New Videos of Ricardo Vidort!

Well... sadly enough they are hardly new. Newly released, and not that newly either. Newly noticed by me, more like. The wonderful Myriam Pincen, who danced and taught with Ricardo in the last years of his life has posted some clips of a workshop in the old Porteño y Bailarín venue in 2004, taught by Ricardo, Myriam and Osvaldo Cartery, on her YouTube channel. The clips are all dated November 24.

The sequence begins with a demo by Myriam and Ricardo. The video quality of these clips is analogue, and the light level is low. I find this quite appealing, a kind of raw, fiery colour, but unfortunately in this clip the movement isn't that smooth so although you get an impression, it's not particularly enjoyable to watch. The other clips are much smoother.

Also before the workshop began Ricardo dances with Osvaldo, who took the role of follow. Old childhood friends from the days when Argentina was still a predominantly male society: I believe sexual parity wasn't reached until the late 1940s, which meant large groups of men standing around at milongas trying to get dances... This must have put a lot of pressure on men to up their dance, their appearance and courtesy, particularily since social dance was the main venue where men and women could meet. At least in the UK, and probably elsewhere too, dance halls remained the places where most couples met each other right up until the beginning of the 1960s. Hence the fanatic interest young guys of Ricardo and Osvaldo's generation had in excelling at tango.

There's a general dance, pretty much like a milonga, carefully watched by Myriam, Ricardo and Osvaldo, at the end of which Osvaldo, crackling with energy as ever, dances a brief demo with Myriam. There's a cut to another general dance with Ricardo and a partner, perhaps the best dance of the series. The video quality here is reasonably smooth, and the analogue colours glow.

Sadly that's it from Porteño y Bailarín, but there is one further video of Ricardo and Myriam, a demo at the end of a private class. The lighting is good so it's clearer how Ricardo leads those corridas, runs of quick steps, round his partner, so much of the energy, the impulse, coming from the chest. It's also a complete piece of music, and performed in true tango style on a space no larger than a fair-sized floor tile, but full of energy and playfulness nonetheless.

Myriam's channel also has a number of clips of her with other, more recent partners. She continues to teach in Buenos Aires, in English if necessary, an invaluable bridge to the dance of the golden age.

Welcome back...

...Tango and Chaos! On the off-chance I searched for it this morning, and there it is again. Wonderful to see it back. However it might not display properly on Firefox which moreover blocks the Adobe Flash Player by default. I don't know my way round all that, but on the Edge browser the site is as good as ever, and the videos always wonderful. Many thanks to Rick! I can claim from personal experience that his site, and especially the clips on it, is inspiring. As he says, if you can't see it you can't dance it, and there's plenty to see here, so plenty to dance.

La Maleva

I wondered again recently if I could listen through, chronologically, to all the Troilo recordings I have. On the surface that’s far from impossible but I failed of course. After a while, fewer tracks really stand out, but it’s still an ambition to get a sense of the span of an extraordinary career from start to finish.

The start is easy enough. Comme il faut/Tinta Verde of 1938 was Troilo’s first 78 with his own newly-formed orquesta. He was 24. It seems a stupendously confident start. Right from the first note it sounds like Troilo. In fact, the very first chord of Comme il Faut seems discordant. Compare it with the performance of composer/performer, Eduardo Arolas who quickly plays two notes, a sprightly flourish leading to the first note of his composition. Troilo seems to jam all three notes together, as if relishing the striking and slightly discordant chord. Within the first 30 seconds there’s no mistaking the driving, tightly rehearsed and disciplined rhythm playing that allows the soloist (piano) to improvise freely, and of course invites the dancers to step out. Right from the very start it doesn’t sound in the least like any other tango orquesta. This is Troilo from the very beginning.

One track that really caught my ear and demanded a repeat listening was La Maleva, from 1942. The energetically incisive rhythm, the expressive softness that Troilo was getting from his five violins, and above all the intense tenderness and sorrow of this track is remarkable. In the first 10 seconds the strings fade practically to nothing, offering a clear platform to the piano. The expressive playing of the strings brings out the tenderness of the phrases. Whereas I think most orquestas until then played loud with little control of volume, Troilo used volume to create emotion and sequence and drama. Nowhere more so than in the final minute of La Maleva. The strings play over a bandoneon rhythm that fades in and out – which I guess was played in-orquesta, not engineered on a mixing desk. All leading to Troilo himself, soloing over or even duetting with a very subdued piano, Troilo, who seems to have found, as Miles Davis, another musical hero, discovered a few years later, that playing quietly can be more emphatic than playing loudly.

& why did this particular song seem so familiar? Suddenly I remembered a dance clip I had watched over and over 10 year ago when it first appeared in Rick McGarry’s great Tango and Chaos blog. Very sadly the blog has gone, hopefully not permanently. But could some of the clips have survived on YouTube?

Lo and behold, miraculously, I found La Maleva,the very clip I’d watched (and listened to) with such fascination a decade ago. What a relief it’s still available! Filmed, I think, in Lo de Celia, two dancers wind themselves endlessly, fluently around each other, rising and falling to the energy and cadence of the music.

I watched it again and again when it first appeared, but my experience of the dance then was very limited, and it seemed almost miraculous. Now I notice first how much dance there is in it. It’s Troilo at his most tender, almost sorrowful, and I’d be inclined to dance more slowly, even if I could lead all those twists and turns (beyond me, in any case.) But despite the constant movement of the dance there’s absolutely no rush, they are both completely at ease. It doesn’t look forced or showy in any way. After all, if there are so many beautiful notes why not mark them, if you can! & then I notice the flexibility of her knees, and realise that he’s leading this. You don’t notice his knees, but the couple’s embrace is too close for her to do this independently. He’s lifting and lowering her, so in effect he’s leading in two plains, horizontally and vertically, which makes sense as you listen to and express the music, the rise and fall of the melodic phrases set against the onward pulse of the rhythm. I notice the precision of lead and follow, his clear ‘steering’ with his feet, and the energy and lightness of her stepping.

Two wonderful dancers, and just how lucky we are to be able to witness it! It’s not the only way to dance to La Maleva but I’m glad to say it’s no less of a miracle to me today.

(Who was La Maleva? A type rather than a person, the bad/loose woman who becomes a milonguera and a ‘kept woman’, but repents and goes back home, to her mother’s joy. It was a tango written in 1922, and subsequently a silent Argentine film released the following year. Troilo’s version, like other versions, dispenses with the lyrics, which can be found on Paul Bottomer’s site along with a translation, and where you can also listen to versions by other orquestas.)

Tango and Chaos, where are you?

About a month ago I remembered a clip I’d seen on Rick McGarry’s great Tango and Chaos blog, which I hadn’t visited for a few years. I found the site – but the clips were no longer there. I was using my mobile and I assumed this was because of some software incompatibility. However, when I went back to the site a few days later, on February 22, I found a message saying that the site ownership had expired and that it was available for purchase. Currently, if you search for it, you don’t get anywhere or you get a message asking you to try again later. I’m not sure when McGarry set it up, but free blogging might not have been so easily available then. YouTube began in 2005, and might not have been the obvious choice for hosting videos until later. I remember McGarry’s videos were good quality but took ages to download as he’d bought space on a server to host them.

So much enthusiastic writing, so much background info about tango, about dancing and the milongas, and in particular so many wonderful clips of some of the great dancers, all gone. It’s a real loss. It was over-elaborate in parts, especially the attempt to explain the tango walk, but the enthusiasm was undeniable. I’m sure everyone who read it will share my dismay that this great resource has vanished, and will hope Rick will resurrect it along with the wonderful clips which, he claimed, were just some of his extensive archive from years of filming in the milongas, a priceless record of a generation of dancers, many of whom are no longer with us. His site was a real inspiration for those of us who believed in social tango, and guessed that it wasn’t what we were in general paying our teachers for. In an atmosphere of choreographed moves Tango and Chaos was a breath of fresh air, and when the clips started to appear, suddenly we began to get an idea of what social tango really looked like.

The site, or part of it, lives on in a Russian translation McGarry authorised in 2012. But in Russian! Of course the clips are there, records of some wonderfully happy afternoons of dance in Lo de Celia, but it’s only part of the site and it doesn’t seem to have all the material that was in the original.

Does anyone have news of McGarry? It would be great to hear that his enthusiasm for social tango is undiminished, that there is a backup of the site, that a revised version is planned, even that more of his archive of clips of social dance, filmed at a time when dancers who had learned in the Golden Age were still on the floor, will become available.


(I received a comment on this subject which I don’t think I should publish as it has an email address and phone number. It reads:

Albert Doan has left a new comment on your post "Ricardo Vidort and Luisito Ferraris: videos":

To my great disappointment Rick Mcgarry's website Tango and Chaos is not available. Can I get some help in resolving the problem. Does anyone have contact information for Rick Mcgarry.

Al Doan

Sorry Al, I can’t help. I discovered this myself just recently, and this post is my response. Of course I’ll update you with any news.)

Gavito

I commented briefly on Gavito dancing Pugliese above, and found several links to statements he made about tango. I also found a link to a book, also available as a download and translated into English a few years ago, based on his recollections and on taped conversations in his final years. He died in 2005.

Of course the book is his recollections, his version, but it gave me something of a new perspective. I always thought he grew up with tango, but it seems clear that this was only partly true. Tango was something he grew into. Most of the ‘older generation’ were born around 1935, turning 13 in 1948 when the predominant dance was still tango, but Gavito was born in 1942, which means that he was 13 in 1955. Although tango was still everywhere, the predominant new culture was rock ‘n' roll, and jive was his first passion: his teenage dance was to Bill Haley and Chubby Checker, and to jazz. ‘Gavito was an impressive dancer: quick, agile, likeable, elegant.’ He grew up as a jazz dancer with a bit of tango and the tango slowly came to predominate after that.

But above all Gavito was a dancer. He danced everything he could, jive, tango, cumbia, folk, latin, flamenco, swing, tap, cumbia, zamba, all forms of social dance. Later he formed companies that travelled the world giving stage performances of a wide range of South American dance, but tango became the highlight. He could dance fast, but claims he never hurried. But as he got older he found himself drawn back to the social tango culture of Buenos Aires, the culture of his parents’ generation, and he slowed down until he became known as ‘the motionless dancer’. ‘Tango is what happens between steps’ he said. His dance and his views on tango expressed that older culture.

He claims to have had teachers of tango – Miguel Caló the musician and Julián Centeya the poet – rather than dance teachers, but he tells a great story about advice given him by ‘Old Márquez’ from Pompeya. ‘I never forgot it... At one point when he was sitting down and I danced past him, he pulled on my jacket and said, ‘Kid, with tango, you have to wait.’ I didn’t know what he meant or why he said it to me. Three years later, I met him when I went dancing in Almagro. I saw him and went up to him and said, ‘Maestro...’ He interrupted me and said, ‘Have you come to ask me what to wait for?’ I was taken aback. What was I supposed to wait for? ‘For the music to reach you and not for you to chase after the music.’

He had a lifetime experience of dance in general, spoke a number of languages from his travels, and was very articulate. As a result he became something of an ambassador for tango, and his teaching was greatly valued. A recollection of his classes in Toronto between 1995 and 2000 gives a good flavour of this. He says: ‘When I am on stage, I play the buffoon. Do not mimic me on the dance floor’ and adds: ‘In Argentina you won’t see people doing a lot of steps. In a dance, three steps is too much.’

There’s also an excellent interview with him from the same period, with a lot of insight into the dance, and an outline of his life.

‘Gavito: A good tango dancer is one who listens to the music. R: Is that the only criteria? Gavito: Yes. We dance the music, not the steps.’

He was a teacher who taught dancing, rather than dance steps. He spent some time in London (he was married to a ballerina from Scotland) and organised a milonga in the 1990s and taught regularly here. It amazes me to think there was a time when you could go to a milonga in London and be greeted by Gavito, while the ladies could expect a dance with him. The current worldwide popularity and spread of tango owes much to him. & he also raised the profile of the older generation of dancers - 'El Flaco' Dany, Osvaldo and Coca, 'El Nene' Masci, Tete, Puppy Castello - by inviting them to dance at his Buenos Aires milongas.

It’s unwise to try to summarise a whole life, particularly one as varied as that of Gavito, in a few paragraphs based on partial evidence. I hope I haven’t misrepresented him.

Many of the available videos are of Gavito 'playing the buffoon', but some of the more recent videos of classes, particularly with Maria Plazaola, are excellent, such as this one. Probably the best is the famous 'Nobody can teach you the feeling' video, a good flavour of the dancer and the teaching.

One-metre Pugliese 2

I’ve edited the earlier post on Alberto Dassieu, changing the embedded video for another I preferred. And soon after I wrote it I discovered that several of the videos I linked to were unavailable in France. I hope some clips Alberto and Paulina are available there: it’s most likely a copyright issue with Pugliese’s music. Fortunately that’s not a problem here.

In any case, that post was incomplete. I started writing about dancing to Pugliese and found myself writing about Alberto. But Alberto didn’t only dance Pugliese, and of course he wasn’t the only person of his generation to dance Pugliese. The orquesta continued to play as much as possible, despite government persecution of Pugliese himself through much of the lifetime of Alberto’s generation. Pugliese was a hero for many, he stood for freedom at a dark time, and was imprisoned for his political views. You couldn’t expect a quiet life, perhaps you couldn’t even expect a life if you were openly communist in South America in the 1970s – 80s. He was brave and he survived.

It was a great pleasure to find a few clips of Pugliese danced by Alberto’s contemporaries. I hope there are more, as dancing to Pugliese is an important topic! I’d really like to find more, but I think the few I’ve linked here give a good idea of how Pugliese is danced by the generation that once danced live to the orquesta.

First, Beba Pugliese with Jorge Firpo. Beba was Pugliese’s daughter, growing up with his music, with the orquesta rehearsing in the house. She still directs her own orquesta from the piano, like her father, and she also dances. Here are Beba Pugliese and Jorge Firpo. & here she is directing the Orquesta Beba Pugliese from the piano in La Yumba.

The late Enriqueta Kleinman with Nestor La Vitola dance to Pugliese's Don Augustin Bardi. There are several other good clips of Nestor La Vitola dancing Pugliese with other partners, all well worth checking out.

Gavito danced Pugliese a lot, but sadly most clips are of his show dance, although he came from much the same background as Ricardo Vidort and other tangueros of that generation. I think I once found a very indistinct clip of Gavito dancing in a milonga in Club Gricel, but mostly you’ll see Gavito and partner on stage in a near-horizontal line. This clip shows him dancing with a very young-looking Maria Plazaola, perhaps around 2002 when she started to dance with him and before he fell ill. It’s a class demo to Pugliese, showing class material, and probably the nearest to how they might have danced in a milonga.

But my favourite Pugliese clip is of Ismael Heljalil dancing in Lo de Celia. It’s particularly valuable as it shows Pugliese danced in a crowded milonga, Pugliese in the real world, if you regard the milonga as the real world of tango. It’s marvellous how they move in a limited space as a single unit, inseparable from the music, echoing in dance its sinuous line and energy, rising and falling back. There’s no ‘style’, no decoration, to get in the way of dance, there’s just music, a couple, and fluent, calm, energetic movement. It’s minimal, intense and beautiful. Dancing the music, not the steps! & certainly the closest I’ve found to one-metre Pugliese.



Isa Negra also uploaded a track of the same couple dancing Di Sarli. I was also delighted to find a clip of Ismael Heljalil dancing a whole tanda of great vals tracks in the much-missed Maipu 444 more than a decade ago. Jantango uploaded a 15-minute talk in Spanish by Ismael, introduced by a short section of dance. A pity there aren’t more clips like this, but we’re lucky to have these and a few more. A real inspiration.

Monica Paz in Europe

Monica Paz is one of a few Buenos Aires-based tango teachers whose aim is to teach people to dance tango - rather than to teach a lot of tango steps. It's not necessarily the same thing. In fact it's probably a whole lot easier to teach steps since that's mechanical learning, learning by rote.

Monica has spent much time in the milongas for many years, and has learned by dancing with a great many older-generation dancers, many of whom she's interviewed on her website. She also speaks good English! Not to be missed.

SEPTEMBER 2017: London, Bristol, Saarbrücken, Antwerp, Hamburg.

United Kingdom from September 4th to 13th:

Date Location Venue Event Time

SEPT. 6 BRISTOL Tango West Technique Class 5:00 to 6:00 pm

SEPT. 6 BRISTOL Tango West Tango Workshop 6:30 to 8:00 pm

SEPT. 6 BRISTOL Tango West Milonga Workshop 8:15 to 9:45 pm

SEPT. 7 LONDON Embrace Tango Guided practica 9:00 to 10:00 pm

SEPT. 8 LONDON Technique Class 7:30 to 9:00 pm

SEPT. 9 LONDON Light Temple 5:30 to 7:00 pm

SEPT. 9 LONDON Light Temple Intermediate Class 7:30 to 8:30 pm

SEPT. 10 LONDON Pavadita Intermediate Class 7:30 to 8:30 pm

SEPT. 11 LONDON Technique Class 7:30 to 9:00 pm

Technique Classes: Pre-registration required, first come, first served.

Private Lessons in London: Contact to Brigitte: brigitte@paris-tango.co.uk – 07818 808 711

Saarbrücken, Germany, Sept. 13th through 20th

Date Location Venue Event Time

SEPT. 14 SAARBRÜCKEN Tanzstudio Fortuna PractiMilonguero 18:00 to 19:00 SEPT. 14 SAARBRÜCKEN Tanzstudio Fortuna Tango is an Embrace Workshop 19:00 to 20:15

SEPT. 15 SAARBRÜCKEN Tanzstudio Fortuna Performance

SEPT. 16 SAARBRÜCKEN Tanzstudio Fortuna Technique of the Movement WS. 18:00 to 19:15

SEPT. 17 SAARBRÜCKEN Tanzstudio Fortuna Interpreting the Music I WS. 13:00 to 14:15

SEPT. 17 SAARBRÜCKEN Tanzstudio Fortuna Interpreting the Music II WS. 14:30 to 15:45

Tanzstudio Fortuna: Ludwigstraße 58. Saarbrücken

To book private lessons, please email at akzentrum1@gmail.com

Antwerp, Belgium, Sept. 20th through 26th

Date Location Venue Event Time

SEPT. 22 ANTWERP Tango Workshop 20:00 to 21:15

SEPT. 22 ANTWERP Tango Workshop 21:30 to 22:45

SEPT. 23 ANTWERP Tango Workshop 20:00 to 21:15

SEPT. 23 ANTWERP Tango Workshop 21:30 to 22:45

SEPT. 24 ANTWERP Tango Workshop 14:00 to 15:15

SEPT. 24 ANTWERP Tango Workshop 15:30 to 16:45

Pre-registration required, first come, first served.

To register to Workshops: buenaires@yahoo.com

Hamburg, Germany, Sept. 26th through 30th

Private lessons available: to book private lessons contact Monica tangopaz@yahoo.com.ar

Good news

It's so rare that something sounds too good to be true and is neverthless true.

From February 2018 the Norwegian budget airline is starting scheduled non-stop flights by Dreamliner from London to Buenos Aires. It will take about 13 hours, which is amazing. Even more amazing - outside peak holiday times the cost is under £600...  Just be aware it'll cost another £25 to put a bag in the hold, and you still won't get anything to eat, but it's still much faster and cheaper than anything else that flies.

Booking is already open.

One-metre Pugliese

Pugliese isn’t easy. It's often more complex than other tango, and we don't hear it so much. One tanda a night if you’re lucky. Late Pugliese was composed and played more for listening than for dancing. He had a long career: he was just 19 when he had a hit with Recuerdo in 1925, and he was invited to perform at the Colon Opera House after the fall of the military in December 1985.

I was dancing Pugliese with a friend recently, and we started talking. ‘I remember a visit to one of the milongas in Buenos Aires’ she said, ‘and I danced to Pugliese with a local guy. It was incredible. We hardly seemed to move more than a metre or so, but it seemed that all the complexity and emotion of the music was in that one metre. At that time Pugliese was the opportunity for the wildest dancing in London, so this experience really stayed with me.’

I looked at YouTube for examples of one-metre Pugliese. There are plenty of teachers’ demos, exaggerated performances on empty dance floors. I also came across Pugliese’s milonga for Fidel Castro, which I’d never heard before, politically a dangerous composition given the time and place. And I came across some amazing dancing too. It was wonderful to remember again just how marvellous the late Alberto Dassieu was, and it’s so great to remember him with his partner, his wife Paulina, enjoying evenings in an over-crowded El Beso dancing one-metre Pugliese, lost in the music on a packed-out floor. Perhaps there wouldn't have been much point in filming it as there was nothing much to watch, it was a very crowded floor and the dances were quite minimal and private. In fact I don't think there are any clips of them dancing on the floor in milongas except for Marina2x4's clips of them dancing in Lujos, but sadly these are from Alberto's last years, and I don't find them easy to watch.

There are quite a few clips of them giving demos in milongas. Here they are performing at Centro Leonesa in 2008.



Watching him in this clip you could almost sense invisible couples around him, denying and then opening spaces as he dances among them.

Incidentally, I see Marina2x4 uploaded a 30-minute interview with Pedro Sanchez a while ago, and more recently posted interviews with Miguel Angel Balbi and 'Chiche' Ruberto, but all in Spanish.

According to Tango and Chaos Alberto was the teenage protege of the Villa Urquiza maestro Luis Lemos in the late 1940s. More than any other dancer of his generation I find his dance looks taught, even ‘drilled’, unlike the more casual-looking dance of his peer group. I get a sense of an entire system, a social code that includes posture, movement and sensibility, feeling for the music as well as attitude to a partner and to everyone else in the milonga, to society. His dance itself is mannered and still instinctive, intuitive and absolutely precise, full of deep respect, and equally full of enjoyment. Granted he’d danced to Pugliese all his life, which helps! But the movements he and his partners, whether his wife or a student, make, whether on a crowded floor or an otherwise empty studio, are precise, relaxed and at the same time quite formal, and always inextricably part of the music. There's a brief biography of Alberto in Todotango.

From watching Alberto’s dances I get the sense of how significant and how wide, culturally, the tango tradition was. He was a great teacher too, and I think there’s everything to be learned from watching and enjoying these few clips we’re so lucky to have. & perhaps the most hospitable, open-hearted and encouraging person I’ve had the good fortune to meet.

Dancing in small spaces

’It’s so crowded tonight’ said my partner. I glanced around. At a guess there was room for twice as many couples. ‘Not really crowded’ I replied. ‘It’s just that many people use a lot of space.’ I remembered dancing – trying to dance – on a heaving floor at Cachirulo in El Beso, when it was underground-like and really hard to move at all. Likewise at Salon Canning, a larger floor that could be very densely packed with dancers. Then I remembered the garage photo, a milonga in someone’s garage in Buenos Aires! I don’t know how many couples, shoulder to shoulder, happily moving to the music. But where did I see it?

Miraculously it turned up a few days later in the Practicaelbeso blog. I think 15 couples are visible, but that’s only part of the floor. In a garage. It’s hard to tell just how big or small the garage is, but in any case the couples are very close together, and they all look happy!

In turn, this reminded me of a wonderful London milonga, Tango al Fresco, ‘tango in the park’, and how, very sadly, it’s ceased to be run. To cut a long story short it relied on a wooden floor that could be packed away when not in use, and a group of volunteers who worked to set it up in Regent’s Park in June and July. It was very popular, an al fresco tango picnic twice yearly, and non-profit-making as the money taken went to planting trees in the park. The floor was a bit bigger than most garage floors (it had to be stored in a garage when not in use) but it could get tightly packed. & because there was often so little room, dancing had to be close and tidy. It was a pleasure to dance alfresco under the trees with such a crowd, and many of us miss it a lot. I briefly checked out photos of bandstands in the London parks to see if they could serve as milongas , but they don't look big enough. Dancing in small spaces isn’t entirely unknown to London tango.

Good ordinary tango

It’s taken me a while to write about this video. It was filmed late in the evening in a well-lit milonga and lasts between 15 and 20 minutes. There aren’t many couples left on the floor, so it’s easy to watch the people and see how they dance. There are two tandas, the second a lively vals, starts around 10:10.

It’s a typical evening in a typical milonga, perhaps not one frequented by visiting dancers. The feeling is calm, relaxed, unhurried, but still slightly formal. They’ve been there all evening, eaten (many milongas serve meals), enjoyed a glass or two of wine, chatted with each other and friends, danced whenever they felt like it. It’s great to get such a clear view of ordinary people at the end of a regular night out dancing in Buenos Aires. I think none of the better-known tangueros are among them. The casual ordinariness of this milonga makes me nostalgic! It's a wonderful great room to spend an evening in.



Each dancer is different, but it’s what they have in common that I notice. It’s a pleasure to notice how they embrace, often with attention, carefully, tenderly. It’s never casual: it’s an important part of the dance. I remember classes with the late Tete Rusconi and Silvia: even when they demonstrated a step, even a simple side step, they took a moment to settle comfortably into the embrace.

It’s a pleasure to notice how the women step. With many there’s what looks like an almost obsessive ‘collecting’. Why is this practised so emphatically? The energy in the dance often doesn’t come from dancing fast, it comes from the way of dancing and it’s there even in slow tango. When you collect you add a complication, an extra distance for your feet to travel, which means you have to move your feet a little faster and with more determination, and that creates more energy. And, truth to tell, if women don’t collect, they might waddle! & guys too! Collecting brings the feet together at the mid-point of balance. Without it, your partner starts to lose sense of where your feet are. & of course, collecting makes a dance look good, which is important. Tango, whether fast or slow, shouldn’t look inelegant. Taking too many short cuts won’t make you look better. Collecting is the most basic, essential 'ornament'. We learn collecting early on, and it tends to get forgotten early too. If your teachers don’t insist on it, you might need to look for different teachers! It's basic tango technique.

I immediately notice how, almost without exception the men step onto a straight leg. The leg you step from is flexed, pushing the weight onto a straight leg. Watch the clip and try to find anyone who doesn’t step onto a straight leg! Again, this is practical – and it looks good. It’s practical because it makes for a firm and clear lead: a bent knee absorbs the impact of the foot coming down, so the lead is less distinct and energetic. Stepping onto a straight leg also keeps the body upright. If you step onto a bent knee, to some extent you’ll slouch around the floor. That means your upper body contact with your partner isn’t so effective, and your lead isn’t firm. & slouching doesn’t look good! I remember Cacho Dante insisting on remedying the bent knee in his classes, but it can take a long time to change bad habits.

Women are taught to reach back with a straight leg and it looks great when they do, but it’s problematic, especially if they have lower back issues. The main thing is to avoid an ordinary stepping back because it’s often not far enough for your feet to be out of the way of your partner stepping forwards. Also, if you simply step back your torso jerks backwards and down, pulling the lead forwards. The mechanics of dancing in close embrace!

& I notice how the guys stand upright, even when dancing with much shorter women. As Tete used to say, keep your head upright or you’ll get dizzy when turning. More basic technique.

We can learn and practise the basics of how these people stand, embrace and walk, and with care we can dance with the same calm, simple elegance that leaves room for intimacy. By and large it’s a calm, assured and graceful dance. Even when they dance fast in the vals tanda they never look hurried. Of course you can dance some kind of tango without getting these basics completely right, but it’ll look better, work better and feel better if you do.

The general feel of the floor is relaxed but slightly formal. Maybe Buenos Aires milongas are no longer as formal as they used to be, but there’s still a degree of formality, a kind of basic courtesy, which visitors need to take stock of. We’ve forgotten social dance as a formal occasion, and the kind of courtesy that went with it, even though in the UK it died out as recently as the 1960s. Dance to us now tends to be celebration, jumping up and down, release. Compared to Buenos Aires we have plenty to celebrate. But if the music resonates with us and if we listen to it and want to dance to it, we should make an effort to be aware of the feel of it. You don’t get tired of of the music, however many times you dance to it, do you? It’s a great expression of love, joy and sorrow, of feelings of togetherness and loss which are common to us all. It’s worth making an effort to hold on to and practise the basics of, standing, embracing and walking, as whatever your tango is it will work better, look better and feel better if you do. Getting used to a social dance that has room for a level of intimacy and a depth of shared feeling can only be a good thing.

The video is from the latitudobuenosaires channel. There are a lot of videos there, but most of the recent ones are of teachers giving demos. Helpfully there’s a playlist called Milongas de Buenos Aires. Most of the 184 videos you’ll find on that playlist are over 15 minutes long. It’s a huge archive. I spent time on this one clip because it’s so clear, but there’s a similar one from the Circulo Apollo. There’s more to be discovered, maybe even with better dancing. But what can ‘better dancing’ be? The tango in this clip is full of feeling, attention to the music, and graceful movement. Can we ever ask for more than that?

Dancing in ballrooms

Thinking over Carablanca’s 25-years of providing opportunities for tango reminded me to look again at a Guardian article I read at the beginning of the year, based on a book called Going to the Palais by James Nott. It studies the history of dancing in large ballrooms (‘Palais’ as they were often called) in the UK. I’ve not read the book, so I quote the numbers from the article. In 1953 about four million people went dancing every week. It was suggested that up to 70% of couples first met on the dance floor. It was huge. It was the main way men and women met, the main social hub, attracting many more than cinema or football. Not that the dancing was necessarily elaborate. For the most part this wasn’t really ‘ballroom dancing’ even if it was dancing in ballrooms. A witness recalled, ‘The masses are content to shuffle. All they want is to get round [the floor] tolerably comfortably.’ Chatting as they went, of course. The enchanted silence of the tanda wasn’t the norm, but then the simplicity of the dance didn’t require that kind of attention.

In 1960 the business was booming, up 10%. Between 1958 and 1962, shares in the industry trebled in value. 50,000 musicians were employed in dance bands. Astonishingly, by the end of the decade, eight years later, the business had crashed. By the end of the 1960s few dance halls even survived. Most were demolished, a few became discotheques, nightclubs, or bingo halls. It was an incredibly radical change. It’s pointed out that women had become more approachable. Couples met at work, in pubs, in normal meeting places. But the main change must have been the change in musical tastes. Most of those 50,000 musicians lost their apparently secure jobs in a short period of time as the new music developed so fast, and became so popular. & of course the dance changed with the music. Jive, or the entirely ‘hands-off’ Twist require venues, but unlike the ballroom shuffle they were practicable in smaller venues, even in parties at home. Record players became ubiquitous and you could throw a dance party in your bedsit if you had a Dansette. Big formal events were no longer what people wanted. The ballrooms were an affirmation of an all-embracing society, parties an affirmation of small groups.

Carablanca Milonga

Many congratulations to Carablanca on its 25th birthday, celebrated at its Christmas party last night. Carablanca as such hasn't been running for that length of time but it is the current form of a succession of milongas run very successfully by Diane and Danny in London since 1991 at various venues. It's a remarkable record, and we owe them many thanks for their effort to make Carablanca such an enduring success. Many of us took our first tango steps in classes run by the milonga, which has hosted every major visiting Argentine teacher. Ricardo Vidort and Gavito were there, as were many, many others. It's brought to London a vision of a place where people meet, socialise and dance tango, modelled on Club Gricel in Buenos Aires. The quiet formality of the Argentine original has never quite translated to our post-rock'n roll social dance sensibility, but Diane and Danny have worked very successfully to make Carablanca as close as possible to the Argentine original. All of us who have danced there, made friends and enjoyed the pleasure of great music and dance, owe them much gratitude. Thanks, and happy birthday, Carablanca!

Ricardo Viqueira in Cambridge

I recently got this link from a friend, Gideon in Zurich, with info about Ricardo Viqueira's visit to the UK this month. Thanks Gideon! Ricardo will give a series of workshops and classes in Cambridge, starting on Thursday November 24. The details are in the link.

Ricardo is a milonga dancer who teaches in Buenos Aires, and has taught regularly in Europe. I can't say much about his teaching as I've never taken classes with him, but he has a good reputation as a teacher. It's claimed he's developed simple and practical methods for teaching leaders to mark the step, and and for followers to understand the lead. He emphasises listening to the music, and development of a personal way of dancing.

Apart from the excitement created by dancing fast on a small coffee table (will they fall off?) this video seems to show a dance that looks rather monotonous, a relentlessly fast dance to music that has gentle and lyrical phrasing, as if the dancers are being forced to mark every beat mechanically and without fail, while ignoring the lyrical phrasing. This lack of expresion isn't generally characteristic of what I've seen of the Buenos Aires dance. At the same time, he obviously leads with great clarity and confidence, and successfully in a very confined space. If you can learn to lead and follow with that level of clarity, you can obviously adapt to a much more expressive and lyrical dance on a crowded milonga floor.

Today's tango is...

A while ago I heard about this source of tango on YouTube. I’ve only just checked it out, and I find I’ve been missing out on a good source of music and lyrics.

Paul Bottomer is a dance teacher with a background in ballroom, who went to Buenos Aires in the 1980s and studied with Maria Nievas and Juan Carlos Copes. (Separate classes, I assume, since they had their differences.) His website says he won the ‘Grand Slam of Tango competitions’ (he doesn’t say what they were) between 1990 and 1994. He still teaches in London.

He currently seems on a mission through his YouTube channel to ensure that as much tango as possible is available online, in some form of HD, with translations of lyrics and all the readily available information on each track, such as performers and recording dates. Since he studied with Copes and Nievas he must be a Spanish speaker and I assume his translations are at least serviceable. I can’t check them, but I expect they are useful to listeners in general, even if lunfardo experts and historians of tango lyrics might not always agree on the details. His channel is called ‘Today’s tango is...,’ but he often uploads many tangos a day, and not always the well-known tangos you hear in milongas. Yesterday there were five tangos, including two versions of Yo quiero cantar un tango (Laurenz and D’Arienzo). Only one so far today, D'Arienzo's 1966 Virgen de la Serranía, but it’s only 4pm. This channel is clearly a labour of love, and it’s a very welcome, ongoing effort to make the songs more accessible. It’s been going for a while, so there’s a substantial archive of songs and music. There’s also a Facebook page.

(PS: On YouTube you need to click on SHOW MORE to access the translations.)

Juntos

A couple of years ago I wrote about something that got called the ‘secret milonga’. (There were a couple of subsequent posts too.) In effect it was a monthly private tango club in London to which entrance was by invitation. Consequently there was no publicity, and I never mentioned its name because I didn’t want uninvited people turning up there as the organiser would have had to turn them away, which would be unpleasant to all concerned. I wrote about it simply to point out that there is another way people can consider organising tango dancing, another template. It was a private event because that was a way to ensure that the ronda was observed with the same courtesy as in Buenos Aires. You could dance comfortably there all afternoon, no couples would block the line of dance with wild gyrations, or barge onto the dance floor without first looking to see if another couple was approaching in the line of dance. Simple courtesy! Yet at other London events that can still happen, although it is improving. The quality of dance was always excellent, as was the music, it was in a beautiful old hall and the organisers always welcomed you personally as one of their friends – which you were. In effect it was a small monthly encuentro in London. I’ve written all this in the past tense because it recently had to close down. It was called Juntos.

It’s very sad it couldn’t make enough money to continue. Of course it wasn’t intended to make anyone a fortune, but there’s only so much money an individual can lose. A beautiful hall in London doesn’t come cheap, and the booking (midday to 5.30 on Sunday) perhaps wasn't ideal. We are very grateful to the organisers whose ideals were set so high, and thank them for keeping it afloat for so long, and giving us many magical afternoons of dance and music. It’s left a mark on London tango, as has the whole encuentro movement, and people are increasingly aware how essential courtesy is on the dance floor. If anyone thinks of emulating this, I can only wish them the best of luck. It's not easy.

Cristal

The music started, emotional, intense, melancholic. I wanted to dance long before I wondered which orquesta it was, as usual. Slowly, it came into focus: Troilo. Not the familiar 1941 recordings, the emphatic Troilo of tracks like Cachirulo or Guapeando that you know immediately, but later, slower, sadder music. We were surrounded by couples who appeared to be listening to a D'Arienzo milonga: slowed by the floor and absorbed by the music, especially the final track, as if I'd never heard it before, music of great intensity and yearning, I felt we hardly needed to move much. I recognised one phrase: ‘La tarde de mi ausencia’. You have to credit the DJ for playing it. It’s really not party music, 1944 recordings that get played rather less frequently than the earlier, brighter Troilo. I remembered the title on the way home. Cristal.

Of course I looked it up later, and found a translation together with a link to both the Troilo/Marino and the Canaro recordings. ‘More fragile than crystal was my love...’ A bit ordinary perhaps, but the poet really makes it work with the following line: ‘Crystal your heart, your gaze, your laugh…’ Fragility, hardness and brilliance, all in a single word. & as usual the translation doesn’t do much justice to the original: ‘And now all I know/is that all was lost/the evening when I was absent.’ Even with my limited Spanish it’s hard not to think that ‘La tarde de mi ausencia’ has a kind of intensity that just isn’t there in ‘...the evening when I was absent’! The song is by José María Contursi who wrote words for several great tangos we know from Troilo recordings, including Gricel and En esta tarde gris, similar poems of loss that actually remind me a bit of Thomas Hardy’s late poems. ‘Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me...’ Hardy’s poems are much more concise, but he didn't have to fit them to a piece of piano music.

& that extraordinary music? The intensity grabs you from the first chord, and it just doesn’t let up. It’s amazing music of great variety that keeps surprising you, a masterpiece of arrangement and a great performance. There seem to be so many musical ideas in the track that the ending, a few final chords, is abrupt: after all that music you feel it should go on much longer. Tango songs often started as piano scores and I wondered how much of this variety was there in the original. I searched online for the piano version and came across this site which has keyboard versions of a number of familiar tangos, but unfortunately not Cristal. & of course I looked to find who wrote the original composition and found it was Mariano Mores, who briefly recounts his life in music here (an English translation). But what really jolted me were his dates: 18 February 1918 – 13 April 2016. It’s always astonishing when the tango past becomes so immediately present. The composer whose music I was dancing to so recently died just a five months ago, aged 98. He was 26 when Troilo recorded Cristal.

​Mónica Paz in London, Bristol and Saarbrücken

UPDATE

Mónica's classes at Negracha have been moved elsewhere. Please check with Brigitte, brigitte@paris-tango.co.uk – 07818 808 711.

After a single group class with Ricardo Vidort, the last he gave in London, I was fascinated by the tango of the milongas, and as it wasn’t really taught in London at that time I went to Buenos Aires. After Ricardo, I was looking for teachers whose hearts were in the dance and music, and the Argentine teachers who came over here were usually young ex-gymnasts, ballet and folk dancers who had learned and could teach and perform tango routines but weren’t dancers who had spent much time dancing socially. It seemed best to try and learn from dancers who had danced in the milongas for at least 20 years, which I thought would cover social dancers of the old generation who had started in the late 1940s and 50s as well as the younger generation who learned from them when tango re-emerged after 1984. I took a few classes from ​Mónica Paz, among others.

It’s really good news that she’s back in the UK next month. She took up tango over 20 years ago, and learned mostly by dancing nightly with the older guys, the generation that started dancing in the middle of the 20th century and have a lifetime of experience. Those who are still on the floor are unlikely to visit Europe now, and in any case speak little if any English. ​Mónica Paz is fluent, and a practised dancer and teacher who still dances regularly in the milongas. The tango of the milongas remains the touch-stone of tango, and you’re unlikely to get closer to it in London than in ​Mónica’s classes. Go to every one you can, whether you lead or follow! Dance practice can always be improved! People with a background in the milongas have an eye for details, they notice movement that doesn't look quite right and can suggest little adjustments that improve posture, embrace and walk.

​Mónica Paz is in the UK for the second time from September 6th to 15th:

SEPT. 7 Light Temple, Intermediate Class, 8:00 to 9:30 pm

SEPT. 9 Negracha, Intermediate Class, 7:30 to 9:00 pm

SEPT. 10 Corrientes, Intermediate Class, 9:00 to 10:30 pm

SEPT. 12 and 14 Negracha Workshops.

SEPT. 14 BRISTOL Tango West Tango Workshop 5:00 to 6:00 pm

SEPT. 14 BRISTOL Tango West Tango Workshop 6:30 to 8:00 pm

SEPT. 14 BRISTOL Tango West Milonga Workshop 8:30 to 10:00 pm

Workshops: Pre-registration required, first come, first served.

For private lessons in London: contact Brigitte, brigitte@paris-tango.co.uk – 07818 808 711.

From September 16 to 18 she will be in Saarbrücken.

Betroffenheit, Tarabband... and tango

Betroffenheit is the German word for a condition now recognised as PTSD, post traumatic stress disorder, the suffering human beings go through after a disaster, combatants, civilians in war, but anyone at any time. Any of us. It’s the name of a recent piece of dance theatre, which I saw a while back in London. Canadian actor/playwright Jonathon Young wrote compulsively after the death of his daughter in a fire at the family home, recording the voices in his head, the flashbacks, the symptoms we now recognise. At some point he discussed the possibility of a theatre performance with Crystal Pite, who runs the Canadian contemporary dance company called Kidd Pivot. Formerly a remarkable dancer she’s now a choreographer with a very wide interest in what dance theatre can do. & with her choreography, with her group of very extraordinary performers, it seems there’s little it can’t do.

She says that dance is great at expressing emotion but poor at conveying a complex story. The disaster in Betroffenheit isn’t spelled out: an explosion in a building is mimed. It doesn’t matter: the point is that someone, in this case Jonathon Young himself, experiences it, perhaps is accidentally responsible for it or perhaps just feels he's responsible, and we hear his voice in recorded sound as he re-experiences it, re-imagines it. He looks for solace in addiction, suggested on-stage by the bright lights and colour of variety performance, the sequined dancers, the comics. But the voices are still there, and the first half ends with confusion and near-death. This part uses mime, the second part is pure dance, the bodies of her amazing dancers conveying emotion, states, it seemed, in which even gestures intended to be comforting could seem aggressive. At the end there were only six dancers on-stage for the curtain call. I was momentarily bewildered: where were the others? I’ve seen standing ovations at that theatre before: a dozen people stand up, then a few more, maybe half the audience on their feet applauding. I’ve never before seen an entire audience, as one, immediately on their feet, applauding. An extraordinary evening.

I thought again about this while reading the Guardian piece on Iraq-born musician Nadin Al Khalidi this morning. Born in Baghdad at the start of the Iran-Iraq war, suffering then the Gulf War, the invasion and the rise of fundamentalism, she managed to flee to Sweden. Having grown up on the music of Joan Baez and her generation she began to write songs and perform. If you’re in Manchester tonight, or Liverpool tomorrow, look out for Nadin Al Khalidi and Tarabband. Tarab is Arabic for ecstasy through music. Here they are:



What links these two stories is the power of the arts to give a form to human experiences that can be overwhelming by nature. I don’t think it’s catharsis in the classic sense, much more a persistent effort at coming to terms with something. The pain cannot be removed, it can’t ever be dismissed, but with work and effort it may be possible to give some form to the problems, which makes life possible.

& tango? I’m always grateful to a friend who initially visited Buenos Aires as part of a study on how societies recover from trauma, which is how she discovered tango...

(There a quite a few clips of Betroffenheit on YouTube but unfortunately they are fragmentary, and fragmentary clips of a piece that's fragmented by nature don't really convey it, but some of the discussions are interesting.)

Far from Buenos Aires

I left a recent London milonga evening feeling a bit unsettled. There’s often a couple or two who dance competitively rather than socially, for show rather than for pleasure, but it’s rare these days to have four, five, six, perhaps even more such couples. These days most of us at that milonga go out to enjoy a relaxed evening of dance and music with friends. In the ‘nuevo’ days the floor was largely occupied by extravagant movers and would-be movers, but the performance of a similar dance in close embrace, or something that resembles it, doesn’t make it social dance, and it can feel aggressive and egotistic. A milonga is open to all, of course, and accepts all kinds of dancers, but one can be forgiven for wishing that they’d choose somewhere else.

So it was very reassuring a few days later to chance on one of Normarin1’s videos of the Alo Lola & La Yumba de Dorita milonga in Buenos Aires. It’s probably no more or less crowded than a London milonga, but magically there’s room for everyone. Normarin1 focuses on an accomplished couple, who dance entirely for each other and with effortless respect for the other dancers around them. They enjoy an intimate tanda, without the slightest effort to show off how accomplished they are. Courtesy, tango from it’s city of origin. & the track, fittingly, is Lejos de Buenos Aires (Calo-Beron).



Perhaps the real highlight for me is early on. An older guy dancing with a young woman in red appears in the background from behind the woman who sticks out her tongue at the camera, and they cover a metre or two of floor, fast and gliding effortlessly, fitting totally with a phrase in the music. You can’t see the feet, as often happens at milongas there, and your perception is of torsos floating smoothly and energetically, anchored out-of-sight at floor-level.