Bailar

This is a quotation from the great (and late) maestro Jose "El Turco" Brahemcha. One of the wisest things I have read in ages...

BAILAR NO ES HACER UNA FIGURA TRAS OTRA... EL BAILE ES LO QUE HACEMOS ENTRE FIGURA Y FIGURA...

To dance is not to make figure after figure... The dance is what we do in between figures...

Music in la cancha

Yesterday I went to see River Plate playing against Godoy Cruz, from Mendoza. I really don't want to get into football banter, but River play really badly and need to get real to get to their deserved status. Anyway, the way how I got dragged into this game was unexpected. A friend from work phoned me when I was CD shopping in Florida "Vamos ver River", "When", I asked,. "En 1 hora!"... So, there you go, I had to get to the other side of Buenos Aires and hope the bus didn't crash.
My post, really, begins in the bus journey. The bus was full of River supporters, fully armed with drums, djambes and lots of chants. And they were singing their hearts out, while in the bus. One thing that I noticed was that throughout their chants, the drummer did exquisite changes in rhythm. Time, half-time, contra-time (transpié), back to time, pause and again... After a few weeks of classes with the Disparis I got a bit neurotic about rhythm of tracks so this was a complete revelation to me.
And it maybe explains why Argentines get tango so quickly. A lot of things that people in the UK have to really make an effort to understand (or even hear) is second nature to Argentines. A teacher of mine (not from UK) told me she didn't like to teach in the UK because she had the notion that people "didn't get it". They wanted perfect technique, fancy steps and sequences but never endured to really understand what they supposedly were dancing, the rhythm, the music, the dance beyond the need to show the rest of the people in the milonga how good one is.

damned tourists

I am sick of hearing "oh, tourists are a curse, oh tourists spoil the tango in Buenos Aires".

For a start, not all tourists are the same. I have been in Buenos Aires for some time now and I have been hit in dancefloor by Argentines more than I hit someone else. So don't come around telling that tourists are a curse.

Tango won't finish without tourism, it won't be spoiled by tourism, but tango, to flourish, needs tourism (please, if you are going to refute this sentence do it with arguments, not just the same old line "you're a tourist, what do you know about it"). I was speaking with someone that works in tourism for the last 30 years and was told that salóns like Canning had little over 15 people when the economic recession and swine flu attacked together.

The other day I went to have a class with the great Jorge Dispari and Marita "La Turca". There were 5 of us in the whole class. 4 of us were tourists, the other was a great friend of the family and goes to classes everyday. This is not Pablo and Dana or Frumboli's class, this is the most traditional of teachers who refuses to teach figures and only teaches walking. 4 "tourists" versus 1 local. And I find that the ratio, though not so steep, is always like this, even in milongas. Yesterday in Sunderland there were at least 50 "tourists" in a milonga with 200 people. I was only hit once in the milonga. Strangely enough, it was an old milonguero (who promptly apologised!). A good milonga, definitely yes. Would it survive without tourists (definitely yes). Would it be the same, no, it would lose quite a lot.

Respect tourists, they help tango flourish.

dreaming of tango

I'm working in a hospital in Buenos Aires. Everytime there is a ward round we go to the intensive care unit to check how our patients are doing. On the way out, in a bay almost hidden by a corridor I always listen to fuzzy sounds of tango. The other day I ventured to see who was there. I saw a man, in his 70s, intubated and sound asleep, a small radio tuned into 92.5FM pouring tango and nothing else. I asked the nurse who this man was. She told me that he had been in coma for some time now and that his family had brought him the little radio so that he would be listening tango while he was sleeping. They said that if he was listening to tango, he would probably be dancing all the time in his dreams.