Benevento

Mimmo Paladino is an international artist who still lives in the small south Italian town where he grew up. There's an exhibition at a villa in Sorrento which is all sculpture and installation, and I'm never quite sure what to make of his sculptures: sometimes they look wilfully archaic, sometimes just odd. It's his paintings and prints I really like. But I like these 'sleepers': I never realised they float on the water. Quite uncanny, the slight, gentle movement, in a state of suspension. (They just happened to be aligned perfectly at that moment.) Some years ago there was an exhibition of non-floating dreamers in the Round House in London, with a sound installation by Brian Eno. The villa is wonderful: not big enough to be ostentatious, but with enough space for all your beautiful friends to come to visit. & dance, of course.

Then I take the bus that patiently threads through the congested traffic of Napoli onto the open road between farmland, winding inland into the hills, to Benevento. About an hour. A real insight into southern Italy. I arrive just as school is closing for lunch. Clear fresh air and bright sunshine: I'm struck by how unusually energetic and cheerful and good-natured the high school kids seemed to be. An Italian, Carlucci I think, the chef and restauranteur, recently wrote that Italian schoolchildren go home for lunch: that's where they discuss their problems. I can't help feeling that this must be a great place to grow up in. No tango, perhaps, not yet.

Benevento's a treat after Napoli as there's hardly any traffic in the town centre. The main street has been pedestrianised, and the old town streets are very narrow. This tower at the town centre is magnificent, and incorporates pieces of older buildings. Buildings in the old town are like this too, carved Roman sculture used as part of walls. (I've seen this in India: the Jantar Mantar mosque in Delhi was built out of pieces of Hindu temples.) A tower like this seems to suggest many stories, just as its walls are built out of many images.

 

The Benevento museum is extraordinary: a bit like the British Museum in one big room. One big room full of Egyptian, Greek and Roman sculpture. Statues of Roman emperors as Egyptian gods, Greek-style sculpture made with stone from Aswan, Roman images of Isis, of the priests of Isis. Benevento at the southern edge of the Roman empire, surrounded by Greek colonies, and looking across the Mediterranean to Egypt for spiritual inspiration, and with an Etruscan past. (Nothing Indian here, although an Indian sculpture was found in Pompeii.) Pompeii, celebration of the worldly, Benevento where the concerns seem more spiritual.

There's an installation by Paladino here, the Hortus Conclusus. I really don't know what to make of his sculpture. But the prints? Here's a neat video of him making a lithograph, a print made on a smooth slab of limestone, at the Bulla workshop in Rome. Unfortunately in Italian. Bulla, I think, talks about the technical process. I don't understand what the artist says, but I like the print, and it's great to watch someone making something like that.



(Thanks to Rubieroart.)

Javier Gramigna

I was about to post more on Italy when I noticed Cherie has favourited a video with Javier Gramigna. Took me a moment to realise he's the same Javier as in the video in the previous post; he looks different filmed with a tall woman from a high viewpoint to dancing with a shorter woman filmed from lower, but it's the same person, same style. The big difference is that this video was filmed in Rome and published on 8 October: Javier is another of the older generation of wonderful tangueros who visit Europe but not the UK. I can't help thinking that someone like this just dancing in a London milonga might have an electrifying impact: just being there, even without formal classes.

I've seen him before but never knew his name, and I think I've confused him with Juan Carlos: similar build. Both are Cachirulo stalwarts, along with a few dozen more from that generation. Understandably I don't get many dances once Cachirulo gets under way, but I don't mind sitting and watching when there's tango at this level. There's always a row of European and American ladies looking forward to a tanda with these dancers, a taste of tango at its source.

& this video led me to Marina2x4's channel, which I'd not seen before. She has about 80 of her own videos, many of Buenos Aires milongas, filmed over several years. Javier is there again, dancing with Mirta Tiseyra. Marta Fama is there too, and recent videos of Alberto and Paulina Dassieu. Juan Carlos and Lucia are filmed in a wonderfully playful D'Arienzo dance at Lujos milonga, and there are many, many more. Marina also has links to a great many other wonderful videos.

On her channel she writes: 'There are still many who remember the tango of the days before the great crisis, but who haven't dedicated themselves to teaching. & most have been overwhelmed by the existence of so many academies and professors: unfortunately those professors didn't really live the tango when it was danced so widely by the people. The majority of them come from other dances as distant from tango as rock and roll, or ballet, and even folklore.'

She's doing what she can to ensure that the tango of those who do remember the days before the crisis will continue to live.

Isabella y Javier

I love this! In the first moment I thought; this guy looks slow, ponderous, clumsy even, and look how he leans over his partner. & then they start dancing! What a delight. It's not a particularly complex dance, pretty much a repeated figure, but the easy, relaxed musicality of it, and the energy, is so enjoyable. & to me it's got heart. There's a whole army of bright young dancers who'd score far more in superfluous elegance and variety – without a trace of that warmth and affection that's so typical of the milongas.

Something I see here that I've not noticed so much in other videos is torque, how precise he is in using the energy of turning.

I don't know what to call these videos from Cachirulo. They aren't demonstrations, they aren't 'performances' either. Just two people having a great time dancing together. & the shouting from the guys: there's a lot of teasing going on. But Javier just grins, he's having a ball. & so, I guess, is Isabella.

There's one other video with this couple on the Cachirulo channel. We've got to thank Cachirulo again and again for the hundreds of videos on his channel. It's such a great cross section of that amazing milonga, Cachirulo, of tango at the start of the 21st century.

Pompeii paintings: Museo Nazionale, Naples

The paintings are made of flicks of paint, brush marks. The impression is that the painters were trained to make brush sketches. There's a lot of movement in the figures and the way they are painted: it's a lively way of painting. Great images of figures and animals in movement. There's little attempt to smooth out the marks to make a photorealistic image: a highlight is built up out of a big medium-tone mark with a smaller lighter mark within it. Some work is sketchy, a few quick flicks to create a face, some is more carefully built up, but the marks are still fluent, lively. It's fresco, so painting had to be quick before the plaster dried.

There were great Roman painters of the human figure, of still life, of landscape, of plants and flowers, birds and animals. Birds and animals must be the commonest decorative motifs; huntings scenes, dogs and deer, less common. The Romans must have loved to feel they lived in an ordered landscape, the natural landscape, with trees, temples, hills, human/divine figures (they look much the same). 

The paintings in the Museo Nazionale in Naples give the impression of being individual paintings, but of course they are the bits the archaeologists picked out. At their best they are remarkable. Scenes from myth are imagined and painted with remarkable skill. 

 

You could sneak this into an exhibition of Renaissance painting, and it wouldn't be out of place. The story of the minotaur (lower left) slain by Theseus. It's incredible how similar in style these paintings are to renaissance art. I don't think renaissance painters had access to any Roman painting: sculptures were being discovered, but I'm not aware that paintings were known. And it's extraordinary that often enough these scenes appear, in a painted frame, in the middle of a solid red wall. Before picture frames were invented! Our galleries of classical painting still follow this example. But occasionally in Pompeii, a single figure appears in the centre of a wall, without a frame. It can be breathtaking.

Roman painting fed off Greek painting. Apart from the wonderful vases, I'm not sure that much Greek painting has survived, but there's a huge mosaic in Naples (composed, incidentally, of the tiniest tesserae) which is thought to be a Roman copy of a lost Greek painting. (A smaller copy is in Pompeii.) 

It recalls Ucello's Battle of San Romano, which is perhaps a millenium and a half later and much more formulaic. Here, the horses are in movement and at all angles, and the figures are interlaced in a complex image of war, often linked by where fighters are looking. It's quite extraordinary. It's a reminder that our view of art is conditioned by what has survived, not by what existed. I've read that the use of blue to suggest distance, along with smaller figures, was a Chinese innovation from the T'ang dynasty, around 900CE. Not so. It was there in Pompeii 1,000 years earlier.

The human figure, often partly or completely unclothed, is very much the central motif: human or divine, there's not much different. They are painted with wonderful warmth, and they almost step out of the paintings. & the Museo Nazionale is a wonderful space for the work, the more wonderful that it has windows that open and you can step out onto big balconies and refresh your gaze by looking out over the city. It makes the paintings less of museum pieces and more part of contemporary life, where the background sound isn't the hushed tones of a museum but the sound of the streets below.

& in Naples there are just two paintings of painters at work: in both, the painters are women.

Milongueros

Finally someone's made a film about the social tango of Buenos Aires, and got it released. In fact it was the finalist at the Via Emilia Documentary Festival, and it was released on YouTube, free for everyone to watch, yesterday. Some scenes are in Maipu 444, so clearly it's been some years in the making. There's some wonderful dancing. A lot of the time the dancers' feet aren't shown, so there's a real emphasis on torso movement, the wonderful smooth flowing movements that follow so closely and effortlessly the phrases of the music. If you've never had a chance to visit the milongas of Buenos Aires now's your chance to meet Ricardo Suarez, 'El flaco' Dany, Alberto Dassieu, 'El Nene' and many more, and when people ask you about 'tango', it's easy: just direct them to this film. & if you know the milongas and the dancers you'll be grateful to remember them through this production. Sadly it's subtitled in Italian, since it's an Italian production, but the heart comes through.

(Thanks to viaemiliadocfest.)

PS. The two comments say that this film has been withdrawn, but it's more than that: the whole channel, the Via Emilia Documentary Festival channel, the (presumably) official festival channel with some 20-odd documentaries on it, has closed. It doesn't seem as if as if this film was an illegal pirate version. 

I guess there are two possibilities: that they are working on their channel in order to upgrade it, or that (more likely) there are unforeseen copyright problems. Either way, it's very frustrating that when a really enjoyable film on the best social dance in Buenos Aires appears freely, it mysteriously vanishes again. 

I don't think this is the only such film that's unavailable. It seems crazy that people go through the labour of love to put these things together and then there's no DVD deal to get returns on the investment, and certainly little chance of a big cinema release either. So the film disappears and might never have been made.

Alfredo 'Tape' Rubín 2

Of course, I should have checked YouTube before I wrote about Alfredo 'Tape' Rubín. Everything's on YouTube these days, on seven year-old YouTube. 

Here's one I liked a lot. It's a performance in a small venue, with a back projection. The song is Calle, Street, from the 2004 Reinanoche album. To judge by the back projection it's about what happens in the street, and the captions suggest it's about political protest during the military period. ('Los 30 mil', I guess refers to the desaparecidos.) I can't follow the words well enough to check that, although the they are fairly clear. (An advantage of not having a full tango orquesta.) It's well put together, and a beautiful song. & a cool cat wanders across the stage. 




(Thanks to Tinch77 )

& this one is unplugged, on someone's patio, with a pink watering can; life in the city. An alfresco, spontaneous performance, without amplification, with the drawback and strengths that brings. 

I shouldn't have compared him to Goyaneche, but there's something about his delivery, the emphasis of the spoken voice rather than an actual singing voice. His voice is light compared to 'El Polaco', but I still think it's a good tango voice: that is, it has heart, it has conviction, it has passion. Whether it is in some abstract sense a 'good' voice is irrelevant.



(Thanks to Puentealsina)

Could you dance to this? You might not want to dance to Calle, but there's danceable music too. Without the steady beat of a bass, piano and bandoneons maybe it's harder to think about, but there are tracks on the CDs that make you (i.e. me) want to try. Tango began like this, guys with guitars writing songs for the people. The arrangers and orquestas came later. Hunt around on YouTube, there are more.

Vesuvio

You say Vesuvius, I say... Vesuvius the classical name; Vesuvio in modern Italian.

You can climb it, but it's a long way. Buy a bus ticket at the Pompeii Sclavi station on the Circumvesuviana railway. The bus takes you about half-way. (Incidentally, the countryside around here is incredibly messy: rubbish, domestic and building, gets dumped everywhere.) Half-way up you transfer to a bus-jeep which takes you lurching up through the beautiful National Park forest. When that peters out you climb the last ten minutes up to the crater. Vesuvio is about 4,000 feet. My water bottle exhales a brief sigh as I open it.

A short lecture from a volcanologist (included in the ticket), and you are free to wander around. Go early: it gets crowded. It's a huge hole in the ground. Not much more really, but really huge, awesome, with vertical sides, a massive 600 metre-wide cannon. In the last eruption (1944) it managed to block its vent with 8km of rock. But the magma chamber is still there below that, and as the pressure builds up, more gas is produced. All you can see on the surface are a few faint whisps curling into the morning sun. Look closer and you see deposits around the vent, foul-looking yellow and brown: a message from the inside of our beautiful planet.

Before 1944 it used to have minor eruptions every 20-odd years, but now it's blocked its own vent. It could erupt from the side, which has happened before. With all that gas and magma building up, pyroclastic flows are likely, travelling at up to 100 miles an hour at 600 degrees celsius. Or it could simply blow its top off. Last time that happened on any scale was the Indonesian Tambora in 1815. It was heard up to 1,000 miles away. Naples is hardly 1,000 miles from London, but in Indonesia the sound would have travelled across the sea: travelling across land, and the Alps, would probably reduce the bang. In 1816 there was no summer. The temperature hardly got above freezing.

But the real threat might not be Vesuvio but the Campi Flegrei ('flaming fields') caldera, a 'supervolcano' a few kilometers west of Naples. The Vesuvio vent is 600 metres across. The Campi Flegrei caldera is 13 kilometers across. Much of it lies under the bay of Naples. The earth goes up and down, there are vents and frequent tremors. Between 1968 and 1972 it rose more than 1.2 metres, and in the mid-80s the entire area was evacuated, but there was no eruption. The earth started to subside. Over the past eight years it's been rising again. Scientists have been trying for years to get the consent of the Naples authorities to drill down into it to find out what is going on, but there has been concern that drilling into it could precipitate an eruption. Fears seem to have been put to rest, and I believe drilling is beginning. Campi Flegrei was regarded by the Romans as the mouth of hell.

The effects of a major eruption in Europe would put any damage to the economy by bankers, speculators, the last government (whichever one it was), in the shade, in some very deep shade indeed, not to mention under the covering of a thick blanket of ash. The loss of life could be horrendous. In the Naples area there are plans for the emergency evacuation of some 300,000 people, but 4.5 million people live in that area. The chaos of 3 or 4 million people fighting to escape. & the likely damage seems to be calculated on prevailing wind direction, so check which way the wind's blowing before you visit. I certainly wouldn't want to live in the area. I've been in a few minor tremors and I wouldn't want to feel the ground shaking under my feet in Pompeii.

...a huge hole in the ground:
yes, those are trees on the
scree slope inside.

Regín

I've just noticed a post by Silvia Ceriani on her Tete y Silvia blog from a while back. It's about a recent album called Reina Noche by Alfredo Rubin. The guy has a great tango voice, perhaps a bit like Goyeneche. He's the author of the poems, the singer too I guess. & poems they are, the old tradition of poem and music renewing itself in the present. Voice and guitars, like the beginnings of tango cancion 90 years ago, simple and direct, without the expense of a full orquesta. Well worth checking out Silvia's post (and the music). Some beautiful things about the milonga, about El Beso, and she's gone to the trouble of making a full translation of the poem Regín from the album, complex, allusive language.

It's on Spotify Alfredo Rubin – Reina Noches. I've been listening to it all evening. & it would be interesting to dance to, too. Very spirited milongas. Nice. There's a couple of other Rubin albums on Spotify too, so a few evenings of new tango music. Very welcome.

The invisible worker

This blog is mainly so I don't forget things: things I read or see, events, things like the sequences I learned from Tete and Silvia, their advice and the kind help of other teachers too. 

& things like this quote from an interview with Jean-Claude Carrière, who collaborated with Bunuel on the script of many of Bunuel's later films, the ones in French, including Belle de Jour, Diary of a Chambermaid, and that extraordinary last film Bunuel made, That Obscure Object of Desire, which sees a world in which car bombs, planted by obscure (Catholic) religious sects, go off in the streets with monotonous regularity. It seems a little less far out now than it did in 1977 when it was released. Looking down the list of films he's scripted on IMDb I find many titles I've enjoyed watching over the years. & he's still at it: two more films were released this year. 

"When a good idea occurs, it has been prepared by a long time of reflection. But you have to be patient. We all have what I call the invisible worker inside ourselves; we don't have to feed him or pay him, and he works even when we are sleeping. We must be aware of his presence, and from time to time stop thinking about what we are trying to do, stop being obsessed about answers, and just give him the room, the possibility, to do his work. He is tenacious, you see. He never loses hope." 

Encouragement to us all. 

On crossing the street in Naples

My first night in the city after a long day's travel from a 6am dawn in the south of France: I go out to find my first Neapolitan pizza. But before I can get to it I have to cross the street.

I stand and watch, my jaw dropping, as a wild stream, a slew, an onslaught of vehicles, like a stampede of wild horses, pours across an intersection, a dense volcanic rush of cars interwoven in impossibly slender spaces by scooters. & into that maelstrom step a young guy and his girlfriend. They are chatting to each other. They pause a moment as a scooter brushes past them, walk on in front of an onrushing taxi that brakes momentarily. It's as death-defying, cooly nonchalant as any high-wire walk. They reach the opposite pavement and walk carelessly on, just as the little red man turns to green, and the tidal wave of traffic comes to a halt. They weren't the only ones: other people too were simply wading across. That's how you cross the street in Naples.

There aren't that many little red men to help you: often enough you just have to walk. I kind of got used to it, but I have to admit I'd often run the last few paces, which must have shown me up very obviously as a tourist. I never saw Neapolitans run. They walk, as if disdainful of the traffic, of the risk of death. In London I'll walk into traffic, but it's because my head has seen the speed of oncoming traffic and the distance across the street, and I know for sure I've got time. That's calculating, it's not daring the traffic to give way. & it works, assuming the oncoming driver isn't talking on a mobile and arguing with a passenger while lighting a cigarette. Ah, Napoli.

& those scooters. Nowhere else is not wearing a helmet the norm. In Napoli, men and women, often enough they don't even wear a helmet to protect an elbow, as you sometimes see in other parts of southern Europe. It really is death-defying, without a safety net, a kind of reckless bravery, an insouciant self-affirming pride in not being safe.

The pizza was excellent.

Challenges

Great to read recently how Melina challenged a poor dancer, was rebuked for it, and was pleased to see later that he'd taken the criticisms to heart and was trying to improve.

It reminded me of a recent incident at one of our local milongas. A couple had been creating some disturbance for a few weeks. Theirs was a kind of nuevo - maybe we should call it Todaro tango - but badly done, a few moves of great centrifugal violence, during which she seemed to have not two but dozens of pointed heels, like the teeth of a circular saw. I used some creative floorcraft on a number of occasions to make sure I was nowhere near them. & there were injuries.

A week or so later they turned up - and halfway through the evening I suddenly wondered where they were. I hadn't noticed them, but they were still there, actually trying to dance salon tango! Not well, since their wild nuevo had hardly concealed the fact that they actually knew very little. But at least they were no longer in anyone's way. & they were spending time watching the floor, and pointing things out to each other. Needless to say, they never danced with anyone else.

Thinking back I'm certain that at least one of the two people who run that milonga had had some serious words with them. Both organisers are forthright and plain-spoken people, and anyway no organiser wants anyone to get injured at their milonga. The change was dramatic. This couple was forced to recognise that their dance was inadequate, but they obviously liked tango, and came back and made an effort to change. 

It`s not unusual for organisers in Buenos Aires to ask people to leave if their behaviour or dance doesn't suit the milonga, and I`m glad that it's becoming more common here. It`s also an indication that the quality of dance is improving: our milongas are no longer anything goes. And although no one will challenge nuevo done well and with regard for the floor, the norm at least where I dance has become a kind of salon, often partly open, but recognisably salon.

Ricardo Vidort: the statement

Jantango recently published the full text of a `statement' on tango by Ricardo Vidort: I found an extract from it a while back and quoted it without knowing where it was from. It seems so clear and definitive, and it's great to have the complete version, and to be able to thank Paul and Michiko for putting it together in the first place. It shows how much he thought about tango, as well as dancing it. Perhaps I shouldn't say this, but in a few short paragraphs it makes most of this blog redundant... The reference to the fourth chakra confirms what I'd already understood: that Ricardo thought more widely the longer he lived. I also heard that became interested in T'ai Chi late in life and found connections with tango. I know there is a lot more about him: videos that have yet to be released, and conversations on tango and on mortality from his last years. He lived with dying for quite a time, and was aware of it rather than trying to shut it out. He was not only a dancer who is a great model, but also a human being who thought about life, a philosopher. I do hope more of this will come to light soon.

Cacho Dante in Asia

'Louis' kindly left this comment on my post a day or two ago:

'In case you have some friends coming to Asia in the near future, this is just to let you know that Cacho Dante will be coming to Hong Kong, Seoul and Singapore during October-November. I understand that this will be the first time he is coming to Asia. This was made possible thanks to my good friends in Hong Kong.'

The post is a year old now, a year old to the day, as it happens, so I thought I should drag the comment out into the open in case anyone is in Asia, or thinking of going there. 

I took Cacho's classes a couple of years ago. I found him very disciplined and methodical in his teaching: he also takes trouble to observe everyone very carefully, and advise them on walk and posture. The stories he tells on his website suggest a lively, fun-loving guy, but he takes his tango teaching very seriously, and the classes are concentrated, hard work even, and an excellent preparation for long milonga nights. I've seen young portenos from those classes dancing in the milongas, and I thought they looked good. Tango teaching in classes is something new, but I believe that Cacho, balancing exercises with social dance with teaching sequences, has got it right. It's all in the approach: he's not teaching you to show off, he's teaching you to dance well, and he expects you to take him, and tango, seriously. Very, very welcome. The 'good friends in Hong Kong' who invited him are to be emulated!

His website has been updated and now has links to his YouTube videos, and photos of Cacho with his students around the world.

PS. Here is the blog page with dates from the organisers of the tour. 

'El Flaco' Dany and Lucia Mirzan

So the tide has come in again. I may well be – I hope I am – the last person in Europe to catch up with these videos. They've been around for up to eight months, with many viewings. I hope I'm the last person to see them just because I hope everyone else has already enjoyed them.

It's such a beautiful, imaginative idea, to take El Flaco Dany to ten cities, film a brief class with him, talk to him about orquestas and dancers, and then a brief reaction to the city. The first city is Bucharest, and after showing a short milonga sequence and explaining it, he sits down with Lucia Mirzan and remembers the D'Arienzo orquesta and its performances. He then talks about a dancer he knew – Gavito – and then his observations on the local Romanian music, which impressed him. To date, there are three other videos covering the orquestas of Troilo, Pugliese, and Di Sarli, three singers, and the dancers Juan Carlos Copes, Osvaldo Zotto, and 'Puppy' Castello and their partners. Some well-chosen clips of these orquestas and dancers fill out the picture. The cities so far have been Tel Aviv, Frankfurt and Istanbul, and I assume that London will be among the other six videos still to appear, since El Flaco and Lucia were there recently. I look forward to these relaxed and informal conversations about music and dance, and to El Flaco's stories. The subtitles are in excellent English and seem to be accurate. It's a wonderful project.

Of the classes, the blog says that they present '...the basis of Flaco Dany’s milonga technique, as a reference in finding your own milonga style.' I particularly like that phrase 'as a reference'. This is material to be used as needed, not merely copied. (Well, as if anyone could copy El Flaco...)

The videos are on YouTube, but are collected on this page of the Flacodany blog.

Todaro

Internet searches are a bit like the tide: you never know what's going to turn up amidst a mound of flotsam and jetsam, and YouTube recommendations are similar. Amidst a recent list of videos that YouTube thought might appeal to me I found genavel1's channel, which includes a whole archive of films of the 'Todaro era', of Antonio Todaro (1929-1994) and his followers.

The film of Todaro and his nine year-old daughter Títi has been on YouTube for a while, and this archive also includes him dancing with her aged perhaps around 13 or 14. The films are undated, but the dates of Todaro and his daughter would suggest that some of the filming goes back to the 1960s; many of the women are wearing short skirts (which may not altogether suit them). The locations look 'underground', barely decorated except for posters on the walls, but the lighting is very poor. & either the filming was silent or the recorded sound was so poor that the sound we hear was added later, so what we hear isn't necessarily the music the couples are dancing to. & I assume it was film: 8mm or Super8. Home movies! The dancers include Todaro, 'Petroleo', Raúl Bravo, Miguel Balmaceda y Nely. 'El Famoso Arturito, inventor de milonga traspie' is also there (ever heard of him?) The more recent clips have recorded sound, and these may be from the 1980s/1990s, and include 'Puppy' Castello dancing with Graciela Gonzalez.

A random look at the clips shows a familiar enough dance. What fascinates me about the dancing in these clips is the extent to which the women are empowered: their energy and input and determination equal that of their male partners. It really is a 'no holds barred' dance. It must have been fairly revolutionary and, like the short skirts, suggests profound changes in Argentine society since the early 1930s. It's not stage tango; it's too lively and disorganised for that, although a lot of skill and practice has gone into it. Nevertheless, I assume that stage tango is a refined version of it, replacing the audacious joyful fun of the original with a simulacrum of bored passion and sophistication. Despite the poor lighting, there's a real sense of enthusiasm, and people having fun dancing. Which doesn't mean I'd want to be anywhere near them on a crowded floor!

It's not the dance of contemporary milongas, which have gone in a different emotional direction. The affectionate embrace of milongas today is one of the great attractions of tango to many of us, and you don't see that in these clips. At the same time, this is part of the background to contemporary Buenos Aires tango. Many of the older dancers didn't go near Todaro and his academia, but others did, and this kind of tango would have been seen around, and I think everyone would have been aware of it. Tango and Chaos has a piece on Todaro that seems to sum it up very clearly. He doesn't actually say that Celia Blanco, who runs that most 'traditional' of milongas, Lo de Celia, was Todaro's student, but I'm sure I've read that she was: I wonder if that's her in the picture. Todaro might not be an obvious influence on the dance of contemporary milongas, but I'd assume he's there, and he's certainly there in the dance of dancers like Geraldine and Javier, and a host of alikes. To dance his tango requires ability, and a lot of practice, as well as a certain desire to show off. Innocent fun when you have space, and all your friends encouraging you, although many of us have other preferences.

I can't help wondering what happened to 'Títi', Todaro's hyperactive beanstalk of a daughter. I guess she'd be in her 60s now. Hard to think that she'd have turned her back on tango. 

PS: The clip of Todaro and his nine year-old daughter is on Babaz's channel, which I see also has this clip  -- of Charlie Chaplin dancing tango. Hilarious, and much too short.  

Today's the day!

El Beso

Jantango made this comment to my post on El Beso:

'2xtango.com posted the announcement on July 26 that El Beso will reopen in August. No specific date was mentioned. All the milongas are returning home.'

-- which is good news. Being somewhat sceptical I'd assumed that a relatively undeveloped property, only two floors in a city increasingly of high-rises, at the central intersection of two major thoroughfares, was probably the subject of real estate negotiations for humongous sums of US dollars. I'm happy to be wrong, but I'm curious about the return of all the milongas. Maybe larger, less crowded floors aren't so attractive, or maybe they are just more expensive. Maybe the expansion of dancing over the last decade or two has levelled off, and larger floors simply aren't needed or economical. Or maybe there's a concensus that this intimate dance is more at home in small venues where people are closer, both on and off the floor. Cachirulo successfully managed the move from Maipu 444 (small) to Villa Macolm (large), but maybe the event becomes more impersonal with a lot more people. I'm in no doubt which of the two venues I prefer, and it's certainly not the larger one.

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

I guess we all have a sense of who we think of as the greatest living human, and Nelson Mandela must be at the top of most people's lists. I can't argue with that, but Daniel Barenboim comes extremely close for me. He's one of the world's finest concert and recital pianists, he's also general music director of La Scala in Milan, and of the Berlin State Opera.

He also argues passionately for Palestinian rights, and has been called a 'true anti-semite' by bewildered Israeli politicians. With the late Edward Said he set up the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra of Palestinian and Jewish youths playing music together, which he directs (in addition to all his other careers). It's wonderful that the BBC invited the orchestra and Barenboim to perform at this year's proms – and to perform all nine Beethoven symphonies, the entire cycle, two each night this week, with the ninth on Friday coinciding with the opening of the Olympics. It's an extraordinary accolade.

I'm pretty sure I saw the orchestra from the top of a bus this morning, a large group of cheerful-looking young people with instruments in cases outside the old Commonwealth Institute, obviously waiting for a coach to take them somewhere, presumably to the Royal Albert Hall to rehearse Beethoven's fifth. What a week for them! I heard part of the broadcast this evening: it sounds like a smaller orchestra than any of the great Philharmonics, but the equal of all of them for intensity, enthusiasm and commitment. It sounded great.

Barenboim was born in Buenos Aires and tango was some of the first music he heard. He records that it was his parents' music when they relaxed and went out dancing, the songs they sang at home.

Nightmare on the streets of Buenos Aires

I awake from a nightmare on the streets of Buenos Aires. I've arrived back in the city, and it seems to be a future time. There's some kind of revivalist milonguero festival on, and everyone is concentrating on Estilo Milonguero, as in 'What was the correct Estilo Milonguero way for the dancers' hands to meet?' I see people arguing about the exact hold: no no, the guy's left hand used to be like this! Qué pesadilla! What a nightmare! As I wake up, perplexed and groaning, I'm thinking; so where am I going to get a dance tonight?

A dystopian vision of the future, or was it a sly subconscious comment on some aspects of the present? I don't want to imagine what Buenos Aires might be like in 100, 150 years. &... oh no, a dream about Buenos Aires! The city with the greatest concentration of analysts on earth! (Or so it's claimed.) What will they make of me?

In the cold light of morning I think that if the soul goes out of tango people will stop dancing, and if they want to start dancing again there's at least an archive of video: between video and the music, the dance can be re-created. A pity to have no contact with that era when kids grew up with the dance and later went to milongas where Troilo and D'Agostino played, it was that much part of their lives, but you could get by and learn to enjoy the dance and music from video. You could get by, but 2D video tends to give a rather weightless impression: if you look hard, and especially if you use slow motion, you can work out how weight and momentum are used, but you don't feel it as directly as when you watch live bodies dancing. But at least the videos will show nothing rigid about the form of the dance, so there's hope for a hypothetical tangoless future.

I should say I avoid the 'm' word: I have a strange aversion to the way it gets used to define and package a particular style (as if there was a particular style), and an apparently elite, exclusive group of tangueros. For some reason I've always felt the reality to be a bit indeterminate, a bit indefinable. Maybe that's just how I'd like it to be, but sometimes things are safer if they aren't defined too precisely. So I myself dance... tango. (At least I hope it's recognisable as tango.) To be more precise, social tango (as against, anti-social tango.) Perhaps even 'tango salon'. I hope there's no such thing as 'salonero', or would it be 'salonisto'? Never, I hope!

Dancing together, without big decorations

'I really like dancing with you but I want to do those big decorations I learned in the class. I never seem to have time to do them...'

...said the newcomer. Oh dear...

I explain tango fantasia, choreographed right down to the decorations, and 'real-world' tango, the social dance of the milongas, improvised and spontaneous because it's on a dance floor with other people. My partner can't see what lies ahead and I can't see her feet; if I have to change direction, she could trip over herself. (I've seen it happen.) Only if we dance at arms' length is it possible for a partner to insert big decorations safely, since we can look down and see all our feet are up to, but if you're looking down your balance isn't great, and you don't look great either, two people dancing at arms length and looking at their feet. It might be fun, but it's hardly elegant, and anyway I should be watching out for the other dancers around us. It's possible to decorate in close embrace dance, but decorations have to be very skilful, small and quick, not huge gestures meant to be applauded from the back stalls of a theatre. Less is definitely more.

'So why do we have classes where these big decorations are taught?'

Well...

& I want to say: just relax! But it's not so easy just to let go, and anyway, if my lead is clear and confident, then my partner will relax. The partners I regularly dance with know what I'm doing and what I'm probably going to do: unless I'm aware, lead and follow can go on auto-pilot, and the whole thing becomes just faintly boring. I have to make sure I really am leading every movement: no good just sticking my left leg out sideways without leading from the torso to put some energy, compulsion, some weight, into the lead. It's with a newcomer you discover how well you really lead.

Like many of his generation, the late Tete was a marvellously assured leader: there are stories of how he could take a complete beginner, one who moved clumsily even, and get her through a dance with him. He taught leading by getting you to lead him: if your lead wasn't absolutely clear he would find a way of doing exactly the opposite to what you hoped you were leading. I guess that's how he learned to lead. It was like trying to lead water if you weren't confident and exact.

Classes can teach you too much to think about, when the essence of dancing is a kind of surrender. Perhaps that's why dance can feel like making love: you just let the flow of pleasure take over. At the same time, the bodies that walk in off the street desiring to dance tango may well need to go through a period of attunement. If there's a shortage of marvellously assured leaders, they might need help with things that ought to be simple, like posture, like walking not only with the beat but also with the flow of the music too. In daily life we can be quite oblivious of our bodies, and when we come to dance our walk is likely to be stiff and awkward. Dance is a great way to become bodily aware, aware of balance and movement, but it takes work. & it takes realising that that work needs to be done. (Unless, that is, you happened to grow up in a porteño family in the 1940s...)

The newcomer's young adult daughter was with her one evening, just watching, entranced. 'It's so wonderful to see men and women really dancing together' she said. 'I mean, most of the dancing these days...' That actually made me very happy. & I'm happy to say that, yes, the men and women in the room actually were dancing together, perhaps imperfectly by the highest standards, but together. Without big decorations.

Photography, dancing and painting

I bought a film camera recently and it reminded me of my first camera, a present. My father sat me down and explained photography, explained the camera, the film, and how it should be used. I was about 11. But when I think about it I realise that he didn't teach me how to make photographs. That was something I had to learn by myself – and am still learning.

You look at photos, you read about them, you talk to other photo makers about their photos and yours. Even now, it still feels like an endless process, as if you take/make photos in order to find out how to make them, how to make them better. (Or 'take' them: the one real mentor I had in photography spoke French, and she always spoke of 'making' photos.) & if you put everything into it you might end up making photos that can be recognised as yours, and no one elses's.

I think it may be some kind of category error to assume that teaching or learning a practical, creative activity like dancing, painting, photography, is the same process as teaching or learning a theoretical or factual subject like history. I think very few of us were encouraged to learn by enquiry: we were passive containers to be filled with knowledge. So, now, if we want to know something, immediately we become students, all ears for our all-knowing teachers. It's a familiar way of learning.

But approaching photography or dancing this way really doesn't make a lot of sense. Sure, there's a certain amount of basic stuff you need to be taught in painting, but you can't solemnly file into a classroom week after week to be taught to paint: you have to go out and buy some tubes of colour and make a mess, and keep making a mess until you start to find something that makes sense to you and others. The same with tango. You've got to be released into the wild pretty early on to develop survival skills. A teacher can, and should, explain the skills you need, and demonstrate what you need to do, but you've got to go out there and join the community, learn by trial and error. & hopefully some wise old teachers, sympathetic partners, perhaps, who've been round the floor more than a few times, will be there to help you improve your skills and develop your musicality.'No! Put your foot there, not here!' or 'Con el cuerpo!', as Pedro keeps saying; dance with your whole body rather than just with your feet. 

There's a certain amount in tango that does need to be taught in classes of some kind, whether one-to-one, or in groups, and these days there are so many people who want to approach tango that group classes are the most feasible option. But it should be clear from the start that the real learning is done on and around the floor, preferably in practicas, by trying and by watching. That is learning, it's an active process, an activity, and it covers a whole area that simply can't be taught. 

As I've mentioned before, there's a real shortage of practicas in London. Chris left a link to a list of Berlin practicas, and as far as I can make out there are at least two every night, more some nights. In many ways I think practicas suit our relatively informal society better than milongas. 

Eleanor Powell

Eleanor Powell (1912 – 1982) grew up as a ballet dancer and gymnast, but found work hard to get, so she took up tap and became one of the most successful US tap dancers, starring with Fred Astaire in a couple of 1940s films, like Broadway Melody. Because she came from the aerial style of ballet and gymnastics, she found that learning tap wasn't easy, and according to IMDb '...she learned to tap by wearing army surplus belts with sandbags attached, to ground herself.'

Well, a good many Profesors de Tango Argentino also come from a ballet and gymnast tradition, and even seem to regard it as a recommendation for teaching tango. Maybe we need to start an international fund to buy them army surplus belts with sandbags attached, so they too can learn to be grounded, and leave that aerial style outside the milonga.

PS: Just how athletic she was, just how much she needed those sandbags, might be clear from this, but the action doesn't start until about 1.30. & an incredible sense of timing, too.

Profesors de Tango Argentino!

Google threw this site at me while I was looking for something else. Wonderful! Did you know that with just 450 hours of theoretical and practical courses in France (and a quick visit to Buenos Aires as well!) YOU TOO could become a Profesor de Tango Argentino, with a Diploma to prove it! Sadly, I can't afford it, but I think we should all look out for those Profesors de Tango Argentino with their Diplomas.

So we can do a quick 'giro', maybe with the tiniest 'voleo', and then an urgent 'caminata' in the opposite direction...

Seriously, though, isn't it sad? Worse, it's a scam. Or... well, maybe not. After all, yes, you could learn some stage choreography in 450 hours, and you could learn how to pass it on, too. But at the end of 450 hours, could you dance tango! (Technically it's a question and should have a question mark, but it's a joke, so it has to have an exclamation mark.)

I'm pretty sure there are schemes like this in Buenos Aires too. & it's a terrifying prospect for the future of tango, all those Profesors with their Diplomas. Hopefully, no one will take them seriously, but you never know.

The controversy

The recent arguments on Tango UK about classes have been a source of entertainment to many of us. This blog was mentioned in flattering terms, but the reference might have suggested that I agree with the views of one of the participants, which I don't. I thought of replying, but Tango UK is intended as a listing and it's been a bit swamped with controversy recently.

I don't agree that classes are evil, futile and a waste of money. Not all classes, anyway. Some no doubt are useless and misleading, and it's obviously a problem for beginners, who have to come to grips with a new kind of social dancing, unfamiliar music, and a layer of hype, as well as the misinformation from TV dancing series. But just because some of the best social dancers of Buenos Aires, born some seventy and more years ago, never attended classes, isn't quite proof that therefore we should avoid classes. From an early age they were passionate about the music and the dance, they grew up in a tango environment and they've also had a lifetime of dance, which no doubt explains their dancing, rather than the fact that they never went to formal classes. 

I realised early on that being taught 'figures' and learning to dance weren't quite the same thing, although figures can be a starting point for learning to dance, but no more than a starting point. I went to every class available, simply because there was always something useful there: in fact that is how I came across a class with Ricardo Vidort, which gave me an idea of the tango of Buenos Aires, and that's what I followed. With tango classes as with anything else it's 'caveat emptor'. There are people out there who will take your money in return for something that looks good on the surface, but isn't much use in social dance. & there are people who'll inspire you with the warmth and openness of tango and the tango culture, too.

I found pre-milonga classes useful when I was less certain of myself at milongas, not so much for what was taught but because that was where I could find out who I might approach for a dance – and who I knew I should avoid. There are classes before many of the traditional milongas in Buenos Aires too, and they are also a good opportunity to find who might look in your direction when the dancing starts. The classes there are more likely to be attuned to the social dance of the milongas: they'll probably begin with simple walking and warm-up exercises, and give plenty of time to actual dancing. A simple figure will be taught, often with possible variations, so it's less like a rigid choreography. These sessions are more like relaxed practicas than high-powered choreography classes: low-key and enjoyable, they are a good beginning to an evening, especially if you're a visitor. Hopefully classes like these will become more common and popular in the UK.

For me, one valuable thing came out of the debate: Andrew RYSER SZYMAÑSKI's recollections. 'I remember when Susanna Miller & Cacho Dante came to London [1995?] they caused a furore, ostensibly because they danced so close. They gave a few classes, not a lot compared to the numbers now being peddled by a plethora of gurus, local & imported - but they changed, in a few weeks, the way tango was danced in the UK. Susanna was no step-merchant, and I can safely say that in one general class with her I learned more than in 20 with Gavito. Actually she was a newcomer to tango at the time, but she had the knack of picking Cacho's brains for all he knew as a seasoned milonguero.' 

Wish we could get Cacho back to London! 

PS: ...and, yes, a lot of good sense was talked on all sides, too. There was probably a lot more agreement than was apparent from the war of words, as so often happens!

Carablanca

Carablanca has another extended evening, with guest DJ La Rubia from Argentina. Dancing 8 - 2.

Nur Du and Viktor

I've been looking forward to Nur Du since late last summer when I managed to book just before it sold out.

Pina Bausch met Tete in Plaza Doriego one Sunday afternoon in 1994, when he would dance with anyone, and she suddenly found herself dancing Argentine tango. She decided to include tango in Nur Du, and invited Tete and his new teaching partner Silvia to Germany in 1995 to teach her company. When the piece was performed at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, Pina danced with Tete on stage.

There's actually only one tango in Nur Du. No doubt she could have watched social tango for five minutes and remembered enough to teach her cast, but she respected the dance and invited them to teach it. Dancers are 'movement junkies' as someone said, and the experience of tango isn't quite like any other dance, so it extends the vocabulary, so to speak. & no doubt she knew the stage tango, 'tango fantasia', pioneered as a stage show by Copes to such acclaim in Europe in the 1980s, and it must have pleased her to show social tango, 'real world tango'.

Nur Du is made up of moments, the longest perhaps no more than a few minutes. A succession of moments, poignant, funny, absurd, breathtaking. In subdued light, a woman dances to a sorrowful blues, then the lights come up and she wanders around desperately seeking for the exit as another woman recalls the routines she used to perform in high school as a cheerleader. The two overlap, comment on each other. Perhaps then (I can't remember the sequence) a man and a woman stand on a chair (lots of chairs in Pina Bausch), he holds her carefully by the hair, she steps forwards off the chair, suspended by her hair, and is lowered gently to the ground. Perhaps that was followed by a sequence I remembered from the film: a man, desperate on the floor, and when his friend returns he flings himself half way across the stage into his arms. There is no plot, no story-line. So how did something so fragmentary hold together? There seems to be a very clear control of time, a sculpting of time (Tarkovsky's phrase), and of emotion too. You suddenly notice there's been no laughter for a while. There are moments of intense activity, then subdued intense passages. The perception of time is manipulated.

But most of all I thought that the fragments are held together by the dancers themselves. Pina Bausch said she was not interested in how dancers moved but by what moved them. You can imagine many very accomplished dancers being turned away in favour of those that Pina found truly interesting, and she made work out of their creativity, anxieties, fears, probably their dreams and nightmares. (Picasso is supposed to have said: 'Many people painted apples. But what is interesting about Cezanne's apples is Cezanne's anxieties'.) Her method was to seek out what was interesting in her dancers, so essentially they are not performing roles dictated by the choreographer, ('Romeo', 'The Sleeping Beauty', 'the Black Swan'), they are given the opportunity to be themselves, and at the curtain call you look on them as people you have met that evening, remarkable people you were very privileged to spend three hours with.

Nur Du had a number of dance sequences. I saw another of her long pieces, Viktor, a few evenings earlier. It's also fragmentary and episodic, with less dance in any conventional sense: Viktor is the only contemporary piece I've seen in which the women wear heels, the men shoes, throughout. It's quite a dark piece, it seems to highlight the way men tend to treat women. It also has wonderfully absurd and comic moments: an auction of live dogs, for instance. Two live sheep are led on stage at one point, and the first part ends with a real on-stage mess: earth, sawdust, broken biscuit and a slice of veal, probably more. (The veal? The dancer in the film who puts veal into her ballet shoes: that's a sequence from Viktor.) For the most part the dancers aren't dancing in a conventional sense, they are 'performers'. 

There's more obvious dance in Nur Du; the tango (Mariposita) memorably warm and familiar, but other sequences, two men staggering around all over the stage holding a heavy table with one hand and a glass in the other, laughing and shouting: it's not dance as you know it, but it demands the strength and co-ordination of dancers to do it. Her performers are frequently put to the extreme, but that's the nature of dance. In one instant, out of nowhere, a man walks on stage with a chair and stands by the seat. Then in one extraordinary sideways leap, he's over the seat, clears the back of the chair, and is standing at the back of the chair. Blink and you miss it. I still can hardly believe I saw it. A quick point, something that wakens, energises, your perception. 

Two performances, two standing ovations. 

There's an interesting piece on Pina's work here. It's from the company's website, which also includes a link to the LONDONblog, a day-by-day account of the visit, in English and with photos.   

P.S.  WARNING: this performance includes smoking. (Notice outside Barbican auditorium.) 

Muma speaks

The opportunity to spend four minutes in the company of Muma as she recalls meeting, dancing and teaching with the late Ricardo Vidort. It's wonderful to hear her talk about tango, having only watched her dancing. Thanks again to Bendtango.

Three voices

Sitting at a London milonga with two friends who have recent experience of Buenos Aires. It wasn't a great night; not a lot of people there and the dancing looked scrappy, bouncing around like clothes in a washing machine, to requote another friend's immortal comparison.

'When we got to Buenos Aires we were really saddened, frustrated, to find that the tango we learned in London wasn't the tango danced in the milongas there. What we'd learned was a simulation of tango, taught by show dancers. We just sat and watched. It was so amazing to watch those older dancers, how much dance they can fit into the space, how smoothly they do those endless turns!'

'& this is what we see when we get back!' We laugh – but it's not meant dismissively. It's just... what we're watching doesn't really look like tango! OK, it's tango, but not as we know it.

'The whole experience is so different. People come here for a fun night out... They have fun there too, but it's really different.'

'It's really part of their lives there, it's a real force, tango is a passion there. They really enjoy it and they are really serious about it too.'

'& their whole lives, half a century of life in Argentina, are wrapped up in it too. When you dance with an Argentine you really don't know just what experiences you are embracing.'

'Well, it's not our culture, not our music, but it's great people come here and enjoy themselves with this music.'

'& then we met Silvia, and we were really impressed by her. She left us both feeling pretty down about our tango: she leaves you with the feeling you have to start all over again. But that's great: that's what you need.'

'It's the guys here who need to change, and they are most resistant to change. We need teachers like Myriam and Silvia here.'

'& Muma.'

'One problem, there's just so much tango in London; a milonga one week can be quite different the following week because different people turn up. There's not so much continuity of community, at least in central London milongas. Perhaps that's one reason  why milongas outside London have a better reputation; there's more consistency.'

'& now you get teachers who claim to teach 'milonguero' – with no real connection with the Buenos Aires milongas and the people who dance in them. They come over here and teach something they call 'estilo milonguero'! Using the name to make money. 'Milonguero' has become a buzz-word here, and it's really sad we never get anyone in London who really has long experience of the milongas. But they might not be popular. They'd be speaking an unfamiliar language to many. They'd want to get people to do basic things, to walk well... people who already know dozens of giros with lapizes, saccadas and voleos! & even worse: they'd expect people to really listen to the music and dance with it.'

'It's not our culture, not our music. It's becoming part of our culture but it'll never be our culture like it's the culture, history, the life story of Buenos Aires. The music speaks to us, but not really the poetry. Tango song and music is everyone's experience there, even though not so many people dance it.'

'Traditions renew themselves or they die off, but we shouldn't assume that therefore we can ignore the culture as it is over there today. Ignoring all those years of experience doesn't make sense. It'd be so great to have a flow of visitors here who have lived their lives with the milongas...'