WARNING: THIS IS A PERFORMANCE! It is a DEMONSTRATION of class material! (Only joking...)
Martha Anton and 'El Gallego' Manolo really are among the most welcoming and genial teachers I know. Manolo seems to be a walking archive of canyengue: I hope someone's cross-indexed his memory, although video is likely to preserve a lot of it. & Martha will remember you from years ago, with a big smile.
The classes are relaxed and unstructured. As they are held in the Escuela Tango anyone may turn up for a taster (and maybe so they can add '...studied canyengue with Martha Anton and 'El Gallego' Manolo' to their CVs). Or, like this class, it might be just a few friends, some who've known them for years. Whatever happens, Martha will have the beginners dancing basic canyengue to that hypnotic beat by the end of the class, or Manolo will have dug out something totally unexpected even to his oldest friends. All with a smile and about three words of English, if you don't speak Spanish. If you do, you might catch Manolo complaining about the young dancers who flock in demanding a lot of new material, and forgetting it as they leave...
Of course canyengue itself helps. You can dance it with a grin on your face, and the music is a lot more simple and cheerful, and less emotional, than tango. It's fun, which you can't exactly say of tango, and at its best it's fascinating to watch. I love the effortless way Manolo weaves himself around Martha at the beginning of this clip. Manolo learned in the late 1940s with his childhood friend, Rudolfo Ciere, at a time when canyengue was regarded as at best old-fashioned if not actually primitive. If I remember Robert Farris Thompson ('The Art History of Love') correctly, the crouching stance was regarded as regrettably African at a time when civilised people stood up straight and danced tango. But what Manolo learned was a kind of proto-tango, from dancers who were already getting on in years when he was young. Proto-tango dance to proto-tango music: it fits early Canaro like a glove. A lot of what you learn can be transposed to tango without much problem. Just make sure you stand up straight, though.
The music is El Pensamiento, played by the Cuarteto Punta y Taco. It doesn't quite sound like old music, and the group may be a sort of revivalist group, perhaps from the 1950s. Martha and Manolo have their own series of CDs of music for canyengue, which you can buy from them, a mix of early Canaro, Donato, Carabelli, Lomuto, with a lot of almost unknown orquestas, some of them wonderful. Many of the recordings pre-date the introduction of electric recording in 1928, so the sound quality isn't great, and it has to be said that the tracks from Canaro and other well-known orquestas are probably available in better quality on other CDs. But if you really want CDs with recordings by Perez Pocholo, Alfredo Cordisco, D'Alessandro, and many others, they are here. You may be able to listen to them on Todotango too.
8 comments:
Interesting. Thanks for that, TC.
"Manolo learned in the late 1940s with his childhood friend, Rudolfo Ciere"
Rodolfo Cieri. Here's a sample of his instruction. (You've got to wonder at the thinking behind those theories e.g. the man's foot position determines the woman's...)
Dear Tangocommuter,
Thanks for this post - it's like you took us back to Martha and Manolo's class at the Escuela de Tango again! Great video too - shows Martha and Manolo relaxed and enjoying the demo as much as their students.
Taking classes with Martha and Manolo changed our tango lives forever - Martha talks about Manolo being an "encyclopedia of tango" and yes, we have been taking classes with them since 2006 and still Manolo never ceases to surprise us. Dancing Canyengue and learning from M&M really opened our minds, whether it is in listening to the music, or understanding how certain steps are done or how certain techniques work.
Manolo, Rudolfo Cieri and Juan Bruno all learned together and exchanged ideas about dancing since they were kids. They consider themselves "Brothers" in Tango - they were never jealous of each other, they were great friends who shared decades of friendship in life and in tango. It made for a very rich legacy of tango and they were able to develop their individual styles with input from each other to the very fullest. Osvaldo Cartery and Ricardo Vidort are two such "Brothers in Tango" as well. Wish that we could see more of this cooperation, learning and sharing in dancers of today - but mostly we see pettiness and envy and dancers not really developing their potential together. Maybe society is different these days - people are more competitive? Less neighbourly?
Good observation about the "old friends" - everytime we see Martha and Manolo, whether in class or in a social setting, they are introducing us to more "old friends" that we have never seen before! They are not just saying it - those friends have really known them for ages!
Thanks again for this post about Martha and Manolo,
Irene and Man Yung
"Wish that we could see more of this cooperation, learning and sharing in dancers of today - but mostly we see pettiness and envy and dancers not really developing their potential together. Maybe society is different these days - people are more competitive? Less neighbourly?"
I wish too.
There's a profound difference between the traditional learning to dance tango socially i.e. with/from friends, and the new learning commercially i.e. from teachers. That difference affects all aspects of the dancing.
For example, the ronda. Guys who learned by dancing with friends inc. other guys are usually fine with going around with other guys, co-operatively, whereas guys who learned commercially have more an attitude of competing for space on the floor. I think that's not just because class students learn in an environment that fosters moves that are incompatible with social dancing. It is also that they inherit the competitiveness inherent in teachers. Another example of an aspect deeply affected is the social factors of partner selection. These can go very awry when people apply and expect the "Say Yes" policy that's inherent to the class model in which people don't have free partnering choice. All these effects add up to a big influence on how easy/hard people find learning and enjoying dancing tango to be, By comparison, things newcomers often think are important (e.g. steps) matter very little.
Here in Europe, the voracious commercial method got a monopoly at the start of the renaissance in part because people had no choice - no-one had any tango dancing friends to learn from. But now there are more social dancers around, newcomers are more likely to know one, if only to take them along to a milonga and maybe get them started by dancing with them. So slowly, social learning is returning.
Chris, yes, I never liked Cieri's tango either, and there's sadly little of his canyengue, although accounts of them dancing in Europe in the early 90s are pretty extatic (once again in Robert Farris Thompson). But Martha and Manolo definitely shine out! Odd perhaps that they dance a funky canyengue but insist that tango has to be danced open, much like the Cieris. I'm sure I've heard Manolo insist that close embrace tango is quite wrong.
Irene and Man Yung, many thanks for some very interesting comments. I'm beginning to wonder if in the end video might be dangerous as it prioritises watching over direct experience, and makes comparisons too easy... Also, I think that attitude of everyone working together is perhaps typical of an immigrant community.
& I think I owe you thanks for introducing me to Martha and Manolo in the first place!
John.
"I'm sure I've heard Manolo insist that close embrace tango is quite wrong.
Is seems to me when an instructor says some stylistic aspect of tango dancing is "wrong", the truth of this is only that it is wrong for him, and hence also for the students listening to this advice because they are there to learn to dance like him. Outside that very specific context, such a judgement makes no sense. Hence that one rarely hears regular dancers saying some other couple's way of dancing tango is "wrong".
As for close embrace specifically, well, it's inevitable that instructors are generally far less keen on it than dancers. That's down to what works best for instruction v. what works best for dancing.
Chris, 'right' and 'wrong' are going to be there in any teaching, even socially among friends. Not moral imperatives, just the best/most comfortable way of doing something. A leader leaning over his partner and squeezing and pushing is always going to be 'wrong'.
I can't comment on Manolo's intentions as I haven't asked him. I just find it slightly odd that he dances canyengue so successfully in a continuous close hold, but doesn't accept much the same embrace in tango. I assume he grew up with open embrace tango and still thinks it's best.
TC wrote: "... just the best/most comfortable way of doing something."
"Best" may equate to "most comfortable" for you and I, TC, but not for all.
"A leader leaning over his partner and squeezing and pushing is always going to be 'wrong'."
In practice, it depends. Witness the many girls hereabouts who give up the relative comfort of their milonga seat to endure the amazingly uncomfortable show moves that guys have learned 'right' in class.
"There's a profound difference between the traditional learning to dance tango socially i.e. with/from friends, and the new learning commercially i.e. from teachers. That difference affects all aspects of the dancing."
Spot on Chris, that is why we all look and dance the way we do in relation to the old guys/girls who learned by cooperation.
The commercial learning structure does not naturally promote personal development, we tend to dance our training (ersatz of instructors), and not who we are, hence the discussions ad-nauseum about techniques, styles, etc., etc…
For those great dancers, Tango is a vehicle for personal self-expression. They bring who they are to the dance, as an offer on the altar of the possible connection between two people. I want to dance with a person, share who I am, and receive who my partner is, not a “learning process” created by many “dance instructors”.
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