Tete and Silvia again

Watch Tete turn: like all the good local dancers he turns as smoothly as a figure hanging on a string, but with an energy, an impulse, often an acceleration, derived from the music. The music comes first: this is emphasised in their classes. Their classes are costly but the attention and affection they give is worth it. The Monday class wasn't great, a bit of an anticlimax as I was tired and a bit tense. The “bounce” from Saturday is taken further with a saccada on the right, and then repeated on the left. Emphasis on axis. There's a tendency, often noticeable in visiting dancers, to 'wobble' the vertical axis, to bend sideways at the waist so one or other shoulder rises. Maybe it's accidental or intended to look dramatic or full of feeling or something. Oscar condemns it in his usual dramatic style: “You kill your partner if you do that!” It pulls the follower out of axis.

Tete says to be very careful to maintain the upright axis, which also means being upright and leading chest first. There's a lot of twist at the waist, but the axis stays upright. This really stood out, for me, the moment I walked into the first milonga I went to, at El Beso, the sight of couples rotating as smoothly as whirling Sufi dancers. & walking. “Come on, just walk!” says Sylvie. Walk with energy and purpose, take bigger steps.

I get to lead Tete, as Silvia is tired. "You need to work much harder around your axis when you lead him" she warns. It's true: leading a man means moving more strongly. & Tete relaxes right into being a follower and following exactly what I lead, which is unintentionally hilarious as he's very supple and his legs fly out in unexpected directions as he follows my rather imprecise lead.

Tete and Silvia's classes are as much about musicality as about 'steps' and 'moves'; when to use double time, when to pause, how to finish, the feel of the music. I've got to be more careful to maintain the completely frontal contact, and to turn from the waist without trying to use the left hand to lead. One more class with them at La Calesita on Saturday. I'm confident I'll get a lot more then. A valuable trip.

Tete and Silvia are performing at Canning. I get there at 11, too tired to want to dance, and of course an hour later, want to jump up and start cruising the aisles to see who catches my eye, but by then the floor is densely packed, and dancing with someone you've never danced with before on a floor that busy isn't very enjoyable. But Tete's out there, rotating smoothly through the crowd with one partner after another. Their performance later has everyone on their feet to watch.

Two more common misapprehensions about tango dancers in Buenos Aires:
Tango dancers in Buenos Aires never change their shoes in the milonga – nor their socks, neither.
Tango dancers in Buenos Aires have the most amazing upright, chest-out posture. (I was watching a good dancer dancing really well with poor posture the other evening. It's possible, but it's not a great idea. & if you aren't a good dancer it doesn't look good.)

Called by La Ideal in the hopes of being able to photograph the cupola/dome in the roof. Unfortunately they don't allow photography, maybe because a class was on, as cameras are out in force at the milongas in the evening. Too bad. What I took to be ceramic is stained, or more probably painted glass, and there's a clear glass roof above. I still couldn't look more closely because the class was using the floor. The upstairs now seems to be regularly open for classes and milongas, and the rather dingy downstairs is back to being a cafe.

Argentina, a society as up-to-date as it can be. Ads urging the recycling of batteries, the use of energy-efficient light bulbs, saving water. Brown bread in all the little local supermarkets, and most restaurants offer brown and white bread. Shopping: an excellent health food shop, Suipacha and Viamonte. However, if you like dark chocolate, bring it with you. And a strange arcade off Esmeralda, like the Parisian one Aragon wrote about: odd little shops full of paintings and antiques, of toy cars, old jewellery and watches, of bizarre cigarette lighters and hip flasks. Nobody ever seems to go down there, although there's a cafe at the end. There's an astonishing quantity of late 19 to early 20th century antiques in town, shipped over in the pre-Great Depression boom days.

The Centro Cultural Borges has new exhibitions: more painting. Art here and now seems to mean painting. But the centre hosts theatre, music and cinema. A huge space is given to visual arts on the top floor of one of the main shopping malls in BsAs, and people wander up there after browsing their Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana. I photograph xmas shopping from on high.