And by the way, I love this song. LOVE it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_-iXxL1XEg
I'm teaching three classes tonight - my routine, the May progressive series at Tuesday Blues, and the drop in at Tuesday Blues. Lord, send me some students...
I went dancing tango last night, feeling rather comfortable, and maybe even a bit complacent. I don't use complacent in the sense of smugness, but in the sense of feeling rather satisfied with my dancing. And I don't mean I was satisfied and not wanting to improve my technique, but just that I was relaxing (maybe a little too much - I had a small crash) and not caring what might be said in the gossiping corners of the tango community. It was a complacency of the mind more than the body. Hmm, maybe I was a little smug too.
My dancing did not feel particularly on, and this didn't surprise me after Sunday's showing, but people keep responding very positively to my dancing. I went through each dance, thinking mostly of amusing myself, and my partners seemed to emerge happily. It was a fairly nice night of dancing. I must admit, however, that at Monday's venue where they tend to play traditional tango music, I yearned for more musical references to the African diaspora. Give me some drums!
I need to ask some more people their opinions, but while tango is uniformly considered a smooth dance, it seems that the heart of it is extremely rhythmic. One only needs listen to the music for evidence of this, but the rhythms seem to be lost in the modern conception of the dance. I am necessarily biased coming from a jazz perspective, but remember that early jazz and tango developed in the same eras. It wasn't until Astor Piazzolla came along that they were outright unified, but the playfulness in the rhythms of tango scream of jazz. The technical aspects of the tango walk are designed to create a strong staccato rhythm, but they are hardly used in as nuanced a way as Brenda would dance jazz. I don't know why. Modern dancers certainly dance rhythmically within their steps - that is to say that they use the staccato nature of the walk, but when you watch the steps, most people step almost entirely in single time. Where's the syncopation, hesitation, doubles, triples, the real complexity?
Here's a thought. Balboa is a minimalist rhythmic jazz dance typically danced on body to fast music. I'm told that in the jazz era, there was a Balboa scene to be found in Buenos Aires. I saw a Milonga demo (this would be considered the rhythmic version of tango, but the music is in a different basic rhythm.) that looked very similar to balboa. The lead and the follow were dancing together, but their footwork was completely individualized - the way advanced dancers dance Balboa. I commented on this similarity to Brenda, and she told me about the Bal dancers in Argentina. Unfortunately, they are pretty much all gone. BUt how refreshing to find this stylistic similarity reemerging!
An tango instructor asked me fairly recently, Jonathan, do you want to dance the tango? Or do you just want to develop the technical skills of the dance? I was taken aback at the time. I love the tango; it's just that, like all my dances, I haven't yet found the feel of the dance. Sometimes I get little glimpses of that thing I'm after.
I was dancing in a class with Brenda in the fall, working on milonga, and we were walking little circles. I was very focused on my own steps, so wasn't thrown off when she started walking off beat (while I was still on beat). In a few moments, she came back on beat. The effect is one of tension and release; it creates a beautiful accent, but this is far outside the acknowledged realm of possibility from what I've seen. As for emulation, I love Juan Carlos Copes - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YpLqCth7DrY
