'El Flaco' Dany

Looking up from the ronda at a recent Sunday-afternoon milonga in London I suddenly noticed a face I hadn't expected to see there: 'El Flaco' Dany, sitting at a table. I shouldn't have been surprised: he's patron of that milonga, and I knew he was in London.

& especially great to see him take to the floor just like everyone else. Just to dance, not to give a 'demo'. It was great to watch that easy, comfortable grace: the experience of a lifetime of the ronda there! Nothing fancy, just the kind of salon everyone else was dancing – but with a distinctive relaxed elegance. Easy is the word I keep wanting to use: as ever, if someone makes something look easy, natural, effortless, it usually reflects a lot of experience. A real inspiration, and to my mind the best kind of tango 'demo'. &, at 78, he's a lot more upright than most of the dancers around. It's wonderful that a tanguero of his generation can now go to a London milonga and not look completely out of place.

Yellow mimosa (or is it acacia?) blossoms on every table: a soft scent of spring all afternoon.

'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.