Monday 21 November 2016

Ricardo Viqueira in Cambridge

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

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

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

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