers on the social dance floor will be dancing the same partner dance as everyone else to a particular musical composition. Some dances are non-progressive where the dance couples all dance in their own spot, independent from other couples on the dance floor. Other dances move in a line of dance, where couples all travel the same direction, counter clockwise around the floor.

Ballroom dance training has been formalized and teachers often take certification tests to show that they know and can teach the official syllabus figures to their students. Dance proficiency is organized into different levels: bronze for beginning, silver for intermediate and gold for advanced. This helps dancers choose classes and learn patterns that are not too far above their existing level, so that the dancing can remain fun and easy to learn. In ballroom dance training, improvisation comes much later in a dancer's development, usually after a dancer has reached a gold level proficiency and is moving on to what is called "open" gold. "Open" here refers to non-syllabus figures, but even these dance movements still fit within the style and characteristics of the formalized dances.

Foxtantino: A Fusion between Foxtrot and Argentine Tango

Today there are many fusion dances that combine the elements of two or more dance styles into a new dance. These new dances are springing up primarily in metropolitan areas where the dance populations are large, vibrant and hungry for creative opportunities within the specific social dance communities to which they belong.

Foxtantino is a new fusion dance that connects the Ballroom American and International styles of Foxtrot to Argentine Tango. This dance was designed specifically for the Ballroom community. It uses the teaching methods, technique and language of the ballroom dances so Foxtantino is easy for Ballroom dancers to learn and dance with each other. Ballroom dancers are intrigued and fascinated with Argentine Tango, but, many do not want to give up their dance frame, their Ballroom culture and/or acquire new music appreciation skills and fully enter into the Argentine Tango community. Foxtantino provides Ballroom dancers the fun and excitement of Argentine Tango while keeping to the style of dancing with which they are familiar.

Foxtantino: The New Dance for Ballroom Dancers

Foxtantino was created by Ted Ross and Karen Lile in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2005. It combines the elegance and smoothness of International and American Foxtrot with the romantic and lyrical style of Argentine Tango. It is danced at ballroom parties to Foxtrot & Swing music in the line of dance. The Tempi range of the music is 110-144 beats/minute (28-36 measures per minute) and the time signature of the music is 4/4.

The Foxtrot portions of the dance use the same technique, frame and styling as Standard and American Silver Foxtrot in the closed positions. The Argentine Tango portions are danced without rise and fall or body flight.

The dance connects the fluid moving portions of the Foxtrot to the rhythmical and creative foot movements of Argentine Tango by using easy seamless transitions. It requires neither the Argentine Tango “close embrace” nor the Ballroom Tango hold, rather, the Foxtantino is danced using a Ballroom smooth frame. The entire dance is smooth and lyrical in nature, without the staccato intensity sometimes associated with some Argentine Tango performance styles and with the competition style of International Tango.