Tango invites communication and creativity, it offers growth and community, and, in Philadelphia, it draws a unique cohort of dancers. What forces have driven growth of the Philadelphia tango community, who exactly are its members, and why do they dance tango? This qualitative and quantitative study recounts the community's history, reveals the people at its core, and explores what the dance means to them. It is a mixed-method, multi-layered integration of dance history, community profile, and individual narrative. Twenty-six instructors and event organizers provided data on the community's history. More than 100 dancers participated in a survey that gathered descriptive and demographic data, and nine dancers gave interviews on their lived experiences of tango. The community grew steadily from 1991 through 2006. Early local entrepreneurs modeled an ethos that placed a premium on tango's community-building capacity. This ethos remained a central force in the community's growth, drawing a unique cohort of dancers. Compared to Philadelphia census data, tango survey respondents were fifteen years older on average, more likely to be divorced or to have been born outside of the continental United States, better educated with higher incomes, and more likely to work in the arts. Ethnographic, quantitative, and mixed methods analysis reveals how tango may serve these unique cohorts and how many dancers perceive that tango enhances their physical, mental, emotional, spiritual, and social lives. Phenomenological inquiry explores dancers' concepts of spirituality and how some made spiritual meaning from tango experiences. Four central themes that emerged--tango music, tango dance, interactive experience, and internal experience--can be theorized to intertwine in a cycle wherein tango invites human interaction that leads to internal growth, which improves one's capacity to dance tango, thus creating a more satisfying interactive and internal experience. This research represents the first comprehensive study of tango in Philadelphia. It documents the creation of a popular social dance community in a major U.S. city and offers new data and theories on community building. It is also the first study to explore intersections between spirituality and tango and offers new insights into how tango improves adults' health and well being. / Dance

Cette étude ethnographique porte sur le réseau social du tango argentin à Montréal, les valeurs esthétiques du tango, l’interprétation de l’expérience de la danse acquise au cours du processus de socialisation et les différents agents de socialisation. Dans un contexte de réappropriation et de déterritorialisation d’un savoir-faire comme le tango, les références symboliques relatives à son contexte d’origine, son imaginaire collectif et son contexte sociohistorique sont moins accessibles. Ceci semble appeler chez les danseurs montréalais une sorte de surdétermination de l’expérience immédiate, concrète et interactive de la danse dans la construction d’un sens collectif. Cette recherche s’intéresse plutôt à la transposition dans le réseau montréalais de certaines normes esthétiques en lien avec les modalités interactives de la danse. Ces normes esthétiques induisent une attention particulière portée à la qualité de l’expérience se reflétant dans les pratiques et les discours. Ces valeurs esthétiques remontent au contexte d’origine du tango et à la rencontre entre différents univers socialisateurs transnationaux à différentes étapes de son évolution. De ce type de rencontres «transesthétiques», s’est développé un dualisme entre le danser pour les autres et le danser pour soi, dans les représentations et la mise en forme d’une expérience dansée. À Montréal, c’est avec emphase qu’on observe la cohabitation de ces deux systèmes de valeurs en apparence antagonistes où, d’une part, est valorisé l’exhibition du soi et, d’autre part, sont priorisés l’intériorité et l’expérience subjective. En bref, ce mémoire explore les relations complexes qui existent entre les processus culturels et leurs produits, l’expérience et le sens, entre la subjectivité individuelle et la collectivité, et redéfinit l’agentivité des acteurs sociaux en étudiant les modes spécifiques de production du sens dans un art comme la danse. / This ethnographic study explores the Argentine tango network of Montreal, the esthetic values of this tango, the interpretation of experience acquired through the socialization process and the various agents of socialization. In a context of appropriation and deterritorialization of a savoir-faire art such as tango, the symbolic references related to the dance’s original context, mythology and sociohistoric context are less accessible to the dancers. This seems to call a sort of overdetermination of the actual, concrete and interactive experience of the dance in the construction of collective meaning. My research will explore a transposition which occurs within the tango social sphere; a compliance with interactive aspects of esthetic norms that draws the dancer’s attention in practice and discourse towards a certain quality of experience. These values can be traced to the origins of tango and the encounters between different social worlds and transnational connections at different periods of its evolution. From such transesthetic encounters, tango has developped, in the way experience is represented and put into form, a dualism between dancing for others and dancing for one self. In the specific context of Montreal, we observe this cohabitation of two apparently antagonistic value systems. On one hand, we value the personal exhibition, and on the other, we prioritize the inner nature and subjective experience of the dance. In brief, this thesis explores the complex relationship existing between cultural process and cultural products, between experience and meaning, between collectivity and individual subjectivities, and redefines the agentive role of social actors by examining the specific ways meaning is produced in expressive culture such as the dance.

Cette étude ethnographique porte sur le réseau social du tango argentin à Montréal, les valeurs esthétiques du tango, l’interprétation de l’expérience de la danse acquise au cours du processus de socialisation et les différents agents de socialisation. Dans un contexte de réappropriation et de déterritorialisation d’un savoir-faire comme le tango, les références symboliques relatives à son contexte d’origine, son imaginaire collectif et son contexte sociohistorique sont moins accessibles. Ceci semble appeler chez les danseurs montréalais une sorte de surdétermination de l’expérience immédiate, concrète et interactive de la danse dans la construction d’un sens collectif. Cette recherche s’intéresse plutôt à la transposition dans le réseau montréalais de certaines normes esthétiques en lien avec les modalités interactives de la danse. Ces normes esthétiques induisent une attention particulière portée à la qualité de l’expérience se reflétant dans les pratiques et les discours. Ces valeurs esthétiques remontent au contexte d’origine du tango et à la rencontre entre différents univers socialisateurs transnationaux à différentes étapes de son évolution. De ce type de rencontres «transesthétiques», s’est développé un dualisme entre le danser pour les autres et le danser pour soi, dans les représentations et la mise en forme d’une expérience dansée. À Montréal, c’est avec emphase qu’on observe la cohabitation de ces deux systèmes de valeurs en apparence antagonistes où, d’une part, est valorisé l’exhibition du soi et, d’autre part, sont priorisés l’intériorité et l’expérience subjective. En bref, ce mémoire explore les relations complexes qui existent entre les processus culturels et leurs produits, l’expérience et le sens, entre la subjectivité individuelle et la collectivité, et redéfinit l’agentivité des acteurs sociaux en étudiant les modes spécifiques de production du sens dans un art comme la danse. / This ethnographic study explores the Argentine tango network of Montreal, the esthetic values of this tango, the interpretation of experience acquired through the socialization process and the various agents of socialization. In a context of appropriation and deterritorialization of a savoir-faire art such as tango, the symbolic references related to the dance’s original context, mythology and sociohistoric context are less accessible to the dancers. This seems to call a sort of overdetermination of the actual, concrete and interactive experience of the dance in the construction of collective meaning. My research will explore a transposition which occurs within the tango social sphere; a compliance with interactive aspects of esthetic norms that draws the dancer’s attention in practice and discourse towards a certain quality of experience. These values can be traced to the origins of tango and the encounters between different social worlds and transnational connections at different periods of its evolution. From such transesthetic encounters, tango has developped, in the way experience is represented and put into form, a dualism between dancing for others and dancing for one self. In the specific context of Montreal, we observe this cohabitation of two apparently antagonistic value systems. On one hand, we value the personal exhibition, and on the other, we prioritize the inner nature and subjective experience of the dance. In brief, this thesis explores the complex relationship existing between cultural process and cultural products, between experience and meaning, between collectivity and individual subjectivities, and redefines the agentive role of social actors by examining the specific ways meaning is produced in expressive culture such as the dance.

This thesis examines the practice of an Argentine Tango dance community in the East Midlands, England. It is an ethnographic study whose objectives are to investigate this instance of a local transcultural dance practice in order to learn about participants’ motivations; their experience of and identification with Argentine Tango; and the meanings produced in the process of their participation. As a social dancer, teacher and insider researcher, I employ embodiment as a key methodological strategy in order to engage with and share the experience of dancing with participants; to gain sensory understanding and bodily knowledge of the practice; and in the process to gain access to further avenues of meaning-making amongst participants. The study considers questions arising directly from my teaching role to do with the transmission and reproduction of the dance, authenticity, the production of meaning, the construction and performance of identity and the imaginative construction of post-modern cultural practices. The nature of space and place is considered, as is Turner’s distinction between liminoid and liminal activity with regard to ritual and communitas in relation to Argentine Tango. Alongside participant discussions, I explore various perspectives on the cosmopolitan appropriation and exoticisation of Argentine Tango; the diffusion, re-territorialisation and globalisation of Argentine Tango since the late 1980s. Data was produced using ethnographic tools, including video recording, shared reviewing and feedback from participants. The thesis analyses findings to show how participants project narratives of the imagination into their dancing, thereby providing frameworks of meaning which crucially underpin and sustain this practice. These imagined narratives are compared to journeys, both literal and of the imagination, enabling the creative construction of new identities, the exploration of self in relation to others and an escape from everyday life in postmodernity.

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