Avignon

The Avignon festival was originally of drama, but these days it takes in dance and the visual arts. This year, the lucky artist was the Majorcan, Miquel Barceló. An artist of prodigious energy, he recently covered 300m2 of a chapel in the cathedral in Majorca with a terracotta mural. He was also commissioned to cover the interior dome of the United Nations building in Geneva with an immense mural.

The first you see of him is outside the Palace of the Popes. I was curious how the good folk of Avignon react to an elephant balanced on its trunk. While obviously a photo opportunity for tourists, it seems a place where young locals choose to meet. & I was delighted to find that the elephant has become a sort of patron deity of the local break-dance community.




Ban des Vendanges 2010

Ban=proclamation, as in 'bans of marriage'. Vendanges: an event of unimaginable significance, the harvest of grapes for wine. At the 'ban' the grapes are ceremonially pressed and the juice shared out. Then, of even greater significance, there's a free tasting of Cotes du Rhone wine for an hour. Free, but you are expected to buy a tasting glass, €2, tastefully engraved, and it feels polite to suggest some interest in the wine that is being poured into your glass. Just pretending to read the label on the bottle is sufficient. & there are stalls with great local food too. A real big picnic. & if you feel you are wandering around a little unsteadily... don't be alarmed, it's not you, it's everyone else.

Heading south II

Yachts

It's difficult to conceive of huge wealth. The houses of the very wealthy tend to be hard to see, and anyway everyone needs somewhere to live. There's a limit to how much you can spend on a car or a horse, and valuable artwork is kept well out of sight. But there's one visible item that speaks of huge amounts of disposable income, and that's yachts. Saunter round the marinas of the Baie des Anges: these pictures are of Antibes, probably rather second rate compared to Monaco or Cannes. Most of the boats are motor cruisers: they look rather like cross-Channel ferries with luxurious trim, and are often almost as big. Some even have a heliport with a helicopter waiting for... well, nothing that important really. Just so someone can take to the air, look down perhaps on their very expensive floating hotel.

Yachts, with sails, are something else. & this one is something else yet again: the Maltese Falcon. I was fascinated to read some years ago that, with new technology, the old technology of wind and sail is becoming feasible again, without the sweat and the huge crews involved in the past. But it was suggested as a way to economise on the costs of cargo transport, not as the toy of an unbelievably wealthy individual. I checked out the Maltese Falcon on the net: it was built in 2006 for somewhat less than $300 million, and it's now owned by hedge-fund manager Elena Ambrosiadou. It's said that you can hire it for around $400,000 for a week: I guess that includes the crew. There's room for 12 guests, and there's an on-board gourmet chef. & it's technically so sophisticated that it can be sailed single-handed.













At another end of the scale is this, which has the dignity of being built simply to go as fast as possible. It's not the kind of deck you'd feel comfortable sunning yourself on with a dry martini: there aren't even any hatches to be battened down.














Not like this, which could well be from an old film about the Caribbean. (Some serious contre jour here.)












& then there's this piece of sheer elegance. But it's a bit sombre; all the trim, the masts, even the sails, are black. It would look distinctly spooky on a clear sunny day and a bright blue sea.












& this is where my disposable income might just about find a home! Anyway, it's the only one of these I could actually handle. I believe these little boats are still in use in the seas and inland lakes west of Marseilles.













Vence

There's a saying in India that you'll settle where you like the water, in which case I should live in Vence. Water from a limestone spring spurts from taps and fountains, cool and fresh. It tastes wonderful, and it's claimed to be naturally safe to drink unchlorinated, and it's certainly done me no harm. But there's no discernible tango in Vence, so that's that. Even though it's a beautiful hillside town just 20 miles inland from the Cote d'Azur, with truly delicious water.

The town fortress became the town hall, and is now an exhibition space. Yvon Lambert, a native of Vence, has become one one of the most remarkable collector/dealers in France, and was offered the exhibition space to show some of his collection this summer. A marvellous show. You might not always feel at home with the work he shows, but you'll never think it's insignificant or trivial. & it's always marvelously displayed, with real sensitivity to the work itself. This sensitivity seems respected by the artists: there are several wonderful pieces made for Lambert by artists he represents, among them Anselm Kieffer, whose vast landscape dominated this year's Summer Exhibition at the Royal Academy.

& life goes on in Vence as you'd expect.

Heading south

I've been longing to get away. But 'south' is 'le sud' not 'el sur': this is one long post with subsections so you can skip over it easily. But the pictures are nice.

Paris

Sometime in the late 18th century the Rue de l'Enfer, Hell Street, on the Left Bank in Paris, disappeared into a big hole. The Left Bank is built above underground quarries, and the authorities began to realise that the entire Latin Quarter was about to follow the Rue de l'Enfer into the abyss, so a vast underground cathedral-like structure was constructed to support it. Something to reflect on over a coffee on the Boul'Mich.

Evening: Paris feels warm, content, cheerful. London after work can feel restless, even self-destructive.

The night train.

Long ago, before the advent of the TGV, much long-distance travel in France was by night train. Now that you can have breakfast in Paris and lunch in Nice night travel hardly matters, but a limited service called Lunea survives, using the old carriages with couchettes and sieges inclinables to some destinations, at least during the summer months, although not every night. The Paris-Nice train is a real pleasure; waking up to sunrise on the red porphyry crags of the Esterel, then the crawl round the Baie des Anges in the bright morning sun is a real treat. The train runs non-stop Paris to Toulon with a brief halt in Lyon, presumably to change drivers, as the entire run is ten hours. & it really feels fast. In the TGV you lose the sensation of speed: there's little noise and the ride is totally smooth. But the older carriages aren't soundproofed and you know you're going fast, really fast. It's half the speed of a TGV and a lot more exciting.

The Baie des Anges seems to have little to do with celestial beings. I read that 'anges de mer' were a kind of shark that used to be common in the bay.

18/09/2010

Ah, and today was Rivertango in London. The air would have been fresh and cool, but not too cold, the sun still warm, and the floor full with partners I know well, and know by sight. There would have been a demonstration of high kicking. & Tango Siempre playing a set, too. Great music, and their Pugliese sublime for a dance too, no doubt. But me, I'm heading south.

L'expulsion des Roms

This has been the big issue of the summer. The papers are full of it. The local paper (in the south, which tends to be very right-wing) sent a reporter to Romania to comment on their condition at home, which was said to be pitiful in that they longed back to the days of Ceaucescu when everyone had a little: now the Roms have nothing. The reporter found this heartbreaking, but the implication is that Romania should look after them better: then they wouldn't need to come to France. The Roms, as Romanians, are EU citizens, and entitled to travel for work, but if they are 'sans papiers' they can be expelled.

It's a sensitive issue. France still remembers another expulsion on ethnic grounds – of the Jews during WWII: there are monuments in many towns to recall the names, and ages, of those rounded up and deported. The government denies the Roms were specifically targeted, but leaked documents have contradicted this.

Sarkozy has an election coming up, and his polls rating is low. Critics suggest this has been done to snatch votes from the far right. It also distracts attention from 'l'affaire Woerth': M. Woerth, while Budget minister, was alleged to have helped the L'Oreal heiress, Liliane Bettencourt, one of the wealthiest people in the world, to evade taxes. & she is said to have made huge donations to M. Sarkozy's campaign: envelopes stuffed with cash have been mentioned...

Liberation is the French Guardian, but wonderfully concise. It protests predictably on the treatment of the Roms. It also published an analysis of the language used. The government said that it took action to protect the security of it's own citizens, that this was the heritage of the Revolution, which guaranteed 'surete': but a historian points out that the 'surete' guaranteed under the Revolution was security from arbitrary arrest and detention. He says that the idea of the state guaranteeing security from civil unrest is relatively recent. He's a member of the 'committee for vigilance over the public use of history': what a fascinating idea! The 'public use of history' should be monitored closely, indeed.

Anyway, expelling the Roms in order to protect French citizens from civil unrest seems totally disproportionate. People sometimes found them a nuisance, but no worse. But the idea that 'security' can be used to justify almost anything the state (or a politician seeking re-election) wants to do... that really is troubling.

Flaubert to George Sand, 1867: '...I came across a camp of Bohemians established near Rouen. [...] The great thing about it was that, although they are as inoffensive as sheep, they excited the hatred of the bourgeois. [...] That hatred is very profound and complex. It's the hatred people have for the Bedouin, the heretics, philosophers, the solitaries, the poet.'

Pedro milonguero

I've just heard that a Dutch student and friend of Pedro Sanchez has set up a website for him, at Pedromilonguero. If you've met Pedro and learned from him, please post a testimonial about what he´s like as a teacher and dancer.

More Pedro!

'El milonguero' Terry has just got back from BsAs with three videos, which he's asked me to upload. Two are of Pedro Sanchez, and the third is of Alberto Dassieu dancing with Eva Garlez.



We scratched our heads to try and translate exactly what Pedro says, and then Jantango very kindly stepped in with a translation, and put us out of our misery. Thanks, Jantango! I think it's well worth doing, as Pedro is very passionate and very clear and very articulate and very compelling about what he thinks, and it's well worth trying to understand what he says. (This is the third version I've uploaded: I think I've got it right this time!)

Apart from that, Terry quotes his notes on what he learned from Pedro. Listen to the music, and dance with your whole body; and he says that the lead/connection in the embrace should come from the sternum or just under, not high on the chest.



The second video is of Pedro dancing a vals with Ali. I'm always amazed at how effortless and simple he makes it look. This is how you dance tango with 60 years practice.

The third video is of Alberto Dassieu in his little studio at home, a demonstration of how to dance to very slow tango. Alberto is a close contemporary of Pedro. I gather that he grew up at the heart of the Villa Urquiza style in the late 1940s.



I took a number of classes with Pedro and with Alberto last winter, and I spent time with both of them at Plaza Bohemia. Alberto always goes out with his wife, Paulina, and they would invite me to sit at their table and talk, as best I could, about the dancers and the music. These videos really bring back to me the classes and those milonga evenings.

Getting things wrong

A great series of instructional videos is appearing. They are hilarious because they are just so imaginatively made. A pity that getting things right is never as funny as getting things wrong!




Video thanks to superchachi2010

Learning tango 2

Just a thought: there is a dance that's improvised to music, that many of us are familiar with from childhood, and certainly from our teens, by which time it IS social dance; that arm-waving, body-writhing, jumping dance of discos, clubs and parties everywhere.

Has anyone tried it to tango music? I have, but what I do is conditioned by what I've been taught to do to tango music. But it occurred to me that it would be interesting to see what people with no knowledge of tango music would improvise to it. & then it occurred to me that this might be a good way to introduce people to tango music. The activity is a familiar one, but the music is unfamiliar, so it would be necessary to listen to it, to find the beat, the compas, and then possibly feel the melodic flow of cadencia too, and respond to it perhaps with the torso and arms. In any case, to explore this new music with the body. A teacher who knows the music should be able to suggest, by body movements, what is going on in the music, and ways to respond to it. Learning directly with the body rather than through a verbal explanation might be a useful path for people who've never listened to the music and who want to dance to it. The dance itself, the embrace and ways of movement possible in the embrace would still need to be explored, of course. & this could be extended to vals and milonga: here's something different, try and work out for yourselves what is going on. What we find out for ourselves we usually know better than something that's explained to us.

If anyone's ever tried this, or tries it, I'd love to know if it works.

Watching dancing

Sitting watching the dancing at Carablanca on a recent Friday evening: it's started to look and feel really good. A good proportion of the couples were in close or close-ish embrace for most of the time, they moved round the line of dance well, and the dance in general is beginning to look quite smooth. In general I enjoy watching social dance a lot more than I enjoy watching 'demonstrations', especially when it's fluent, and it looks intimate and suits the feel of the music.

Carablanca has a long history in London tango. It started at the Welsh Centre in the early 1990s, and moved to Conway Square recently. I'd really like to write a history of it, with the tango stories of the people who work each week to make sure we have a good time, as I'm sure there are some interesting ones there. Maybe in the future. It's developed, with the thoughts and suggestions of many people over the past year or so, into something that's beginning to look like a traditional BsAs milonga, and the dancing is going that way too.

But just so we don't get too many illusions about ourselves, it's worth delving into the archive Jantango is building up, just as a tango 'reality check'. One thing that's amazed me over the past year is just how many wonderful older dancers there still are. It's wonderful that video can reveal to us people whose names are little known and who still look amazing. Here's such a couple, dancing oblivious to what seems an unsympathetic background. They show skill, playfulness, great elegance and real enjoyment... isn't that cool?

& of course this is the kind of milonga I'd really like to see, although this was filmed nine years ago and sadly it's no longer possible. Jantango identifies Ricardo Vidort and Muma, Carlos Gavito, Miguel Angel Balbi, Elba Biscay, and others I've not heard of. I thought I spotted Mimi there too. Wonderful to watch all these great tangueros on the floor together.

Pedro again!

It's the 75th birthday of Pedro Sanchez on August 27th. Feliz cumpleaños, maestro!

& to judge by a couple of recent videos he's in fine form. One video is an interview, a 'Pedro talks' in his upstairs room, but there's no translation with it. & then there's also a brief, all-too-brief, video of him dancing. I love this: it's probably totally incorrect to laugh while you're dancing, but you can laugh after you finish, so why not during the dance itself?



Great video. Two people really enjoying themselves. A pity part of it shows waist level, rather than heads or feet, and mirrors are an opportunity to show the full picture in a confined space, but it's one of the most joyful tangos I've seen.

& when I found this I also came across the teaching videos Pedro made in 2005. I heard about them a few years ago, but couldn't get hold of them. I meant to ask in Buenos Aires, and completely forgot. Anyway, they appeared recently on YouTube, which is great news. However, I can't help feeling that they're a bit limited since Pedro teaches without a partner. It's actually a bit frustrating, trying to work out what he's leading, and where he's leading his invisible partner. I guess it's possible to work it out, but it could have been so much clearer if she'd been visible. I just wonder if he could be persuaded to revisit with a partner the material he covers in those videos, because it would be incredibly useful. It could be slotted into the existing videos, or uploaded as a separate piece. His explanations are simple and clear, and really deserve a more complete translation, and with a visible partner this could be excellent teaching/learning material.

There are also three wonderful dances with TangoCherie, but I don't think they necessarily cover what he taught in the class sessions. Probably not: more likely he's responding to the music, and would find it hard to dance something to order. It really is great to have the three classes, and three more tangos from Pedro available to watch: there are too few.

&, as ever, what he says is wonderfully clear and to the point. He starts the very first class by saying, first of all, feel emotion! Tango milonguero is very emotional! Emotional, not theatrical! & then he starts to talk about posture, very simply and straightforwardly. I assume that when he says the dance is very emotional he means that it is a response to all the emotion in the music: I hope someone out there can clarify this. To me, emotion distinguishes the golden age tango.

& this is what I was trying to clarify to myself in an earlier post: we are not so familiar with the emotional language of tango music, the 'cadencia', so this emotion tends to be lacking in European tango. You can be taught steps, but '...nobody can teach you the feeling', as Gavito said. But at least it can be pointed out. Unlike Pedro, who talks about it at the beginning of his first lesson, most teachers don't even refer to emotion. Many of us are drawn to tango because of the music, but responding to the emotion in the music isn't so straightforward, particularly if it's not pointed out to us as really important. Pedro's dance is clear and doesn't look elaborate, but one of his regular partners told me that there's constant flow of emotion in his lead. Or perhaps that should be; his lead is a constant flow of emotion...

These are the teaching videos: tango 1, tango 2, milonga. & the dances are: tango, tango vals, milonga

Video thanks to milongueromateo. & the classes were uploaded by Macfroggy. (Macfroggy? I wonder who that could be?)

Am I missing something?

OK, I think this image would cause howls of protest...














...while this image might well be illegal as a poster...













but this image is a movie poster we've had to look at for three weeks now:












In any other field this might be suspected as product placement. & why is it assumed that glamorous, wealthy stars waving guns will attract people to see the film? It's bad enough that guns are so high profile in films. The gun = power, strength, solutions; it's as if you don't need to think, all you need is a handgun. A bad message, a dangerous message. But should handguns be visible like this?

Incidentally, I came across the US poster for the film: it's a decent piece of graphic design, sort of late-1950s: there's only one gun and then only as a silhouette.

Phrasing

I've been listening to Troilo a lot recently. There are some 40 albums available for listening online, but so little information is given that it's hard to know the date of the original LP or 78 releases(1). The album-cover photo usually gives a clue: the chubby-faced young man with slicked-back black hair becomes heavier-faced until we reach the unmistakeable 'El Gordo', hair no longer so black, but still slicked back. Some of the recordings are in stereo, another clue. & the later recordings, from the 1950s onwards are often as a quartet, since dancers were abandoning tango, and orquestas are expensive to run.

I could recognise the music of D'Arienzo, Di Sarli and Pugliese early on. Pedro Laurenz I discovered late one night on the commute back from a London milonga three years ago, when my ear picked out Paisaje from some mixed tracks, and I played it over and over, amazed at the orchestration. But although I recognise pieces by Troilo, until recently I've not found his music so easy to distinguish.

& for dancing he's definitely not easy. For a start, those rhythms are complicated. 'Makes me think of Joaquín' a partner remarked recently during a Troilo tanda, thinking of a few hours spent with musician Joaquín Amenábar exploring how the same rhythmic phrase can get repeated, with variations, within a single track. Milonga is directly rhythmic, closer to 'steps' and to our own dance background, with less phrasing, fewer melodic lines. Robert Farris Thompson (2) talks about the rhythmic intensity of Troilo's 1962 recording, with his quartet, of the milonga La Trampera; '...habanera at fast tempo, jazz bass, art guitar, even a phrase from old samba...'(3). & it rocks, in an elegant musical way. A pity it didn't stem the tide of rock 'n' roll!

Troilo's rhythms are complex, but on top of them in his tangos there's sensuous lyricism in the phrasing, which demands a different response. Phrasing is the aspect of tango I have most difficulty with. Rhythm is a common dance experience, and keeping a basic beat is hardly a problem, but phrases in tango mean thinking in terms of melodic sequences of more than a few beats, thinking ahead to the end of the phrase, with variations of intensity and speed within it. Phrasing has never been mentioned in any class I can remember: I first came across it in Tangoandchaos, the idea of dancing with the feet to the rhythm and with the body to the melody, the phrases. We learn steps and sequences, and if we're lucky we learn about rhythms, but phrasing may be too indefinite, too subjective, for classes. Maybe Joaquín could teach it, alongside rhythm, if he had time. I think it's a feature of good Buenos Aires tango, which doesn't mean we can't live without it. And yet.

& it's difficult. Just watch those milongueros and see how smoothly they follow the phrasing of the music with their upper bodies. It looks wonderful, and very satisfying too, but unless you know the music really well, a phrase can be half finished before you get your feet in place to respond. Rhythms are easy to recognise, but without (and even with) some musical background, particularly in the Italian folk and opera traditions, which were so important to tango, it's hard to respond to those singing phrases that follow the breathing of a sung line. Almost all tango starts as song, and watching the old dancers is like watching singing with the body instead of the voice. (& maybe with the voice too...)

Until five years ago, to watch Buenos Aires social dancing meant a long and expensive trip: these days it's beginning to be possible to to see how social tango looks simply by logging into YouTube. Unfortunately these days we never get to see or meet these older salon dancers in London, although they visit Europe regularly. Ah! I'm re-re-repeating myself...

Here's Troilo and his orquesta. I guess this was a few years before his death in 1975.



Video thanks to elmundoalreves1.

(1) On Spotify. The dates are of the UK CD releases I think. (2) Tango: the art history of love, pp. 132-3. (3) On the 1962 Cuarteto Troilo-Grela album, Pa' Que Bailen Los Muchachos. (Apologies for the footnotes!)

Learning tango

All tangobloggers write at some point about learning tango. Here goes...

I've just read Arlene's post admitting her difficulty in remembering sequences, choreographies. Me too! Some people have an amazing facility for remembering, many of us don't. But I've learned a lot from video, and successfully worked out on the floor what I've watched. When I watch on screen I find it easier to break a sequence down into individual steps I'm familiar with. I don't think there are that many different steps in tango, but it's extraordinary how they can be combined and recombined. (By 'step' I mean one single step, not a sequence.)

For instance, in an ordinary salida the guy leads his partner by moving his weight to the left, then steps sideways with the left foot. Now here we reach the same position as in an ocho cortado. This must mean that we could continue an ocho cortado as if it was a salida, and vice-versa. I guess we've been drilled in salida patterns and ocho cortado patterns in classes, so this might not be immediately obvious, but it offers a simple way of giving our partners unexpected variety; a salida that ends in a cross, an ocho cortado that turns into a walk. The dynamic and the rhythm of salida and ocho cortado might be different, but the positions are identical.

This suggests a different way of teaching and learning. A few teachers sometimes offer puzzles to be solved in class: how many ways can you think of to step out from the cruzada? Can you invent more, what other possibilities are there? This seems a really useful exercise because it's an improvisational approach. Stringing memorised sequences, choreographies, together is a clumsy approach to learning an improvised dance: it's probably the cause of a good many collisions too.

A while back I assumed that the late Ricardo Vidort had cracked it. He claimed that to dance tango all you needed was eight lessons with him. I thought he might have identified eight basic positions, with an infinity of switches between them. & then I was told, yes, but he also said three classes with him, so I guess the next day it might have been six or ten! Dancing in general, rather than specific movements, must have been in his mind.

Laura, a milonguera from Buenos Aires, was in London recently, and it was a wonderful opportunity to dance with her for a while. 'What giros do you have?' she asked, then: 'I'd like to give you a giro': I liked the language a lot. The teaching method is familiar: it's as if a giro is a thing that can be passed on in its entirety. In an effort to simplify learning, the possibilities of alternatives at any step of the giro are ignored. However, this means that the giro is likely to become a brief, inflexible sequence of steps, whereas it is really a sequence of single steps each of which, I think, could lead in a different direction.

Laura talked of 'an old milonguero' who can dance only two (or was it three?) sequences, and yet he's the one all the women look forward to dancing with. (Ismael Heljalil maybe?) Of course, she still taught us new sequences, but the simple, practical advice she gave about leading, about making intention clearer, was certainly as useful as the giros she 'gave' me, and which I treasure. The classes in Buenos Aires I really valued were those where I got nuts-and-bolts observations about walking and body position. You can improvise sequences or if, like me, you're not that quick, you can work them out from YouTube or from classes, but feedback from an experienced dancer is gold dust. That's why I valued Cacho Dante's classes so highly: he took the trouble to watch me closely, and made valuable comments about the way I walked, and I think his advice was more useful than the sequences I was taught by other teachers. After all, what he told me applies to every step of every tango.

Tango teaching probably can't do without fixed sequences. However, if there is a small number of distinct positions vis-a-vis your partner, then a system based on memorising and recognising them might be useful. Memorise them so they are recognised when they occur, and learn some of the different ways to lead away from each distinct position. In theory this could lead to a more flexible kind of leading that can adapt more fluently to changes on the floor. Perhaps, after all, there are just eight distinct positions. Has anybody counted them?

Picasso for free

Amazing what you can get for free, sometimes. There were three free dance events recently: I saw two of them and thought they were really outstanding. And now Picasso.

Gagosian is a big international gallery of the Rome/New York/London variety, and the business is selling big international artists. So it's quite wonderful when they put on a free exhibition that, as far as I can tell, isn't aimed at selling anything. Not only that, it's a seriously big and thorough show, almost on the scale the Tate would charge you £10 for. Insurance for bringing together all this work must have cost a small fortune; then there are gallery overheads, not to mention a platoon of black-suited security guards with wires coming out of their ears. & a free coats and bags room.

The gallery is in Britannia Street, off Gray's Inn Road, five minutes from Kings Cross. The show covers Picasso's 'Mediterranean Years', painting, sculpture, ceramics, prints, drawings, from 1945 to the mid-60s. If you think art should never be playful, you won't like it, but behind the playfulness, in the furious scribbles of the paintings and the endless reinvention, there's an intent and obsession that is more than just playful. & there's a lot of painting, and a lot of sculpture too, much of it previously unseen since it's from private family collections. Rooms and rooms of it. Including the wonderful litho print of a bull or bison, which starts off as solid, realistic; the stone gets re-worked, and stage by stage the prints become a spare linear drawing. I've never seen the originals before. Plenty of people there, kids sitting drawing on the floor, too. I came out feeling I'd had a good holiday, and a lot more besides.

Larry Gagosian started out selling posters in LA in the 1960s. Wonderful; and many thanks!

South of the Border

I'm just discovering the huge changes south of the US border. Discussions on Latin American union have been ongoing for some years: with the EU as a model the aim is a common market, currency and parliament within the next decade. The UNASUR treaty was signed in May 2008 and the Banco del Sur was set up in September 2009 to support South American countries. Countries once dependent on the World Bank and the IMF are no longer willing to borrow from it, or to accept the conditions for loans; usually the deregulation of markets, which has lead to multinational exploitation of local resources. Argentina has been active, and in May this year the former Argentine president, Néstor Kirchner, was elected the first Secretary-General of UNASUR at a heads of state summit.

Oliver Stone's new documentary was written by Tariq Ali and Mark Weisbrot. Weisbrot is an economist and co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington D.C., and has been critical of globalization and of World Bank and IMF policies. He has supported the governments of South America in creating the 'bank of the south' to help achieve independence from the IMF. The film aims to counter the relentlessly negative media representations in the US, and elsewhere, of the south and its leaders by visiting them and allowing them to speak for themselves. We meet them as people and share their thoughts and aspirations.

What If Latin America Ruled the World? How the South Will Take the North into the 22nd Century is a recently-published book by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera, a native of Colombia who teaches at London University. I know it through the Guardian review, where it's quoted as making the astonishing prediction of a Hispanic takeover of the United States 'sometime before the middle of this century' – that is, within the next forty years. He also claims that a sense of common ownership of land and resources is, and always has been, at the heart of the indigenous peoples' experience, and that radical, local economic models are being developed in Latin America to supplant the perceived exploitative nature of a capitalist system that, with bitter irony, developed on the proceeds of South American silver mines.

And back to Fernando 'Pino' Solanas. I've been able to follow the dialogue in his great masterpiece Sur now that it's on YouTube with English subtitles. (I wrote about it here.) It's a strange, poetic film with, I now realise, a strong political thread. The first section is called 'La Mesa de los Suenos', the 'table of dreams'; the dreamers being retired military men of an older generation who dream of an Argentine people fully in control of their own resources and using them to their own benefit. The military of the 1976-1983 period were American trained, backed and supported.

Sadly (to me) Solanas abandoned his poetic/political cinema in favour of a more directly political kind of film, which I don't enjoy watching so much. Typical of this is Memoria del saqueo 'A report on the looting', an Argentine/Swiss production that examines the 2001 crisis, and the poverty and wealth of Argentina: this is also on YouTube, as are some of his other films. I haven't watched it, but I assume the 'looting' is of individuals' bank accounts by central government.

In 2007 Solanas founded a political party, Proyecto Sur, 'Project South', with a radical agenda for economic reform. He was elected last year, and seems to have been controversial in office.

A Hispanic USA by 2050? It takes a leap of imagination, but just a decade ago it would have been inconceivable that Brazil would ever be mentioned alongside India and China as on the way to being an economic superpower. & fifteen years ago, neither China nor India counted for much economically. I wonder if we will we have a 'relación especial'.

How do you continue dancing when the line of dance is completely static?

A milonguera who we'll just call Laura told us recently that the giro was invented when dance floors became very crowded.

So how do you continue dancing when the line of dance is completely static? Look here. & listen, too. Beautiful music.

Thanks to Jantango. To be watched many times with great pleasure, and especially before the next Tango al Fresco.

Slow Dancing 2

Slow Dancing is extraordinary. Slow motion can be very beautiful anyway, but to get a cast of dancers and choreographers like this – they include Trisha Brown, Karole Armitage, Dana Casperson, William Forsythe, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, Angelin Preljocaj – in front of a very slow motion HD camera is incredible. The list also includes dancers world-wide: American Indian, Flamenco, Samoan, Capoeira, Balinese, Indian...

Five seconds of dance results in ten minutes of incredibly smooth slow dancing. Expanding time like this removes any sense of narrative or sequence. It's more like a moving photograph than a film. In film or on stage we clearly see a dancer preparing to leap. But in hyper-slow motion this sequence is so attenuated that cause and effect aren't clear, and the dancer simply seems to rise up. & these leaps are extraordinary because we see the body change shape, as the ankles start to hang from the legs, the legs from the hips and the hips from the torso; and when the body lands it visibly crumples, like an inhalation and exhalation. There's no horizontal line, no horizon to suggest ground level, just brightly-lit dancers surrounded by darkness, and the only indication of leaping is this change of body shape. & some of the leaps just go up and up. There's a strange feeling of weightlessness, and of effortlessness. Perhaps this is what dancing feels like at its best.

The more traditional dances are quieter in gesture and movement, so ballet and contemporary come out well, as does flamenco, every moment of which looks amazing. But the faces of all the dancers took my attention. For a few there was an exalting joy in movement, but most faces were inward looking, mask-like, as if absorbed entirely in the dance. Photographer David Michalek, whose project this is, takes the concept of portraiture as a starting point.

Of many very beautiful performances one of the most extraordinary was dancer Alexandra Beller, who by most standards would be regarded as over-weight, but who makes an amazing turning leap that comes down to earth and then down to the floor, where her body subsides, her hair and clothing settling slowly around her. It's an astonishing image of aspiration and matter.

& unfortunately it finishes today, July 24, at 6pm. But if you're anywhere near east London, it's at the Village Underground in Holywell Lane, which is just up the road from Liverpool Street. (You might have passed by and seen underground carriages up on the roof.) It's free, just walk in, be given a programme, and settle down on cushions and beanbags on the floor, and be entranced. Many thanks to Sadler's Wells for giving it to us.

RIP nuevo

There's a contagious idea going around: prophets of doom, Cherie, Irene and Man Yung, then London Tango, one after the other, all proclaim the imminent demise of 'tango nuevo'! (Sighs of relief all round!) I seem to be the last to catch it, but maybe someone will catch it from me. After all, it's such a good idea!

Some years ago it was pointed out that there's no room for it on most dance floors, and thus the End of Nuevo is nigh. Not always true, but tango actually feels best in big close groups, like our Tango al Fresco in London. If you dance at arm's length from the friend you're dancing with, and at leg's length from the nearest couple, you are very close to dancing completely on your own, and how long is that satisfying?

A few weeks back I visited the big Monday-night practica in North London: a friend I'd met in Buenos Aires was passing through London, and of course we wanted to resume our dancing. She'd learned in all the best places in Germany and has enjoyed tango wherever she's been which, since she's a non-tenured academic, is all over Europe. It was literally a heart-warming experience to renew our friendship over some good old tracks that were such a pleasure to dance to. But pause a moment, and look around. Milena Plebs had taught the class so there were a lot of people there, and it was mainly tango at arms' and legs' length. A strange disengaged, abstract, cold, detached (literally) sensation; there's something cerebral about it, as if the dancers are really wrapped up in some kind of puzzle, cleverly remembering fragments of choreographies, and assembling them, and remembering the appropriate responses to the lead. I cried for the cheerful ringing laughter of the late Ricardo Vidort. Or the passionate musicality of the late Tete Rusconi. Sin miedo! Sin pensamiento! Without fear! Without thinking!

Pablo Veron commented a year or two ago that 'tango nuevo' is doubly a misnomer: it's the name coined by Piazzolla to describe his kind of music, and moreover there's nothing new in the dance itself, which goes back to dance halls of the 1930s and 1940s. It's all old tango, its elements are tango history. In its city of origin the usual term for this kind of dance is 'tango fantasia': something that happens away from the crowded reality of the dance floor, tango for the stage. I can enjoy it if it's done with passion and musicality, and with a strong sense of the close-hold emotional commitment. Look at Javier and Geraldine when they were young and together: it's a wild and breathtaking dance, although I think they'd call it salon, but nothing like the fingertips-only-and-look-how-clever-we-are-dancing-tango dance that's the worst side of London tango.

Chicho Frumboli loudly proclaimed last winter that he had ruined tango with his experiments; that THE EMBRACE was what really mattered. I checked out some recent videos of him: well, poor guy if he thinks that's an embrace! And he even looks bored. Well, maybe he was; maybe he was thinking 'I'm Chicho so I've got to teach this stuff and dance it, but really, my dear, I just want to hold you close and dance properly!' I hope he'll shock everyone and do it soon!

So is 'tango nuevo' dead or dying? It's less popular on the continent than in London, and my guess is that its day here has passed. Europeans dance close, and do it well, and I think nuevo, or fantasia, will begin to feel to dancers how it looks to outsiders: arid, lacking emotional pleasure in its core. They don't really look as if they're enjoying it, so how can it survive? Dancers will split off into jive and salsa, which can be enjoyed very readily, and into salon/milonguero tango. Of course a few gifted dancers will continue to amaze us with 'extreme tango', and the 'n' word will be long forgotten. Eso espero!

Gardel and Goyeneche

NuclearGirl set me thinking a while back when she commented that Gardel was her late-night listening: mine is usually Pugliese, like a good many people I expect. But there is another name, Roberto Goyeneche, who I know primarily from the wonderful Sur album, which is the soundtrack to Solanas' film of that name. It's an album I often come back to, and usually late at night. I wrote about the film earlier.

Listening recently to Sur I was struck that Goyeneche speaks rather than sings, speaks in tune, but it's hardly singing. It's said his voice deteriorated as he aged, but it has such emotional depth I'd not call it deterioration. & I couldn't help thinking how strongly this contrasts with Gardel sixty years earlier, whose passion for bel canto gave tango a new direction. By the time Sur was made, the cultural background of opera and the ordered, prosperous world that supported it must have been a distant dream. The music is so full of anguish, tenderness and loss, and so beautiful, that I never tire of it. It's music that aches with nostalgia for the whole nostalgic tango tradition of the golden age, and speaking, rather than singing, seems appropriate to this new, brutal and impoverished world, 1988, the years after the dictatorship. Goyeneche's style was always a bit declamatory: his voice was rich, expressive and powerfully direct, and his diction wonderfully clear, helped no doubt by better recording technology.

The performers were mainly Nestor Marconi on bandoneon, and Roberto Goyeneche. Marconi plays three solo pieces. The voices of the bandoneon and of Goyeneche complement each other emotionally. Sur, 'South', a tango from the 1940s, is a highlight of the soundtrack and the film, the archetypal tango topic of lost love. It's a beautiful poem and the last line, 'y amargura del sueño que murio' – 'bitterness for the dream that died' – seems to have an added poignancy, given the date of this recording. It's a very potent poem: when talking about emotions in tango, Pedro Sanchez quoted the opening lines of Sur...

'On the corner of San Juan and old Boedo, and all the sky,
Pompeya, and in the distance, the flood,
memories of your loose bride's hair
and your name floating in farewells...'

… and said how he'd identified with this when he was young, and that he dances to it with all his own emotions. I felt he was suggesting that a non-porteno couldn't relate to it, but I'm not sure: we all share emotions of love and loss, and the more we understand the words, the more our own memories and emotions are involved too. (The castellano, and a translation, with a link to Troilo's recording with Edmundo Rivero, are here: I re-worded that verse above from it.)

The album is ascribed to Piazzolla, but it's not performed by him: at most there are a few tracks by him. Most of the songs, such as Sur and Naranjo en Flor, are standards that Troilo recorded much earlier with Goyeneche and others. The film came out in 1988, five years after the end of military rule, when the revival was only just beginning. Troilo and Piazzolla had both been affected by the decline in dancing from the 1950s onwards: in the mid-50s, Troilo started to record as a quartet, while Piazzolla, like Pugliese, began to concentrate on playing listening music rather than dance music. Musicians have to make a living, and perhaps there was no longer the money in dance music. Albums were still being made but the future of that amazing 20th century tradition of Argentine tango can't have looked good at that time.

Roberto Goyeneche, 1926 - 1994.

I checked out YouTube to find if there was a track there of Goyeneche singing Sur, and found that someone has uploaded the entire film, Sur, in 12 10-minute segments. & it's the Spanish version with English subtitles; the songs are partially subtitled. I've seen it only in a version dubbed into German, which regrettably I don't understand. This segment is the opening credits: the music itself, Goyeneche singing Sur, begins about 1:56. Sadly, the uploader has screwed up the aspect ratio, making Goyeneche unrecognisably overweight, and the visual quality is rather poor. The credits attribute the arrangements to Nestor Marconi, and the incidental music to Piazzolla.

I bought the album from Digital 7 (search under Piazzolla) as a download, but Sur is also available for listening on Spotify, which has expanded hugely since I last looked. It now has some 40-odd Troilo CDs you can listen to, ten of them released this year, about 20 Goyeneche albums, most of them released this year, and up to a dozen each of the Golden Age orquestas: some are compilations so they overlap a bit. i-Tunes has even more for purchase. Some of it isn't really music for dancing, but that's the era Goyeneche lived through: some of Goyeneche's albums seem over-generous with strings, and the crisp rhythms of tango aren't really there, unlike the albums he made with his close friend Anibal Troilo.

Tango al Fresco

The two Tango al Fresco events are always highlights of the London tango year for me. Interesting that for a day everyone seems close to being 'milonguero': the floor is so packed that there's no room to be extravagant, and everyone adjusts, more or less, to the crowd because everyone's happy to be there. & it feels really good. I hope the connection between dancing close and neat, dancing with a lot of people and feeling really good gets widely recognised! There were a few attempts at flying heels early on, but they either flew away in disgust or joined the crowd. & the weather was excellent. It always takes a tango or two to get used to the camber of the floor, but it's wonderful to be outside under the trees on a sunny July afternoon. There are picnics all around, milonga friends everywhere, and a warm and relaxed feeling. Devotees of the more serious Buenos Aires milongas might find it too relaxed and informal, but it's always a very enjoyable afternoon, and it always seems to show London tango at its best.

I made a discovery that really interested me. When you don't have space to do much you can playfully vary the rhythm, pause when you might be expected to step, step on the offbeats, create a sequence of rhythms that seems irregular and yet returns to the regular beat at the end of a phrase, which can make dancing with small steps in a tight space more interesting. It's never occurred to me to explore this before.

I watched The Limits of Control by Jim Jarmusch when I got back, an original and unexpected film, as ever. There's a 'making of' on the DVD; you can watch actors being ordinary humans one moment, and suddenly someone else the next. & how many people does it take to film one person walking down a street? & Jarmusch tells the old truth: there are just so many stories, but there are infinite ways of telling them.

& there are just so many steps, but there must be infinite ways of dancing them. Roll on 8 August for the second event. Here's 25 seconds of last Sunday.

Slow Dancing

High-speed, high-definition cameras recording at 1,000 frames per second have been with us for a while, showing astoundingly beautiful details of sports events. Artist David Michalek uses this technology to make video portraits of dancers, and shows them in installations using a number of screens, one per dancer. A short movement phrase of perhaps 5 seconds, is played back in 10 minutes of extreme slow motion, enabling the viewer to see the complexity of the simplest gestures, catching details that would normally escape the naked eye.

London has been a bit slow to catch up with showings of dance video made with this technology, but Slow Dancing is now in London in Trafalgar Square, from Tue 6 - Fri 9 July, starting at 9pm, and it will move on to the Village Underground, 54 Holywell Lane, London EC2A 3PQ, from Tuesday 13 - Saturday 24 July. The list of participants in this unique installation reads like a who's who of dance talent, including Wendy Whelan, Shantala Shivalingappa, Judith Jamison, William Forsythe, Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and Alexei Ratmansky.

This is another free dance event.

What fascinates me is that this use of technology completely removes choreography from dance. Choreography is something that happens in time, whether in five minutes or in the hour or two that a 'show' takes. This technique strips away choreography and shows us dance simply in terms of body movement. & (to me, anyway) the body in movement is one of the most beautiful things there is. There are choreographers I admire, but to me they are best when they show the freedom and complexity of movement. &, of course, my favourite dance is choreography-free! But nevertheless I find Slow Dancing a very beautiful and fascinating project.

Here's the 2007 installation at the Lincoln Centre. The video is the Sadlers Wells presentation for the project in London.

Some tango music films

Tango Salon, the BBC film about La Confiteria Ideal in Buenos Aires, was released on DVD in January. I've just rented it from my usual DVD provider, LoveFilm. It was made for general viewing rather than for the tango community, so bits of dance by the likes of Gerardo Portalea are intercut with talking heads, some interesting, many not. It also explores the political and economic situation in 2002. There are long takes of a youthful and exuberant Javier and Geraldine. Cutting up wonderful tango with talking heads is irritating, but I first watched it when I was just starting out, and I got a great deal about tango and about Argentina from it.

Unfortunately the BBC hasn't been reading Tangocommuter, or it would know that 'Extras' in the form of their out-takes, the full versions of the dances in the film, would be a big hit. There's not a single 'Extra', so if you've already seen the film there's nothing new. Which is terribly sad!

Color Tango seems to be available on DVD at Color Tango gigs only. It's a series of mini-lectures by Color Tango members, charting the history of tango, with musical illustrations. It would be a useful introduction for someone who knows little about the music. Good that Julio de Caro was given prominent mention: he introduced a musical sophistication into the relatively basic tango of his time. But the presentation of Color Tango is clunky at best. The mini-lectures are translated by translators rather than in subtitles, which slows the film.

Rodolfo Mederos has provided music for a number of films, but El último bandoneón ('The Last Bandoneón'), directed by Alejandro Saderman (2005) seems to be his first acting role. Ostensibly, the story is of how a gifted bandoneón performer, Marina Gayotto, auditions for a place in Mederos' new orquesta, but her instrument is useless, and her search for one that is playable takes her through the world of the bandoneón in Buenos Aires, the collectors, the repairers, the musicians. The dance appears too, with Geraldine and Javier, and a few of the older dancers, including Pedro Sanchez, talking about the tango world. But the musical focus of the film is the encounter of Mederos with a group of old bandoneón performers who get together regularly to play the old music. The film culminates with a concert with the new Mederos orquesta, but highlighting the bandoneón orquesta. So the storyline is rather mixed: the story of Marina looking for an instrument is an interesting insight into the world of the instrument, but provides little music. Musically, the group of old bandoneón performers is the focus of the film, but we don't see or hear a lot of them.

I've heard it said that there's been a prejudice against women playing bandoneón: until recently women have been welcome on the violin or piano, but not on bandoneón.

Mederos played with Piazolla and Pugliese, but went off in the 1970s to found Generación Cero, aiming at a fusion of jazz, rock and the music of Buenos Aires. By 1990 he had returned to tango. He was invited by Buenos Aires-born Daniel Barenboim to play in a tango trio that briefly toured Europe. This appears as a TV-only film, Tangos among friends. The tango is OK, but would hardly make you want to dance.

El otro camino ('A Different Way: Tango with Rodolfo Mederos') written and directed by Gabriel Szollosy (2008): another made-for-TV film. I watched it on cable TV late one tired night, so my impressions of it aren't exactly clear, but there's plenty of music in it, including several magical solo improvisations by Mederos. Unlike El último bandoneón the focus is much more on the music.

By far the best tango music film is Si Sos Brujo ('If you are a magician'), made by American-born Caroline Neal, who met bassist Vaurchensky when his group, El Arranque, played at a well-known London milonga. She was just finishing film school, and left with him for Buenos Aires. Vauchensky was trying to get funding for his great project (one of his great projects), the Orquesta Escuela Tango, so she was there, filming, at all the meetings and early rehearsals, and the film is an effortless, marvelous, fly-on-the-wall documentary.

At its centre is the wonderful Emilio Balcarce, who played with, and arranged for, many of the great golden age orquestas including Troilo and Pugliese. At an age when he might have expected to live quietly with his family he found himself on stage again, in Buenos Aires and on European tours, directing an orquesta of young musicians. Other surviving maestros of his generation are brought in to instruct the young musicians and to play with them: the meetings of experience with the energy of youth are extraordinary, and the music is exciting throughout. Not only is there plenty of good music, but the film is beautifully shot and well thought-out. This is definitely not to be missed, and it's the only one I can still enjoy watching again.

I'd like to say that this is the one to rush out and buy, but currently Amazon UK has only one copy - at £76. (We're assured it's in good condition.) I got it from them a year or two ago, and I think it cost around £20. Music Argentina advertises it for 18 Euros, but it would be imported from Argentina.

Here's the closing sequence, in La Ideal (where else?)

Sunday at Pavadita

Two good things: it was a hot day, and England won! The third ODI, that is, a bit of a nail-biting finish, but well done. Not the same Australian team that thrashed us for years, and a well-organised English team that even seems to have worked out how to deal with the few seasoned Aussie players. Two ODIs to go, we've won the series and we're beginning to wonder about a whitewash. Can this really be happening?

& on to Nikki's new Hammersmith milonga, La Pavadita, at the Hammersmith Club in Rutland Grove, five or 10 minutes walk from the underground. The most ideal place for a milonga I've seen in London. Beautiful, a tall, rather narrow building with a stage at one end, and a bar with a balcony over it at the other. It feels spacious, high-ceilinged, with windows close to the roof. Even on a hot evening it was bearable. (I was told that at the Crypt the previous night it had been 33 degrees inside: the place reminds me of an enormous brick bread-oven, and must have been close to turning out human pizzas.)

The dance floor at Pavadita is long and fairly narrow: you can see across it easily, which is great, but subtly confusing because it feels like a cabeceo situation, but it doesn't actually work because no one is expecting it. The opening night a few weeks ago was comfortably crowded, but last night it was a bit sparse: a hot, late-June evening. The building is well-maintained, and the lighting is quite good, a nice change. An excellent wood floor, and space to move in between the tables and the dance floor. Perfect.

Last winter, Cacho Dante insisted that I must not step forwards with a leg bent at the knee: I realised afterwards what this does to posture. In fact, straightening the knee produces that flick forwards, that little kick you notice in a good tango walk. When there are few dancers on the floor you tend to notice individuals, and individuals who lead without looking confident often step forwards with a bent knee. They may be confident and even have quite a range of steps, but someone who confidently leads a wide variety with bent knees simply looks weird. (& I wonder how my posture looks these days, after years of bad posture, some years of yoga and pilates, a few years of tango, and a few months since Cacho's intervention. These days it feels good walking down the street, but once you get on the floor things can change. Some months since I last dared film myself dancing.)

And a couple who dance and teach 'fantasia' tango in London was there. It surprised me how irritating it can look. It kept catching the corner of my eye, and seemed to go against the grain of dancing there, which was otherwise pretty much salon, some of it very practised and good. It was certainly going against the music: it was with the beat of course, but seemed to ignore completely the emotional charge of the music. I like Golondrina's comment about following this kind of dance: '...it can feel like a cryptic word puzzle – elusive and just out of reach'. It's meant to look good, but by comparison it actually looks rather trivial.

Anyway, welcome Pavadita, and best wishes!

Cool!

Free Open Air Performance
1-4 July
Edmond J. Safra Fountain Court
Somerset House
Strand
London

'Come and watch a powerful all-women cast, made up of five extraordinary professional dancers and fifteen of the UK’s exciting emerging talents brought together especially for this unmissable event. Shobana Jeyasingh's dramatic choreography, together with the unique talents of designer Ursula Bombshell and sound artist Cassiel, promise an intense and water-inspired dance performance for visitors to Somerset House.'

Thurs & Fri at 18.00 & 19.00
Sat & Sun at 12.00, 13.00, 15.00 & 16.00

The beautiful game...

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!'

Here and there

I sometimes think it can surprise people in London to realise how much Argentines can bring to tango. That's not really intended to sound sarcastic, but I sometimes get the impression that even London dancers in a traditional tango style aren't that interested in Argentine dancers whose tango is traditional, that there's a feeling that we should sort out our own tango for ourselves, even that we might know a bit better than them. Maybe we should, maybe we do, but it's still wonderful when Argentines like Mimi, like Marcelo Rojas, turn up and really excite people with their passionate enthusiasm which, along with a sense of elegance, is really characteristic of traditional Argentine tango.

I heard a lot of very positive comments about the music the Buenos Aires DJ Marcelo Rojas played at Carablanca last Friday. People really liked it. In Buenos Aires I'd been struck how strong, proud, alive, the music often sounds, and how dull it sometimes sounds here. Tangoenelcielo pointed out that Buenos Aires DJs will typically play tanda after tanda of that strong proud music, a limited, often repeated selection of D'Arienzo, Biagi, Troilo, Tanturi, at the beginning of the evening. It's a good way to get a party going, but gets a bit repetitive. Later, Fresedo, D'Agostino, Pugliese maybe. I couldn't stay to the end, but that's the way the evening seemed to be shaping up. 'The music is so good this evening' was what I kept hearing. It certainly made me feel good, and quite a few other people too. Many thanks, Marcelo, it was great.

And I wonder how this couple, Argentine dancers whose tango is traditional, would be received if they visited London. 'Traditional' suggests a single style, whereas traditional tango is really individual: Osvaldo and Coca's tango, like the tango of everyone else of their generation, is unique. No two couples are alike. No other dancers move from humour to intense seriousness like Osvaldo and Coca, and always with impeccable musicality. They teach all over Europe in our summer months, but I wonder if many dancers would manage to to turn up if they gave workshops here. I've never seen tango as a competitive sport, so the idea of tango 'World Champions' always seems more than a bit off to me, but that's what they were, Campeones Mundial de Tango Salon, 2004. Even so, would many dancers go to their workshops in London?

& have I said all this before? & am I repeating myself? Sad, isn't it?



Video thanks to 2xtango (but it would have looked better without the logo), and thanks to tangocelebration for pointing it out.

The Craneway Event 2

An astonishing feature-length film in which little seems to happen, and yet one watches in a kind of relaxed attention, oblivious to the passage of time. It just looks beautiful.

The 'event' isn't really a rehearsal: the dancers have already rehearsed, and choreographer Merce Cunningham is spending three days prior to performance locating the dance in the former Ford assembly plant, an enormous hall, glazed on three sides, right on the quay-side, separated from the sea only by the craneway, the iron tracks once used by the cranes. To the sides, the hills of San Fransisco, and the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance. Ships; a container vessel inches past, yachts breeze by. The floor of the hall is huge, probably three or four times bigger than any stage, and covered with a semi-reflective surface of dance mat. The folding doors at one corner of the hall must be 20 feet high.

Three days, the fresh clear light of morning giving way to the diffused warm glow of late afternoon sunshine. The dancers work through their sequences; their pacing and angle to the audience are changed a little by Merce Cunningham, wheel-chair bound after, he has said, too many years dancing on concrete. But he was 90 when the film was made and sadly he passed away during the editing. The film does have an elegaic quality. There's no music, just the sounds of the dancers on the floor, occasionally of boats and the sea. It's very quiet. The cameras never move; no pans, no zooms, just cuts from angle to angle, long takes, the visual style of film-maker Tacita Dean, who was invited by Cunningham to film the event, although she chose rather to film these final rehearsals since Cunningham himself was present.

In a way it's unfocussed, or rather the focus is on everything. It's certainly not a film about a dance performance as it doesn't show us clearly all the dancers' moves. It's not a film about Merce Cunningham, who is present throughout but not as a character in a film or documentary. Or rather it is all these, and more too: it's a film about the building, about the birds, the sea and the ships, the bridge, the city and above all the wonderful light. It's a wonderfully calm film. At the end of the third day, there's a long take, looking from end to end of the hall, against the warm blaze of the setting sun, the dancers little more than silhouettes, the vast building full of movement from end to end, the floor reflecting the light and the dancers. The final rehearsal finishes, there's a little laughter, voices and relaxed movement, and with that the film ends.

Details of the screenings are here. Three screenings a day Tuesday to Friday, and two on Saturday, until June 26. & it's free. (& if you click on that link, have a look at the line of dancers in profile. Que postura!)

Bridge to the Tango 2

At the beginning of April I posted about Daniel Trenner's blog and new website, and about his great series of videos, which he is currently re-releasing online. Later in April he uploaded some samples on YouTube. All go back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, and there are some well-known names among them. His videos are now the only record of some of the dancers who learned in the Golden Age.

The one-hour sessions seem expensive at $65 as downloads. I bought the two VHS cassettes of Tete and Sylvia a few years ago, and they were cheaper, even with postage and packing. However, Trenner says he also has hours of interview material as well, which is of little or no commercial value, and that the sale of downloads of the class material will go towards the free release of the less commercial material on YouTube and on the itangocafe website. If this includes translation and sub-titling, it's excellent value. & he points out that these prices are in line with the cost of private lessons.

If you search YouTube for itangocafe you'll find a number of recently uploaded extracts from Tete and Sylvia, Tomi O'Connel, Rodolfo and Maria Cieri, Juan Bruno, Pupi Castello, Victor Romero and Norma Galli, and Omar Vega, all well worth watching. The format isn't ideal: translation, rather than subtitles, adds to the length, but there's some inspiring material there.

I'll embed just one, the late Tete. It's said that he was dissatisfied with the two one-hour sessions. The setting is certainly strange: the potted plants and pseudo-Greek columns, a Buenos Aires studio, no doubt, an atmosphere miles away from the comfortable relaxation of a milonga. & there's a telling moment when Trenner asks him to demonstrate a step without music. 'Sin musica?' asks Tete, looking really puzzled: to make up for the lack of that essential ingredient he sings to himself as he dances. But if he felt that his 'performance' is lacking, at least the video is extremely clear, and the tangos danced in between the teaching demonstrations show something of the energy and musicality he is remembered for. This is one of them.



PS. 1.21 to 1.30: just what does he do there? But it's a totally unhurried lead, virtuoso without the slightest sense of a display, and Sylvia just continues with a couple of untroubled ochos.

Tango and Argentine football

BBC Radio Three has an excellent evening programme called Night Waves which manages to be interesting about a very wide range of material, from Paul Davies on the possibility of extra-terrestrial life to the latest opera productions, from IVF and the definition of a family to... tango and Argentine football. Here's a quick summary: you can listen online until 15 June here, but it might not be possible outside the UK.

As the city grew, the huge immigrant influx resulted in densely crowded barrios, where the national hero, once the solitary gaucho out in the pampas or the literary hero Martin Fierro, no longer made sense. Football started as the past-time of the large British expat community, but was taken up everywhere across the rapidly expanding city. Huge crowds turned up to watch, and English professionals visited on lucrative tours with their focused, disciplined, unemotional, organised and forceful play, the football of an industrialised nation. But Argentina wasn't an industrialised nation, and its football favoured virtuoso footwork, individuality, the turn, the dribble, the feint, over the mechanistic style of the English teams.

& where had the Argentine footballers learned their more emotional style and moves? It was the time of the emergence of tango, which had been banned from the centre of the city, but thrived in the outlying barrios, where the footballers developed their skills. The sharp turns of tango, the rhythm of movement, were part of the same culture as football; footballers danced tango. Racing Club was written in the 1920s, and we still dance to it: I assumed it was about horse racing, but apparently it was about a football club. (Huracán, another well-known tango, I believe still is a team.) The 1924 Olympics in Paris and 1928 Amsterdam Olympics, where the Argentine football team took the silver, showed off the new skills. Football heroes took over from the gaucho as the new masculine icons of the nation, icons that could dance.

The window of opportunity

If this blog has one theme, it's how frustrating it is to be stuck in London in a sea of publicity for visits by young, mainly show-tango teachers, while some of the best of the older generation from Buenos Aires, with a life-time of experience, teach all over Europe yet never visit the UK. When I hear of such visitors to Europe I always draw attention to them – Osvaldo and Coca are in Europe now, and will be at Tango Retiro 2010 in Sweden in the last week of July, and Alberto Dassieu will be in Switzerland, also in July – in the desperate hope that someone can get them into the UK for a few days. Alberto I know for sure really hopes to be able to visit London this July. At one time I even fantasised about a London Milonguero Festival to which they'd all be invited – all together! – but I just happened to lack the funding... (I pushed out the idea in case someone thought, 'Hey, what a good idea. I'll do it!' – but I didn't think it was advisable to hold my breath.)

There are legal problems, yes, there are in most countries, but there must be ways for visitors to teach here temporarily: Los Ocampo and the Disparis manage to visit regularly for extended, well-publicised tours, as do bucket-loads of almost-identical teachers of showy tango. Surely by now there are enough of us to make a visit by some of those other wonderful dancers worthwhile? Because time isn't on our side. The window of opportunity may be just a year or two, if that. Not that their teaching will disappear when they go, but I happen to think that contact with all that experience is really important. Learning tango isn't just learning where to put your feet.

It was wonderful to have Mimi in London last weekend: the class was well-attended and, with a better understanding of what was possible with publicity we could have had better-attended workshops too. There was certainly no shortage of enthusiasm for her teaching. & that's just London. I think (hope) there's the realisation that 'milonguero' isn't just a style of tango, one among many, but that in its native form it has a big heart, and a life of its own, that it's a very profound communion between people.

In the meantime, if the prophets don't come to the UK, the only thing to do, it seems, is to go to them while they are still able to visit Europe. Italy is their no. 1 destiny, partly because of the language affinity, and several excellent dancer/teachers have settled there. You can make several trips to Italy for the cost of one visit to Buenos Aires: worth thinking about. See you in Milano/Venezia/Ferrara/Roma/Lecce/Bari next summer? Or do you think we could manage to get some good visitors to London by then?

Mimi in London

I really don't know where to begin this one. The Friday night workshop at Carablanca was big and a bit chaotic. Mimi, by no means young, nevertheless has unstoppable energy for teaching tango, and it wasn't easy to halt her voluble flow: moreover, Carole who was translating for her, only just had the voice (unlike Mimi) to fill Conway Hall, which is big and high. But someone with energy like that carries a whole crowd along with her. Soon we were dancing with coats draped over our arms (guys' left, girls' right) to remind us of the need to keep that side of the embrace open. It all seemed a bit basic and pedantic, until suddenly we were trying to lead a walk in parallel to the girls' left side, with a saccada.

And unlike some other teachers Mimi stayed to the end, and enjoyed herself on the floor, leading and following. She led a milonga tanda with Christine Denniston, which I'll remember for a while. & I know that she went on to another milonga when Carablanca closed, because I showed her where it is.

I think this is an aspect of tango we rarely see in London: this wholehearted, good-natured passion for the dance. I think Ricardo Vidort was quoted as saying that you should only dance if you're going to give it everything you've got, and not dance otherwise, and I think most of us were impressed by that spirit in Mimi. If it's worth doing, it's worth giving it everything.

So she left the milonga at 01.30 and was ready for workshops at 11am next morning. The workshops were a lot easier. For a start there were two excellent Spanish speakers in addition to Carole, and they all made a point of reining her in - 'Espero, Mimi, uno momento!' – so we could get the full translation. And stopping her so we could get a short break was really an effort! We're all more than grateful to those Spanish speakers for their help.

There was plenty of opportunity to work with a partner, and also to ask Mimi for particular advice and clarification. I wish I could remember more of the clarification, but a few points stick in mind. Firstly, stepping out of the cruzada: for a lady, make sure that the weight is fully transferred to the front foot by lifting the toes of the back foot, before stepping back with it. It looks good, and it ensures that the weight has been fully transferred before stepping. Guys are probably going to step forwards from a cross, so the toes of their front foot should be lifted by pushing up from the ball of the back foot. Then, when leading a saccada, try to lead it from the hip. It certainly works better, and it certainly feels better, more a nudge of the leg than a kick to your partner's foot, as the leg swings out from the hip, rather than kicking. Then just in walking, girls step back with a straight leg, guys step forwards with a straight leg, and onto the ball of the foot as much as possible. Try to think of the instep as you walk, and try to walk like a tightrope walker. & the contact of guy's left to lady's right hand should mainly be with the lower part of the palm: the fingers don't give a firm enough contact. (Although of course you don't lead with the left.) And she noticed too much 'clutching': with the guys' right hands in particular; and also the guys' left and the girls' right arms get pulled in towards the body. Practice with a coat draped over your forearm! And... And... (If anyone can remember more or correct me, please post a comment.)

There was a lot more, a huge amount more: about which muscles need to be used to make walking better and so on. My first impression of her teaching in Buenos Aires was amazement that dancing had been analysed in such detail. Normally, I'm opposed to classes with a lot of talking, and to classes with a lot of technical detail, but this was on another level. In fact, one participant told me she wanted to go to all the tango teachers she'd ever studied with to ask them for her money back: she'd been misled and misinformed so often.

We started with the parallel walk from Friday night, then a basic walk in cross system with two saccadas, and a way of linking the two. Then in the final session she said she'd been watching us dance and had seen plenty of walking but not much turning, so she taught us a very quick tight turn, a 'giro milonguero', a 'quatro baldosa' (four-tile) turn, since it can be done in very little space (a good many Buenos Aires dance floors are tiled). It actually feels more like a one-tile turn, it is so tight, the kind of thing you can do even when you are squeezed in between four other couples.

Mimi didn't really stop for a break, just slowed down a bit. & she was still teaching on the pavement outside as we left. & I know she was going on to another milonga that evening. This really is the spirit of tango. Come back soon!

Hats off...

...to tango organisers! As in so many things, if their work is well done, you don't see it. If you see all the hard work, then the result can look laboured. The same is true in dancing!

This occurs to me as I'm involved in getting together some workshops this weekend. Emails have gone out, and Tango-uk alerted. So if you are in London, I hope you can come along to Carablanca on Friday night, and on Saturday June 5 to The Room, 33 Holcombe Road, Tottenham Hale, London N17 where there will be two workshops, between 11 and 1 and between 1.45 and 3.45. A single workshop will be £20, and the price for both is £30. If you are interested, please email me (address on the right side of the page) as we need to keep numbers about the same.

Mimi Santapá grew up observing her father, Mariano Leotera, teaching the tango dancers of his generation. He developed a methodical way of teaching tango, and Mimi witnessed many great dancers pass through his workshops, including the late Carlos Gavito, and Juan Carlos Copes. When Mimi teaches she reminds us often: “These are the things my father taught me, with a few things I added through my own understanding of the body.”

She teaches dancers of all levels in Buenos Aires, and emphasizes walk and body position to result in a dance that looks and feels effortless. Too often tango is taught merely in terms of foot positions, but the position of the whole body in the lead up to a position of the foot can be really important. I've written about her a couple of times before: the entries are here, here and here

Mimi doesn't dance so much these days, but there is a video of her with one of her students at El Arranque in Buenos Aires. I've embedded it before, but I think it's well worth watching again.



Video thanks to Tangoyte.