Bridge to the Tango

Daniel Trenner is a granddaddy to us all. His first visit to Buenos Aires to learn tango was in 1987, after ten years in various forms of jazz dance. By the early 1990s he was there with a video camera, recording a wide range of the tango dancers he had met, recordings that were edited into a ground-breaking series called Bridge to the Tango. They included teaching videos by Mingo and Esther Pugliese, Rodolfo and Maria Cieri, Miguel Balmaceda and Nelly Argaraz, Tete and Silvia, Puppy Castello, workshops with Gustavo Naveira and his then partner Olga Besio... (But sadly, it seems, nothing of Ricardo Vidort.) A few years ago it was announced that Bridge to the Tango was closing down, and I rushed to buy a few more of their VHS cassettes. The visual quality isn't great, and the verbal translation (rather than subtitles) slows everything down, but you get teaching material from some of the greats. Before YouTube, it was all there was, and it's still wonderful material.

I've just noticed that Daniel Trenner has added a blog to his new website, with several very thoughtful entries from last autumn called 'Homage to the Followers'. There's also a wonderful piece on Jean Bruno, who Trenner also filmed in Buenos Aires. Bruno was born in 1925 and started dancing in 1941, truly 'Golden Age'.

There's also a link to the store: 'Bridge' is no longer running off VHS cassettes (for obvious reasons) but a number of the cassettes are still in stock and still available. & it seems that Trenner is going ahead with digitising his archives with a view to re-releasing them. Wonderful!