Milonga - but not quite as we know it

Video thanks to un rien de tango.


Nathalie Clouet, a trained dancer inspired, like so many, by the Tango Argentino show in Paris in 1989, spent a year in Buenos Aires on a government grant in the early 1990s, and returned to Paris to teach. Later she invited Tete and Sylvia to Paris yearly: I went over for the workshops in 2009, the last he gave in Paris before his death, which were unforgettable, intense and warm events. She teaches and organises milongas and practicas. I'd say there's always a playful and creative spirit at work, which doesn't conflict with her great respect for Tete and traditional tango.

Her website is here. There's a lot of material of different kinds on it, mostly in French, and including a link to writing produced for her grant. My rather clumsy translation of the statement at the top of the web page is: 'To dance, to make a journey to become one with the floor, the music, space, time, partners. Our goal is to partake of the experience of movement as a group, to develop the qualitative aspects of movement at the heart of the dynamics and rhythms of social Argentine tango'. Elsewhere she explains the 'qualitative aspects of movement' as co-ordination, fluidity and lightness.


Incidentally, I notice on her website a link to a video of Pina Bausch and some of her dancers at a milonga organised in Paris in 1996 by Tete, but the video has disappeared from YouTube: it was on an account terminated because of multiple copyright infringements. Too many good videos of this kind disappear.