This step is one of the most popular and essential steps to be able to dance tango in a milonga, and especially in a milonga porteña (from Buenos Aires).
It is a step that is already used worldwide, part of a universal language, that for many years, no matter where you have learned to dance, surely, your teachers have already taught it to you.
There is a basic ocho cortado and thousands of possible variations to better adapt to the musicality, to the space and to have fun being creative.
We do not know its "creator" but it is a tango step that has developed over time as part of the continuing evolution of the dance. The specific story behind the creation of this step may not be clear, as tango has experienced various influences and styles throughout its development but we believe that space has been a key factor.
Thinking about the evolution of tango as a dance, we can imagine that it comes as a result of the canyengue-orillero tango, since in this style there are many crossing movements and perhaps some dancer has created it as a result of the reduced space in which he danced, as happens with many steps.
The space in which we dance ends up being the one who drives creativity because we must develop in that precise space and our creative mind ends up inventing things that suit that space.
To those who belittle the ocho cortado, as if it were a step of little importance just because people resort to it often, the truth is that when we use a step recurrently but incorporate quality of movement, expressive subtleties and rich musicality, everything becomes more valuable. So it's not about the step we do but "how" we do it, how we use it to interpret the music.
Here is a lesson from our class "El ocho cortado y variante":
This video is an excerpt from our DVD "Tango de Buenos Aires 1":
This video was recorded in 2010 in Buenos Aires at the milonga "La Nacional", which takes place in a historic building, more than a century old, of great cultural value belonging to the "Associazione di Mutuo Soccorso e Cultura Nazionale Italiana" which besides many other activities is also home to different milongas.
If you want to learn creative variants of the Ocho cortado you can do it with this video:
Esperamos hayas disfrutado de la lectura y te invitamos a compartirlo con tus amigos.
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