Tuesday 29 September 2009

Dancing to Biagi

I have the impression that Biagi is difficult to dance to, and I wonder why. I found his music late: I could recognised D'Arienzo, Pugliese, Di Sarli, before I'd even heard of Biagi. I guess he's not played incessantly in milongas, so you don't get the practice. &, yes, his music is different.

Rodolfo Biagi was D'Arienzo's pianist for about three years, and became known as 'Manos Brujas' – 'magic hands'. In 1938 he left D'Arienzo, and formed his own orchestra. The story has it that D'Arienzo was irked by the applause his pianist was getting: 'I'm the star around here!' he's reported to have said. So Biagi came out of the tradition of playing very rhythmic music for dancing to.

There's a particular intensity in his compositions and arrangements, but also a serious kind of playfulness with rhythm, and with melodic lines. His rhythms are sharply staccato, perhaps the most staccato rhythm in all tango music, but his melodic lines can be extremely 'legato', very smooth and flowing. When you are dancing, and hear at the same time sharp forceful rhythms from the bandoneons and piano, and smooth flowing lines from the violin, you are faced with a dilemma: the rhythms make you want to move your feet in time, but the melodic line asks you to dance in a very flowing way.

But that's not all. The rhythms themselves aren't at all regular. Occasionally, the first or the third beat, which is normally accentuated, is either unexpectedly missed out, or played very quietly. Sometimes in a phrase of a few bars, the fourth beat in every bar is accentuated. This is syncopation, but for some reason it doesn't have the same effect as syncopation in jazz. Biagi plays around with the beat, so you have to keep your inner metronome sharp and clear. If you start to think the fourth beat is the first beat, sooner or later you're in for a big surprise.

This suggests that he abandoned the tradition of playing music for dancing to. But his music is great fun to dance to, but I really have to listen carefully, I can't take anything for granted. Above all, it's very powerful music, very intense, very energetic. To make a different kind of music, an individual music, is a great achievement.

I checked out YouTube to see if there were many videos of dance to Biagi, but rather few are identified. One of them is familiar because I uploaded it myself, and I've linked it before.

Tete isn't popular with everyone: he's never really elegant, smooth. Watching this video again, it's obvious that he uses his regular, perhaps relatively limited, repertoire of 'steps', even if they are combined in different ways.* But elegant or not, I don't think Tete and Silvia's dance to Biagi can be bettered in spirit and musicality. The intensity of the music is right there in the dance, and they relate perfectly to the legato phrasing, as well as to the crisp rhythms. There's a mixture of long and very short steps, which suits the phrasing and the rhythms well. The introduction is by Natalie Clouet, who invited Tete and Silvia to Paris in May: 'Tango is danced in a variety of ways, but above all one gets support from the floor because from the floor energy is found, and because it's on the floor that one dances the music.' (Tete.)

(*This led me to wonder about dancing differently to different music. Teachers do talk about this. To what extent do you use different steps and combinations of steps when you dance to, say, Di Sarli or D'Arienzo? My guess is that for most dancers it's not the steps themselves that change so much as a more general overall 'interpretation'. The style of dancing to Di Sarli might be longer steps, long smooth turns, while D'Arienzo would be a livelier use of the same steps and turns.)

8 comments:

Mari said...

Fantastic post! I've heard a lot of leaders complain about the difficulty of dancing to Biagi - particularly choreagraphing the end of his pieces on the fly. It's always beautiful, powerful music - but it requires much more concentration on my part to stay "on the music".

I also loved the video you posted. I'm partial to Tete and Silvia. :)

Game Cat said...

Re Biagi - I agree it is challenging to dance well, and knowing the music well and being focused really helps to get the most out of the tanda. Wonderfully expressive, though I admit liking only some of his songs (as in your vid).

Re - varying how one dances to different music, personally I vary the flavour/ texture of the same step more often than what figure I actually step. Some figures lend themselves better to certain music too I think (or at least interpret so) - e.g. giros with smooth, flowing music, balanceos with stronger accents. Would be interesting to hear what others do though.

Anonymous said...

[broken record]
How many teachers in London get us students to even think about this ... sigh...
[\broken record]

Simba said...

I sometimes wonder if the appreciation of Biagi's orchestra is a part in the rhythmic awakening of dancers, many seem to go through different phases of hate and love of his music, and I did the same.

At one point Biagi was a little over played in my area, nowadays I mostly prefer D'Arienzo w/Biagi, although he does have some real gems.

Nice post.

Tangocommuter said...

Thanks, Mari. Glad I'm not alone! Really, his music is regular, it just tries to sound a bit irregular. I have to concentrate, 1-2-3-4, and if I get a kick on '4' it gives a bit of unexpected energy; you get used to it. & glad you liked the video: I think the really long gliding steps, and the really short steps might be the answer to the legato/staccato in the music. But the endings are always a tease. You just have to be familiar with the music.

@ Game Cat, yes, that's how I react to different music. Perhaps ways of dancing to different orchestras could be taught more.

Anonymous said...

Just a thought, instead of thinking about the beat, try feeling the music to a particular instrument and moving to that. It obviously helps to know the music. The beauty of the dancing in the video is that although the steps are simple, they are in time to the music and there is probably stuff that you can't see and which is what they are feeling that makes the dancing special.
I have come across a few posts these last couple of days in where the dance, music, etc. is soooo analysed (over analysed in some cases)that I wonder if all this over thinking about Tango is hindering people from enjoying it because they think too much and not feel enough.

Tangocommuter said...

Thanks, Londontango. To me, the peculiarity of Biagi is that you get very flowing legato lines at the same time as the sharpest, most staccato beat. Moreover, the beat isn't regular: 2 and 4 can be accentuated while 1 and 3, which you expect to be accentuated, can be almost ignored. As you say, you need to dance to the legato lines, but you need to do it to the beat, which often seems to disappear from under you. I like that video too: it seems to resolve this by alternating very long steps with the legato phrases, and very short steps to the rhythm. It's a powerful interpretation of a powerful piece of music.

Sorry if this post adds to the analysis! Of course we need to 'feel' our response to the music. But I found it useful to think over the problems I encountered in dancing to Biagi.

Incidentally, I heard that in the early years of London tango there were many experts at Biagi because there were only two CDs around: Troilo and Biagi!

Anonymous said...

@ Tango commuter
LOL! You might as well be speaking in another language to me as I never count the beat and unless I look it up in the dictionary, I do not know what a legato is. I have a hard enough time remembering the names of particular steps. As far as I am concerned, all that talking about dancing to the beat means nothing to me. I just move when my leader moves and I know when he is not moving in time (to anything, even the silent bits).
Maybe it is just the way my brain works, but when it comes to dancing and music, I don't think about it, I just move and feel it.
That's just me.
Perhaps I should have had more music lessons at school!