Joe's TangoWeb

Three Clinics with Joe and Carlota

Check the Classes page for full description.

• July 15: The Rock & Roll of Milonga : Rhythm, body English, riding the wave.
• July 22: The Dead Men's Salida : One of the greatest classic figures from the forgotten days of tango.
• July 29: Barely Tango : Three Tango nuevo concepts give you the keys to dance possibilities.

$10 each session • $20 for all three

Pre-register today using this online form.

Questions:

Tango at Soma

Come out for tango dancing every Wednesday at SOMA.

9-11pm + No cover. SOMA Ultralounge 320 N. Neil, Champaign, IL { GoogleMaps }

Below you can see the results from the survey about alternative vs traditional music at the Soma tango dance. To take the survey, go here.

Results (pdf):

Summary

The survey was answered by 39 people, and pretty evenly balanced between men (20) and women (19). The age of the respondents seems well distributed among people in their twenties into middle age, although there is a cluster of people younger than twenty-eight (30%), and another cluster of people older than forty-three (33%). Most of the respondents (80%) said that they attend the Wednesday night dance once a month or more.

When asked how they well they like the alternative music that is played at Soma, a majority (64%) appear to like it a lot, saying either that it "makes my night" or that they "want to hear even more."

When reporting their preferred percentage of alternative music to traditional tango, most people (27 people - almost 70%) prefer at least 25% alternative music. A smaller number (8 people - 20%) prefer 10% alternative music. A few people (4 or 10%) prefer 0% alternative music.

In fact, 11 people would be happiest with 50% alternative music, which is a much higher ratio than we have ever played at Soma. And a surprising number of people (6) would like to have more than 50% alternative music.

Clearly, a lot of dancers like dancing to non-tango music. Who are these people? Is it mostly women who like alternative music? Is it mostly the old farts well into their mid 40s who like traditional music?

It turns out that, indeed, women are largely the ones who like alternative music the best. Six women surveyed (30% of women) said that alternative music "makes my night", and eight (42%) said that they "want more." That equals more than 70% of women who are really into alternative. And eleven women (57%) requested that half or more of the dance night be alternative music.

Among the men, four said that they either disliked it or "don't object but wouldn't mind" if we eliminated alternative music. While seven men (35%) said that alternative music "makes my night", only three men (15%) said that they wanted more alternative music than is already played. Thus, half of the men surveyed were fairly keen on alternative. The other half were lukewarm ("don't object") or expressly disliked it. Four men said they would be happiest with 0% alternative music. Five men preferred 10% alternative, and another five preferred 25% alternative (which is the highest ratio we have played at Soma).

Only six men (30%) wanted half or more of the dance night to be alternative music; by comparison, almost 60% of women wanted this much alternative.

Age

As for age, all of the people who wanted 10% or less of alternative music were in their mid to late forties (> 43). Only four people in this age range wanted 25% or more of alternative. So preference for traditional music seems to be skewed towards the codger end of the scale.

The 20-27 age group all wanted 25% alternative or more.

In the 28-35 group, only two guys wanted 10%; the rest in this age group wanted 50% or more alternative music.

With the exception of one holdout, all of the 36-43 year olds all wanted 25% or more alternative music.

Discussion

What his means is that it would make most of the women happy to play as much or more alternative music as I do now.

Some men have feelings against alternative music, and especially the older men, and not as many men are asking for a high percentage of alt music at the dance.

I conclude that the amount I'm playing now is about right. Alternative music pleases more people than it alienates. However, I am concerned about the number of men who don't like alternative music that much. As one of the respondents suggested, it might be good to contain the alternative into discrete segments of the evening so that these guys can be frustrated at only, say, two points of the night rather than at various undetermined points.