The footwork! The precision! The timing! The control! The fluency! &... the musicality! No apology, we're still in the land of the midnight milonga. In Maipu 444 to be precise. Just take a look at this! Please! (I can't embed it.)
Too bad so many videos of milongas show the ceiling, and the torsos of dancers. There are many reasons why it's not easy to film in a real milonga. (I suggested that someone should try to find funding to set up a temporary milonga in the city, where the best old dancers could, if they chose, come and be filmed: I hope someone's working on that right now!) This brief clip has got it absolutely right: it shows where it all comes from, where the energy starts, the floor. Just watch these magic feet dance together! & for a brief moment, their faces. & see how much music you can make stuck in a small corner of the floor while the other dancers are still chatting.
One great thing of the last year has been finding out just how many wonderful older dancers there still are. Irene and Man Yung revealed a number of them earlier in the year, and Jantango's project is ongoing. It's wonderful that good quality, inexpensive video, and YouTube, have arrived just in time for us to follow some of these people from afar, for dancers in the future to look at stuff like this and say, 'Is that what it was like? Amazing!'
1 comment:
The old dancers aren't interested in being filmed. If they go to the milonga, they simply want to dance. Many have told me this. A milonguero viejo told me that the young dancers "want to rob us, not just copy us." He added, "my steps are mine, because I created them." If anyone wants to film, the dancers have to be sought out in the milongas.
I have a different point of view about where the energy begins. We have all heard it said: the music enters your ears, moves down to your heart, and makes you dance. It always begins with the music that inspires us to dance. The feet don't move on their own. I don't see energy in the floor.
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