So
the tide has come in again. I may well be – I hope I am – the
last person in Europe to catch up with these videos. They've been
around for up to eight months, with many viewings. I hope I'm the
last person to see them just because I hope everyone else has already
enjoyed them.
It's
such a beautiful, imaginative idea, to take El Flaco Dany to ten
cities, film a brief class with him, talk to him about orquestas and
dancers, and then a brief reaction to the city. The first city is
Bucharest, and after showing a short milonga sequence and explaining it,
he sits down with Lucia Mirzan and remembers the D'Arienzo orquesta
and its performances. He then talks about a dancer he knew – Gavito
– and then his observations on the local Romanian music, which
impressed him. To date, there are three other videos covering the
orquestas of Troilo, Pugliese, and Di Sarli, three singers, and the
dancers Juan Carlos Copes, Osvaldo Zotto, and 'Puppy' Castello and
their partners. Some well-chosen clips of these orquestas and dancers
fill out the picture. The cities so far have been Tel Aviv, Frankfurt
and Istanbul, and I assume that London will be among the other six
videos still to appear, since El Flaco and Lucia were there recently.
I look forward to these relaxed and informal conversations about
music and dance, and to El Flaco's stories. The subtitles are in excellent
English and seem to be accurate. It's a wonderful project.
Of the classes, the blog says that they present '...the basis of Flaco Dany’s milonga technique, as a reference in finding your own milonga style.' I particularly like that phrase 'as a reference'. This is material to be used as needed, not merely copied. (Well, as if anyone could copy El Flaco...)
The
videos are on YouTube, but are collected on this page of the
Flacodany blog.
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