My Maestro di Arma taught with a mantra of “Form, Tempo, Intent”. For their attacks to be effective a fencer should have good form. For that attack to to pose a threat it must have intent and it must be executed at the right time, tempo. It is a mantra that I keep bumping into the essence of everywhere, nowhere more so than tango.
Let us start with a quote from E. Santos Discepolo lifted from Tangri-La
“Tango is not about what is done, but how it is done”.
The form of tango is easily identifiable, its posture, its moves, its mechanics, the cogs in the timepiece, the what. Tempo is, of course, the beat of the music, the tick of the clock. With those two components you will have something that looks like tango, will move like tango, but it won’t be tango.
For it to be tango there must be intent, there must be a desire to connect, to communicate, there must be music (for music is much more than just the beat). Intent is to beat and to mechanics what the concept of time is to a watch. Without the concept of time a watch is a mere trinket or bangle, with the concept of time we can be desperately lost in the absence of that mere trinket.