Moving Together: Touch, Affect and Boundaries in Social Partner Dance by Taylor Applegate [Masters Thesis Project]

https://scripties.uba.uva.nl/download?fid=c9176149

The Tango Philadelphia Story: A Mixed-methods Study of Building Community, Enhancing Lives, and Exploring Spirituality through Argentine Tango

THE TANGO PHILADELPHIA STOR... by Alex Tango Fuego

https://digital.library.temple.edu/digital/collection/p245801coll10/id/19083

Tango and the Dancing Body in Istanbul - 1st Edition - Melin Levent Yuna

https://www.routledge.com/Tango-and-the-Dancing-Body-in-Istanbul/Yuna/p/book/9781032011332

Book Description

Tango and the Dancing Body in Istanbul explores the expansion of social Argentine tango dancing among Muslim actors in Turkey, pioneered in Istanbul despite the conservative rule of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) and Tayyip Erdoğan.

In this book, Melin Levent Yuna questions why a dance that appears to publicly represent an erotic relationship finds space to expand and increase dramatically in the number of contemporary Turkish Muslim tango dancers, particularly during a conservative rule. Even during the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic, tango dance classes, gatherings, and messages flourished on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Zoom. Urban Turkey and its tango dance performances provide one symbol and example of how neoliberal capitalism could go hand in hand with conservatism by becoming a bridge between Europe and the Middle East. This study largely focuses on the dancers’ perspective while presenting the policies of Erdoğan. It presents the social characteristics of the tango dancers, the meanings they attach to their bodies and their dance as well as what this dance reflects about them – besides the policies of the Justice and Development Party. The book approaches the tango dance and its dancing body in terms of layers of meaning systems in a neoliberal and conservative context. 

This study will be of great interest to students and scholars in dance, anthropology, cultural studies, and performance studies.

Table of Contents

1. Concepts and Tools: Self, Identity, Class, and More  2. Leisure, Consumption, Class: One Mode of Being an Upper-Middle Class  3. Becoming the Contemporary Tango and the Tango Dancer: Bailemos el Tango  4. One Mode of Being an Upper-Middle Class in Istanbul: Bodies, Self, and the Attached Meanings, Part I  5. Bodies, Self, and the Attached Meanings, Part II 6. Bodies, Self, and the Attached Meaning,s Part III

Author(s)

Biography

Melin Levent Yuna is a sociologist and a cultural anthropologist at Acıbadem University, teaching various classes on these areas. In addition to her MA in sociology and PhD in cultural anthropology, she is a tango dancer herself, and has had a deep interest in Argentine tango dancing for many years.

#tangoinacademia #tangoresearch #tangoandpolitics #turkishmuslimstudies #sociology #culturalanthroplogy


Sent from my iPad

Wallflowers and Femmes Fatales: Dancing Gender and Politics at the Milongas | Marta E. Savigliano

‘Wall Flowers and Femme Fatales: Dancing Gender & Politics at the Milongas in Buenos Aires ’by Marta E.
Savigliano at ‘TANGO! Dance the world around: global transformations of Latin American Culture’ at Agassiz Theatre, Radcliff Institute, Harvard University, Boston

choreography Susan Rose in collaboration with dancers Adriana Pegorer, Carlos and Tovas Moreno

“Just as the conference broke new ground by bringing together popular music and scholarly analysis, so
Savigliano's presentation created a new genre by combining academic discourse with performance art” Harvard Gazette

The Harvard Gazette

BY Ken Gewertz
Harvard News Office

November 1, 2007

ARTS & HUMANITIES

It takes 200 (or more) to tango
Dozens of participants and hundreds of auditors participate in conference on tango

Barefoot and dressed with thrift-shop elegance in a floor-length, taffeta gown with fingerless gloves and a discus-shaped hat, Marta Elena Savigliano read from her paper “Wallflowers and Femmes Fatales: Dancing Gender and Politics at the Milongas” with a tinkling Argentine accent and an air of fey imperturbability.

A professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Department of World Arts & Cultures, and the author of “Tango and the Political Economy of Passion” and “Angora Matta: Fatal Acts of North South Translation,” Savigliano had come to Harvard to participate in the conference “Tango! Dance the World Around: Global Transformations of Latin American Culture,” co-sponsored by the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, the Humanities Center, and the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. The conference took place Oct. 26-27.

Just as the conference broke new ground by bringing together popular music and scholarly analysis, so Savigliano’s presentation created a new genre by combining academic discourse with performance art.

As she spoke, four dancers paralleled her words with brief solos and pas de deux, interspersed with ambiguous movements and glances. Short films of tango dancers played on the screen behind them, and later, choreographer Susan Rose, dressed like a French schoolboy in black jacket and shorts and red boots, videotaped the live dancers with a hand-held camera, projecting their images onto the screen.

Meanwhile, Savigliano developed a thesis about the world of the milongas, Argentinean clubs where people go to dance the tango. Through the medium of dance, men and women enact a succession of roles that include performer and observer, chooser and chosen, victim and victimizer. “It takes three to perform the tango,” she said, “two to dance and one to watch.” Despite the self-conscious role-playing, the dancers are at the mercy of this sensual and overpowering music. “It is beyond your control; just try to make it beautiful.”

According to Homi Bhabha, the Anne F. Rothenberg Professor of the Humanities in the Department of English and American Literature and Language, the conference represented an attempt to initiate a conversation among the performing arts and a range of academic disciplines, including literary and cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, political science, economics, philosophy, and history.

“Tango is an impassioned music that is indeed a world music,” Bhabha said. “It began in Argentina and Uruguay in the early 20th century and spread all over the world, even to places like Japan and Finland. Tango provides a lens through which we can study such things as gender, urban development, globalization, and other issues.”

Bhabha’s own history testifies to tango’s global reach. Growing up in Bombay, he was introduced to tango by his father, a great fan of tango music and an enthusiastic tango dancer. Bhabha said that listening to his father’s records, he was “completely captivated by the music’s combination of fragility and strength. And in that way that children sometimes experience, the music caused me to feel nostalgia for something without my really knowing what I was nostalgic about.”

Years later, when he was an adviser for the humanities at Radcliffe, Bhabha suggested the idea of a tango conference to then-Radcliffe Dean Drew Faust, who agreed that it would it would be an interesting way of bringing about dialogue across disciplinary boundaries. As Harvard president, Faust was, if possible, even more enthusiastic about the idea, since it coincides with her focus on intellectual discussions underpinned by new interdisciplinary and institutional alliances.

Just as Bhabha imagined, the conference did succeed in bringing together scholars and performers from many different fields and geographical locations. In some cases there was a melding of the two roles. Pablo Aslan, a bassist and composer and amateur tango historian, gave a presentation titled “In Search of Tango Music History.”

According to Aslan, the leader of a tango-jazz ensemble called Avantango, there are many myths and assumptions about the origins of tango that have no basis in fact. According to many sources, tango began in the early 20th century as a scandalously erotic dance of the lower classes of Buenos Aires forbidden by the authorities, which achieved respectability only when it became a fad in Paris just before World War I. But Aslan said he has discovered sheet music for tangos as early as the mid-19th century and that by 1900 it was being danced by all classes throughout Buenos Aires.

Aslan played several early recordings of the music, showing how it evolved from a complex style played by highly trained musicians to a simplified form accessible to the middle class. Certain features remained, however, such as the corte, a sudden halt in the rhythm that gives the tango its characteristic start-and-stop quality.

Conference participants got a chance to see Aslan the performer at a reception following the conference when he and pianist Octavio Brunetti, accordianist Victor Prieto, keyboardist Bario Boente, and other musicians played contemporary expressions of this still-evolving musical form. Two Argentinean-born dancers, Fernanda Cajida and Dario da Silva, demonstrated various styles of tango dance.

The second day of the conference also featured talks and discussions that covered a wide variety of subjects. Sylvia Molloy, the Albert Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at New York University, where she teaches Latin American and comparative literature, delivered the keynote address on the influence of tango on the work of the great Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. Two discussions considered “Tango as a Cultural Form: Music, Dance, Film,” and “Tango as Politics: Gender, Class, Urban Life.” Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who recorded the CD “Soul of the Tango: The Music of Astor Piazzolla” in 2005, participated in a discussion of tango with composer Osvaldo Golijov.

Bhabha said that he hopes the tango conference will serve as model for future conferences that will consider other cultural forms indigenous to particular regions and follow their development into global phenomena. He said that he was encouraged by the enthusiasm that has been generated by the tango conference.

“This was something that was literally a dream in my head, and now it’s become a reality,” he said.

ken_gewertz@harvard.edu

Destino Buenos Aires | Tango-Turismo: Sexual Cinematagraphico | Marta E. Savigliano

PDF En Español: http://www.scielo.br/pdf/cpa/n25/26531.pdf

Destination Buenos Aires
Tango – Cinematographic Sexual Tourism

Abstract
Buenos Aires currently enjoys a boom in international tourism and the tango is undoubtedly a main local attraction. What are foreign tourists looking for in the tango experience? How do they know what is in a tango and in the tango world for them? What pleasures does the tango offer them? Unconvinced with settling explanations based in the universal and transcendental powers of art, the author explores the uses of tango in narrative cinema – in particular, the sophisticated ways in which the erotics of cultural difference frame tango-esque seduction. For this purpose, tango films of recent release (Potter’s The Tango Lesson and Saura’s Tango) and oldies (Gilda) are analyzed as stories that, taking place in an exotic Buenos Aires, weave intertwined dramatic plots of cultural and gender alterity – exacerbated by the presence of femmes fatales – , through dramatic and dangerous romantic disencounters with a happy end. Thus the tango, culturally appropriated, promises violent emotional turmoils, erotically tamed via “ universal” laws of heterosexuality and homosociality. An irresistible cinematic formula for sex tourism.

Key Words: Tango in Film, Sexuality and Cultural Tourism, Cinema and Inter/Multi/Transculturalism, Femmes Fatales.

Resumo
Buenos Aires disfruta de un boom turístico internacional y el tango
figura predominantemente entre los motivos de atracción.
¿Qué buscan los viajeros foráneos en la experiencia tanguera?
¿Cómo saben qué les puede brindar específicamente un tango y el
mundo del tango en general? ¿Qué placeres les ofrece el tango?
No conforme con explicaciones sobre el carácter trascendental y
universal del arte, este artículo explora los recursos sofisticados
empleados en la narrativa cinematográfica para transmitir la
seducción tanguera en el marco del erotismo de la diferencia
cultural. Con este fin se analizan películas de tango recientes
(The Tango Lesson de Potter y Tango de Saura) y del
pasado (Gilda) en las que, en la exótica locación de Buenos Aires,
la alteridad cultural se cruza con la alteridad de género
(exacerbada por la presencia de femmes fatales) para desarrollar
dramáticos y peligrosos desencuentros amorosos con final feliz.
El tango, entonces, así apropiado, promete violentos huracanes
emocionales, eróticamente docilizados por las leyes “universales”
de la heterosexualidad y la homosocialidad. Una fórmula
cinemática irresistible para el turismo sexual cultural.

Palavras-chave: Tango en el Cine, Turismo Cultural y Sexualidad, Inter/Multi/Tr




MARTA SAVIGLIANO
Professor
Ph.D. in English, UC Berkeley

marta.savigliano@ucr.edu
Office: ARTS 107

Marta Elena Savigliano holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Hawaii-Manoa, and a Licenciatura in Anthropology from the Universidad de Buenos Aires.

She is an Argentine political theorist and anthropologist interested in the politics of culture: the transnational traffic of cultural goods, workers, ideologies and affects under global capitalism.

She is the author of Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Westview, 1995), translated into Turkish, Slovene and Japanese, which received the Congress of Research on Dance Award for Outstanding Book 1993-1996. Her second book Angora Matta: Fatal Acts of North South Translation (Wesleyan U.P., 2003) addresses feminization and fatal-ness as recurrent tropes associated to artistic and scholarly representations of Latin America and, in particular, of Argentina.

Angora Matta was first conceived as a libretto for a thriller-opera of tangos. As an interdisciplinary and multi-art project of international collaboration, Angora Matta was developed with composer Ramon Pelinski, choreographer Susan Rose, and animation director Miguel Angel Nanni. A first experimental presentation of the complete work took place in the Teatro Presidente Alvear of Buenos Aires in November 2002 as a US-Argentine co-production involving 30 artists on stage.

The active participation of artists and intellectuals in reproducing or challenging historical and contemporary colonial world orders is consistently discussed in her work. Savigliano's current research focuses on staged and screened Global South responses to World Dance, in particular self-parodic versions of “traditional” dance forms associated to racialized, exotic, and erotic representations of “other” cultures and their contentious power in globalization.

Savigliano taught at UC Riverside's Dance department from 1992 to 1998, and at UCLA's department of World Arts and Cultures from 1998 to 2006. She is currently Full Professor at the University of California, Riverside, in Dance History and Theory; and founder of GLOSAS, an international center for Global South Advanced Studies located in Buenos Aires. Savigliano is President of the Congress on Research in Dance since August 2010.

The Politics of Touch, by Erin Manning

Manning, Erin -Politics of Touch by juanfecas on Scribd

Tango Addiction :: A Neurobiological Disease?

Photo credit: Remi Targhetta (the study's author)


https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4117296/

Here's the pdf...

J Behav Addict. 2013 Sep; 2(3): 179–186.
Published online 2013 Jun 14. doi: 10.1556/JBA.2.2013.007
PMCID: PMC4117296
Argentine tango: Another behavioral addiction?
Remi Targhetta,1,# Bertrand Nalpas,1,2,*# and Perney Pascal1
Author information ► Article notes ► Copyright and License information ►
This article has been cited by other articles in PMC.
Go to:
Abstract
Background: Behavioral addiction is an emerging concept based on the resemblance between symptoms or feelings provided by drugs and those obtained with various behaviors such as gambling, etc. Following an observational study of a tango dancer exhibiting criteria of dependence on this dance, we performed a survey to assess whether this case was unique or frequently encountered in the tango dancing community. Methods: We designed an online survey based on both the DSM-IV and Goodman's criteria of dependence; we added questions relative to the positive and negative effects of tango dancing and a self-evaluation of the degree of addiction to tango. The questionnaire was sent via Internet to all the tango dancers subscribing to “ToutTango”, an electronic monthly journal. The prevalence of dependence was analyzed using DSM-IV, Goodman's criteria and self-rating scores separately. Results: 1,129 tango dancers answered the questionnaire. Dependence rates were 45.1, 6.9 and 35.9%, respectively, according to the DSM-IV, Goodman's criteria and self-rating scores. Physical symptoms of withdrawal were reported by 20% of the entire sample and one-third described a strong craving for dancing. Positive effects were high both in dependent and non-dependent groups and were markedly greater than negative effects. Long practice of tango dancing did not modify the dependence rate or reduce the level of positive effects. Conclusions: Tango dancing could lead to dependence as currently defined. However, this dependence is associated with marked and sustained positive effects whilst the negative are few. Identifying the precise substratum of this dependence needs further investigation.

Keywords: addiction, tango, behavior, dependence

Dmitry Pruss wrote about it at his humilitan blog when it came out in Discover Magazine back in 2014.

And here's Remi Targhetta's article in Tout Tango (in French)...

Choreographed Architecture

More in the vein of Tango & Architecture or The Architecture of Tango, there is this related concept. It is Ciera Shaver's Master's Thesis (University of Idaho, 2015) titled "Choreographed Architecture", which "proposes an analysis of human movement as a medium to generate architectural form". Note that it is conceptualizing dance in general, not tango specifically.

Here is a very short excerpt:

"While dance and architecture initially seem like opposing forces of artistic expression, both mediums are able to engineer an emotional response, addressing human-scaled factors of design and inviting audience speculation.

In theory their end products are identical as they both utilize human intuition to challenge the typical and transform the discovered concepts into physical art forms."


Be sure to click on the "full screen" viewer button at the lower right on the issuu viewer/reader. It appears that she's disabled downloading and embedding.

https://issuu.com/CieraShaver/docs/thesis_compiled

A dancer’s brain develops in a unique way :: By Hanna Poikonen :: University of Helsinki

Callie Fink, Artist

Music activates our deeper brain areas, but what happens in a dancer's brain? Movement can trigger a flow state which makes way for an intuitive neural network.

https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/health/a-dancers-brain-develops-in-a-unique-way#


By Hanna Poikonen, Doctoral Candidate, University of Helsinki/Cognitive Brain Research Unit

As technology takes over more areas of our lives, interest in more natural ways of life has also increased massively. One example of this desire to reconnect with nature is the upsurge of yoga and meditation retreats.

Music and dance have been fundamental parts of the human experience for millennia. They have enabled interaction which has given rise to close communities and rich cultures.

Neuroscience has studied music for decades. It has been found to activate the deeper brain areas in a unique way. Deep brain areas are primarily responsible for emotions, memory and social interaction. They evolved in the human brain much earlier than the cognitive functions in the cortex.

Deep brain areas are primarily responsible for emotions, memory and social interaction.

My doctoral dissertation developed methods for understanding the processes that dance generates in the cortex.

I compared the brain functions of professional dancers and musicians to people with no experience of dance or music as they watched recordings of a dance piece. The brain activity of the dancers was different from that of musicians and the control group during sudden changes in the music, long-term listening of music and the audio-visual dance performance.

These results support the earlier findings indicating that the auditory and motor cortex of dancers develops in a unique way. In my study, the dancers’ brains reacted more quickly to changes in the music than those of musicians or members of the control group. The change is apparent in the brain as a reflex, before the dancer is even aware of it at a conscious level.

I also found that dancers displayed stronger synchronisation at the low theta frequency. Theta synchronisation is linked to emotion and memory processes which are central to all interpersonal interaction and self-understanding.

In dance, the basic elements of humanity combine in a natural way.

Touch and cooperation are integral elements of dance – without them, there can be no dance. They are as important to dance as movement and music.

However, the neuroscience of dance is still a young field. Consequently, the brain processes of touch and cooperation have not yet been studied through dance specifically.

We do know that in dance, the basic elements of humanity combine in a natural way. It combines creative act, fine-tuned movement and collaboration, much like playing music. The movement involves the whole body, like in sports. There is touch, like in gentle interaction.

Dancing is also associated with “flow”, a well-researched phenomenon in which the person becomes fully immersed in an activity. Flow experiences have been found to increase the general contentment and productivity of the person as well as the quality of the activity. It reduces the activation of the neural network which is responsible for logical deduction and detailed observation.

This makes room for the creative neural network which also has an important role in generating a relaxed state of mind.

Practicing an instrument requires extreme precision. It has been found to shape motor processes in the brain in many ways. Meanwhile, studies conducted on dancers reveal how their brains have specialised to process dance motion.

Certain areas of dancers’ brains have specialised precisely to observe dance movements. The brain structures of musicians and dancers have also been found to differ from the general population in the areas responsible for processing movement and sound.

Brain synchronisation enables seamless cooperation.

Studies on producing music and movement show how during cooperation, the brains of two people become attuned to the same frequency. This is apparent in how the low-frequency brain waves of the participants become synchronised.

Brain synchronisation enables seamless cooperation, and is necessary for creating both harmonic music and movement. The ability to become attuned to another person’s brain frequency is essential for the function of any empathetic community.

Lately, researchers have gained fantastic results regarding the role of exercise as a mood enhancer. In addition to drug treatment and psychotherapy, exercise is currently even being recommended as a form of treatment for depression. Exercise releases hormones that create a sense of wellbeing, which in turn boosts positive emotional processes in the brain. It also lowers the activation of the amygdala, the brain’s fear and stress centre.

Finding the right dance style can make dancers euphoric, and make them forget the drudgery of official exercise recommendations and step counters.

Dancers who pursue graceful movement must practice being aware of their bodies and (being aware) of wordless communication. These skills are particularly important today, when we spend so much time sitting and in virtual realities. Our way of life has taken us further from our own physical experiences and the understanding of the wordless emotional messages of others.

For example, contact improvisation makes the dancers to listen attentively to the body of their partner. Touch is known to reduce pain, fear and anxiety.

Functional brain imaging has shown that these effects of touch are also apparent in the brain. In one study, a touch from a significant other reduced the intensity of the pain activation in the brain during an electric stimulus when compared with pain experienced alone.

Pain, stress and anxiety often go hand in hand with depression. Dance, music and related expressive forms of therapy could help lessen mental fluctuations even before the onset of full depression. Promising results have been gained from treating depression through music therapy.

Dance therapy can help with many disorders of the mind and body, from anxiety to dementia and Parkinson’s disease.

Dance is a highly subjective experience. However, neuroscience can help us understand how people can use dance to feel more connected to each other in our technology-filled world.


Hanna Poikonen
The author is a Master of Science (Technology) and a dancer, and is writing her doctoral dissertation at the University of Helsinki’s Cognitive Brain Research Unit.

From the Researcher’s Pen is a series of articles in which researchers describe their work. This article was produced by Uutistamo in cooperation with the University of Helsinki.

Sent from my iPad

Can Another Body Be Seen as an Extension of Your Own? Tango makes it into Scientific American

Scientific America/Mind

Can Another Body Be Seen as an Extension of Your Own?

Surprising results show the fluidity of the "body schema"

By Julie Sedivy on January 12, 2016

The relationship between a person’s notion of self-hood and the openness of their body schema to another human being hints that perhaps it’s no coincidence that tango, which takes entanglement to sublime heights, originated in a culture that orients toward interdependence.

They want $500 for me to post an excerpt for up to 12 months.

Fuck that noise.

Here is the link.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-another-body-be-seen-as-an-extension-of-your-own/

Feeling Blue? Then Try Argentine Tango...

Feeling blue? Then try the tango: Scientists claim the dance helps rid depression, anxiety and stress
Australian academics said the dance has significant health benefits
University of New England team recruited 41 people with complaints of stress, anxiety and depression
Study found 'satisfaction with life and self-efficacy significantly increased'


Thanks go to Nina P on Facebook for the find....!!!

UNE/Rose Pinniger Blog Article: http://blog.une.edu.au/news/2008/04/16/tango-trial-aims-to-dance-depression-away/

Apparently there are a couple of published studies (at least) - one in the journal "Music and Movement" and one in "The American Journal of Dance Therapy"...one on depression and anxiety and one on macular degeneration...I'll see what I can do to get the full text of the study...

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2280869/Feeling-blue-Then-try-tango-Scientists-claim-dance-helps-rid-depression-anxiety-stress.html#ixzz2LUWqSqyG

The authors wrote: ‘Participants showed significant reductions in depression, anxiety, stress, and insomnia. Satisfaction with life and self-efficacy were significantly increased.‘At one-month follow-up, depression, anxiety, and stress levels remained reduced. A brief programme of tango dance was shown to be an effective strategy in alleviating mood disorders.’ The team at the University of New England in New South Wales and Australian National University in Canberra recruited 41 people with complaints of stress, anxiety and depression.

Mood: The team at the University of New England in New South Wales and Australian National University in Canberra recruited 41 people with complaints of stress, anxiety and depression. The participants were aged from 18 to 73, mainly well-educated and 80 per cent were female. Clinical assessments were made to classify their symptoms as extremely severe, severe, moderate, mild or normal.

Twenty participants then took eight tango sessions of 90 minutes each over a two-week period, while the 21 in the control group were put on a waiting list for classes. The assessments were conducted again at the end of the two weeks. Most tango participants showed clinically significant improvement in at least one area, whereas those on a waiting list were stable or became worse. Dancers also reported less insomnia and better general life satisfaction. One month later all 41 people were asked to complete the survey again and the results showed the tango’s benefits in reducing anxiety, stress and depression still remained.

The benefits for insomnia and general life satisfaction did not, however, suggest longer courses might be needed for sustained effects in these areas. The authors said tango requires 'a strong connection' with a partner, synchronisation and improvisation. They said study feedback 'indicated that this activity helped the participants to focus on the present moment and mentally switch off from their feelings of stress and distress'.

Another recent study, also by Australia’s University of New England and published in the British Journal of Visual Impairment, found that dancing the tango reduced depression, boosted self-esteem and improved balance in people with age-related macular degeneration.


Abstract here...

Intensive Tango Dance Program for People With Self-Referred Affective Symptoms
Rosa Pinniger, BPsych1⇓
Einar B. Thorsteinsson, PhD1
Rhonda F. Brown, PhD2
Patricia McKinley, PhD3
1School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences, University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia
2Australian National University, Canberra, Australia
3McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Rosa Pinniger, School of Behavioural, Cognitive and Social Sciences, University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales 2351, Australia. Email: rosapinniger@gmail.com

Abstract

Recent research shows that tango dance may be an effective strategy for influencing symptoms that contribute to mood disorders. In this study, we examined the efficacy of a short-duration intensive tango program (ie, 2 weeks). Forty-one participants were randomized to tango dance (1½ hours, 4 times/week for 2 weeks) or to a wait-list control condition. Self-rated symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, self-efficacy, satisfaction with life and mindfulness were assessed at pretest, posttest, and 1 month later. Tango group participants showed significant reductions in depression, anxiety, stress, and insomnia at posttest relative to the controls, whereas satisfaction with life and self-efficacy were significantly increased. At 1-month follow-up, depression, anxiety, and stress levels remained reduced relative to the wait-list controls. Thus, this brief but intensive program of tango dance was shown to be an effective strategy in alleviating mood disorders in people who self-report these symptoms.
anxiety dance depression insomnia mindfulness



Intensive Tango Dance Program for People With Self-Referred Affective Symptoms
Authors
Rosa Pinniger, Einar B Thorsteinsson, Rhonda F Brown, Patricia McKinley
Publication date
2013
Journal name
Music and Medicine
Volume
5
Issue
1
Pages
15-22
Publisher
SAGE Publications
Description
Abstract Recent research shows that tango dance may be an effective strategy for
influencing symptoms that contribute to mood disorders. In this study, we examined the
efficacy of a short-duration intensive tango program (ie, 2 weeks). Forty-one participants
were randomized to tango dance (1½ hours, 4 times/week for 2 weeks) or to a wait-list
control condition. Self-rated symptoms of depression, anxiety, stress, insomnia, self-efficacy,
satisfaction with life and mindfulness were assessed at pretest, posttest, and 1 month later. ...
Scholar articles
Intensive Tango Dance Program for People With Self-Referred Affective Symptoms
R Pinniger, EB Thorsteinsson, RF Brown, P McKinley - Music and Medicine, 2013




Tango program for individuals with age-related macular degeneration
Authors
Rosa Pinniger, Rhonda F. Brown, Einar Baldvin Thorsteinsson, Patricia McKinley
Publication date
2013/1/25
Journal name
British Journal of Visual Impairment
Volume
31
Issue
1
Pages
47-59
Publisher
SAGE
Description
Abstract Recent research shows that tango dance is an absorbing and effective strategy to
reduce levels of depression, while also increasing well-being. This study investigates the
feasibility, acceptability, and adherence to a tango programme for individuals with age-
related macular degeneration (ARMD). Depression is closely intertwined with the ARMD
diagnosis, since the loss of central vision has a profoundly negative impact on the person's
quality of life. Seventeen participants were randomised to tango dance (1.5 h, 2 times/ ...
Scholar articles
Tango programme for individuals with age-related macular degeneration
R Pinniger, RF Brown, EB Thorsteinsson, P McKinley - British Journal of Visual Impairment, 2013





Argentine tango dance compared to mindfulness meditation and a waiting-list control: A randomised trial for treating depression
Authors
Rosa Pinniger, Rhonda F Brown, Einar B Thorsteinsson, Patricia McKinley
Publication date
2012/8/3
Journal name
Complementary Therapies in Medicine
Publisher
Churchill Livingstone
Description
To determine whether tango dancing is as effective as mindfulness meditation in reducing
symptoms of psychological stress, anxiety and depression, and in promot.
Scholar articles
Argentine tango dance compared to mindfulness meditation and a waiting-list control: A randomised trial for treating depression
R Pinniger, RF Brown, EB Thorsteinsson, P McKinley - Complementary Therapies in Medicine, 2012