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Y ou could say there are as many Argentine Tango styles as there are great dancers from the old days. On the other hand you can describe some categories of similar styles. This discussion is of course simplified.

First, we can classify tango by context: Stage, Social Dance (Milonga), or Practice.

Stage tango is flamboyant and dramatic, usually choreographed, and technically perfected to a high level for an audience. A Social Dance has specific codes of behavior, common sense things, for the most part, such as avoiding collisions with other dancers, walking the lady back to her seat, dancing musically instead of showing off, and taking care with your partner. A practice is an informal setting where you can practice things more casually. read more >>

The Roots of Argentine Tango.

Argentine Tango as a dance and musical form developed in Buenos Aires at the end of the 19th Century, and arrived in Europe and then the US in the first decades of the 1900s. This is the model of dance that evolved into Ballroom tango, familiar to us from Rudy Valentino in the classic anti-war silent movie "The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse".

The roots of tango came from urban folkloric dances of the poorer neighborhoods, a mixture of Spanish, Criollo (Gaucho/Native from the countryside) and certainly African elements. In the great immigrant flow of the early 20th century, tango became the culture of Buenos Aires of neighborhoods, bars, nightclubs, and popular theater.  read more >>