Advice for the new year (and for the rest of your tango life)

Tango is not a religion. Just because somebody important tells me that something is the way it is it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily right.

Challenge!

Filter!

Sheep will always be sheep. And sheep never go anywhere.

Tango LEGO

When I started tango I wasn’t so into going to dance in different places; I was quite happy in Edinburgh, I knew most people, had a regular group of people that knew enjoyed dancing with me and was generally confident. But my (full) time at Edinburgh drew to an end and, back in Braga, Portugal, I was getting cold turkeyed. So I decided to go to a milonga in Porto, about an hour drive and check out the scene.

I went in, the organisers greeted me, asked me about me, offered me a espresso and I went to sit quite happily. I stayed watching for a little bit and I was very confused. Everybody seemed to dance the same way! Everybody were copies of one another dressed in different bodies. The same ganchos, the same giros, the same embrace. Back in Edinburgh it’s the opposite. Even people that learn in the same place have different styles, different ways of walking, different solutions to get in and out of the dancing line. I asked somebody to dance and was again quite horrified when people did not understand a simple front ocho with a pasada. The simplest of things and they didn’t know how to follow it, even worse, they said that didn’t know what to do! I went home horrified that I had been learning the bad tango, that the last year and a half was hopeless.

It took me some time (weeks), but I soon realised that instead of dancing with an emphasis on the walk and on pure improvisation of movements derived from the walk, what these people were being taught was sets of moves that were pre-rehearsed and could be stuck one after the other, pretty much like a LEGO puzzle. LEGO tango? No thanks.

The pain of starting from scratch

I chose it, I can’t blame anybody. I chose to move into a place where tango did not exist. I never thought that I could live without tango but I just thought that I would come up with a solution once I moved there. It kind of helped me accepting the place.

Running away from problems (or ignoring them) has never solved anything and the cold reality set in very quickly once I moved to Coventry to start a new student life at University of Warwick. No milongas in a ray of 40 miles (and even those are less frequent than monthly) and no tangueros to be seen. Damn! I emailed the local ballroom and latin dance society, “Any tangueros there?”, “No” was the answer. Damn! But then a very tantalising suggestion “do you feel you can teach it?” Damn! This wasn’t going to be good for my (3^rd) degree.

I was and I still am very cautious about teaching. I always wanted to do it but I had to make sure I knew my basics really well. I don’t want to teach the bad tango. I’ve seen it being done and it ain’t nice. At all! So, to the loss of my Epidemiology lectures I sketch my Saturday classes, trying to make complete beginners understand tango dynamics without getting absolutely bored. I might as well be a rocket scientist, it would be easier!

Organising classes, milongas and trying to attract people into something that everybody thinks “it’s too difficult for me” is not easy, especially in a town whose population isn’t the most, say, latin friendly. Coventry is a melting pot of cultures, a dump of asylum seekers , an uneducated place and that makes it really difficult. It’s draining and sometime I feel that I can’t do it anymore.

But looking to the bright side of things, the plan is going well. I was very lucky Supantheress moved down to the same area and to be honest, I wouldn’t have done it without her. We were fortunate that Eleni is so enthusiastic about coming around to help us whenever we ask. But the very best thing was when our students came to the milonga we organised and, to everybody’s surprise, not only they ventured into the dance floor, they did it perfectly. Always out of the snake pit and trying to feel the music. That’s what keeps me going. That’s what keeps me sane.

La Negracha

It’s a cliché to say that things have to live up to the expectations. In fact, things have to live over the expectations created. It happens with cinema, music, and tango is no exception. La Negracha had to punch really high.

First things first - the music. It doesn’t work having one room playing clasico for the most skilled dancers and another playing neotango for the walls; walls don’t dance. Nevertheless, the music selection was quite nice. I knew Ivan’s good taste for tango from previous milongas in Edinburgh but, hombre, if you’re reading this, give up the bottom room and bring some neo upstairs!

The level of dancing was quite high. I had many sweet dances and I saw some lovely couples dancing really nicely to the tracks, trying to enjoy them as much as they can. However, it was painful (literally, I got a heel on my foot at some point) to have to constantly dodge away from Pablo Verón wannabes. Watching the very last three minutes of Assassination Tango where Pablo Verón & Geraldine dance on the empty floor should be forbidden before a milonga – you start getting murdering thoughts. Furthermore, those people 1) weren’t Pablo Verón, 2) their companions weren’t Geraldine and 3) the floor was crowded. They are the living proof that clean quick moves don’t make you a good dancer.

The bar was an absolute rip-off, even considering that we were in Holborn.

And I share with you a story that a friend of mine came across, in the same milonga (sorry J!). He went to a lady and asked her to dance, she asked him, very pretentiously, “Are you good?” to what he said “no”. Then she asked him “How long have you been dancing for?” and when he told him that he had been dancing for four years she said, patronisingly, “Ok, I’ll dance with you.” These are the kind of people that should be barred from milongas.

We walked back to City Road and realised how lucky we were to be tango-raised in Edinburgh.

And if you want another opinion about La Negracha, read mshedgehog's review.

Godiva's Lounge

Yet another milonga in the heart of England! It was an impressive start to the new milonga that we are organising. Coventry is on the tango map!

The next Godiva's Lounge is on the 20th of January, at 2pm (until 5) at The Lounge, 26 Warwick Road, CV1 1EY, Coventry.

Tango cosmetics

Ever wondered if you, as a follower, are costing to the leaders you dance with more than the price of the milonga? Makeup, like in tango, follows the rule that less is the best. Read Tango Baby's comment and reflect. It may be time to think laterally. It may be not.

From the Mordida de Tango to Le Latina of Paris

I am recalling the simpatica tangeros of Mordida de Tango, a Paris Milonga near Monmarte which lightly holds an informal and friendly atmosphere. It is half way to a practica with a delightful Musical selection of old as well as newer tangos, a few eccentricities to raise your eyebrows, and with cortinas that are gently respected and smoothly integrated. It enjoys a healthy number of people and fair few beginners who stay on following an earlier class. This is the sweetest little Parisian Milonga. It reminds me, from a certain soft light, of the early days of Edinbugh's La Otra.

In the centre of city, and later into the night, leads to Le Latina, the well trodden steps of my Parisian tango ritual. Although I find it a bit of a tough place to go, being somewhat inclined to cliqueyness and waving airs of pointless superiority, it draws in a huge mix of people, tango dancing actors, comedians, students, and professional dances, regulars and visitors. It's small space gets packed and becomes a good challenge for small playful steps. The standard of dancers is high, and with a little effort and simple outgoing smiles and good humour, I highly recommend it. Although, perhaps more for the confident who can ignore the famous bored and grumpy faced teachers who also frequent it. But this really is one of the lively hearts of Parisian tango and sometimes even enjoys lock-ins until the late hours become early again.

A wee pointer for other Milongas, Practicas and general Tango antics in Paris: http://www.republique-des-lettres.fr/tango-argentin.php

Organisers vrs dancers

I confess I see tango as a social event. I rejoice when I enter a tango venue to encounter a room full of familiar faces or abrazos; to greet them with a smile or a polite word, to sit at the tables around the dance floor and, while changing my shoes, to exchange a few words with the people next to me. Of course, there is the more personal social interaction of the tango, when we actually get these shoes on and our eyes meet an inviting gesture for a dance. When the music starts, and we translate its rhythm into movement, it's this very rewarding experience of harmony that keeps us hooked to tango.

However, what is a city that lacks a regular milonga for its tango community? How long can you just go to classes, listen to tango on the radio, or dance with your broomstick? A tango dancer is not a tango dancer until they enter a milonga.

With the urge of a tanguera that seeks for the materialisation of her identity, I seek for my milonga in the Midlands to be often met with disappointment. Lots of cancellations, few regular events, a habit of paralysis during festive days. Tango follows the term-time schedule of our job or our university. When our day planner is closed for the vacations, no tango plans are made in the city. There is a general assumption that there is no one around to dance. However, that is not true. People look for a place to dance in their town or city, they don't find it and they make other plans, or (in my case) go to another city where there will be able to tango.

What is the key into making tango in our city what it is elsewhere, which is of course a social event? Not to seek for it's identity, but make it. I've been thinking about founding a new regular milonga, to find out that there are not a lot of dancers who'd be interested in organising a milonga. Apparently, organising a milonga is a tough business, full of politics and dead ends. I hear stories full of intrigue and can't help but asking: Aren't the milonga organisers also dancers, who aspire to a social event after all? Why are they met with suspiciousness and mistrust?

Before deciding to organise a tango group at the university of Birmingham I found the experience of organising a milonga to be fun and informal, just like making arrangments to meet up with my friends. That was un otro caso at a different place, where a tango identity already existed and we were just hoping for a otra idea. Here in the big city, distances are important and politics play their part. The tango dancer can't become the organiser without taking up the organiser's role and behaviour. I can't but feel admiration to those that find the strengh to withstand the transformation. As for me, I still stand at a loss and hope that I will find a way to marry the tango dancer with the milonga organiser to organise a University of Birminghma Milonga in the new year.

La Otra Milonga - the jump

July 2005, a forsaken tendonitis knocked me off the dance floor for 6 months! Could I stay away from tango for that long? Of course not. I hooked up with a few friends and decided to organise a milonga, something different to what we had in Edinburgh, something more intimate, more relaxed, less formal, where the music invited everybody to dance.
Two and a half years past, the current management of La Otra Milonga takes it a little but further. A Xmas ball, a fantastic duo of maestros with a wicked musicality and a secret santa. After all is Xmas, isn't it?

Cortinas - tango palate cleaners

I didn't use to like cortinas. Maybe because I wasn't properly educated in that sense but when some external DJ came to Edinburgh I always found myself dancing to cortinas and making a fool of myself. But I realised why I didn't like them - because most people play really crap cortinas. Cortinas should not be danceable, they should be a short stretch of music that you don't feel like dancing to. This way you also lose the rhythm from the previous tanda. And for DJs is great. You can alternate between Firpo and Bajofondo - nobody will mind the drastic music style change!

The Robotic Crotch

Sweet Sea!?

First, I know that tango is often seen as something sexual or sensual but there's no need to put something so vulgar right in our face.

Second, if one is to continue with the sexy fishnet theme, it can be done in a more classy way.

Third, why associate 'sweet sea' with a very artificial-looking crotch with tights?

What am I talking about? --- the cover of "Mar Dulce", the second album by Bajofondo Tango Club. The artists are great, their sound is great, and their concert was obviously great. Their first album cover was also great, it was quite apparently sexual and eye-catching but it was more like... elegantly titillating.

Please, I am very interested in what everyone thinks about the cover. I'm just disgusted and unaroused.

Dancing with broomsticks

I am one of those who believes that it takes two to tango. Sorry, maybe I just used the cheesy line but, to be honest, I have seen so many people that dance only with themselves that I wonder, why bother getting a partner? Wouldn't it be easier for them just to get a broomstick and stay at home dancing to their favourite tracks?

The Lisbon Miracle

Portugal is a country with a deep religious feeling. Everybody believes that miracles just happen. For a city that did not have much tango not so many years ago it looks like a miracle how the standard of dance in Lisbon is so good. The miracle has a name (or two names): Juan Capriotti y Graciana Romero.
All of those who are involved in tango are part of the miracle, Lusitango for instance. But it's undeniable that JyG presence and expertise has propped the tango a few notches up.

An example on how not to dance tango.

The music is shite, the dance is shite and those (pseudo) back ochos... Gosh, there is just so much bad tango going on that you have to see it with your own eyes (from Fishnets and Fedoras)

The reasons I don't take Edinburgh for granted

I don't. I really don't. I never knew how lucky I was to have learnt tango in Edinburgh, until I started going to other places. I'm not saying it is the best place in terms of everything. Of course, as mentioned by koolricky and lots of other people, there are good points and bad points to the tango community of Embra.

Anyway, here are the reasons:

1) Friendly & Welcoming
2) Cheap & Frequent
3) Good standard of dancing
4) Good teaching
5) Relatively integrated (albeit some rivalries)

The first impression is so important. As a guest, one would like to be welcomed where they visit. Maybe one is nervous, is feeling lost, or maybe even doesn't speak the language! Somebody mentioned that the general atmosphere flows from the organisers. The hosts have the responsibility to treat the guests, that are potential future regulars, nicely, or else it's their loss.

In Edinburgh, Toby Morris makes sure that visitors are welcomed. He almost pounces on them as they enter. I've seen it so many times. He talks to them very attentively and introduces them to the local dancers. For a few years that's what I've always seen so I assumed that this would be the case wherever I go. Uh uh. Wrong.

When I was on the committee for the Edinburgh University Tango Society, I was always at the door and made sure I spoke to all those that signed up and came in, and learnt their names. When some of us started up La Otra Milonga, we made an effort to speak to people that we had. How else would people know more about what we did? How else would people come back for the next session? What organisers do, the attenders follow.

The Edinburgh tango community consists of various characters: multitalented, ultra-intelligent, dirty (I don't mean covered in mud and unwashed), tarty, hippie, posh, shy, confident, creepy, chatterbox-that-can-speak-for-Scotland, nice (genuine & fake), interesting, geeky, artsy, weird, temperamental, charming, opinionated, old, young, single, attached, etc, etc... On an unlucky day you might end up sitting next to somebody who is in a bad mood (this happens to at least once a month if you're of a female species) and might just bump into somebody who is rather hot-blooded. Somehow, somehow though, despite such a spectrum of people, MOST of them, I find are friendly and chatty and they are fairly well integrated. Even some known enemies are quite civilised to each other.

Those that complain that men have become lazier and stopped asking women to dance, I totally understand, as I used to be one of them. But what I can say to them now is that it's probably the general trend in life anyway*, and really, Edinburgh is doing well compared to other places. The only exception I can think of is if you're young and female, visiting a testosterone-filled milonga abroad, you have no time to sit down.

In conclusion, my dear Edinburgh tangueros, please don't take Edinburgh for granted, and do continue to be friendly to visitors and newcomers.


*I'm just trying to be provocative; seeing if I get any reactions.

Bajofondo ignites in the Midlands

The star-gazing ambience… The glowing sounds… The hubble-bubble of culture-loving intellectual voices… Is this Edinburgh? Is this the neo-Soho? Or maybe Paris? Mmm… no. Believe it or not, the übercool electrotango band, Bajofondo Tango Club took a brave step to our chavvy Cov, C-o-v-e-n-t-r-y less than two weeks ago. (Though I must add lest I may offend some Warwick uni students, they played at the well-established Warwick Arts Centre.)

Much to our delight and excitement, their performance was pretty awesome. Shame though the audience wasn’t any bigger, but it gave us good space to dance around and make use of the brilliant music. What is it about live music that gets us buzzing? Do they just play it differently? Is it louder? Is it because of the visual aid? Personally, as a performer, I always got a buzz out of the audience and big concert halls, probably because I had to tell my story to not just practice room walls and teachers but to so many individuals. You have to exaggerate, physically and emotionally, and you become much more dynamic and interactive as a result. You have to tell oh-so-many-of-them that you’re angry, happy, sad, or love-sick, whatever. My message to traditionalists is that this can be done so amazingly by electronic means as well as by classical instruments and golden-age music. Bajofondo was numbingly great at conveying their oomph. Only as I reached the bar after the show, I realised my heels were killing me.

What was so endearing was that we didn’t just love them. The Bajofondians also loved us, the audience. They showed their appreciation throughout and after each song. It was nice to see that the individuals were all very different-looking from each other. I’m not talking about outfit. I’m talking about their talents and characters. Individually, they were completely immersed in what they were doing, but somehow their strands of music, and their funky retro images in the background interwove so enthrallingly. Of course, that made the experience of dancing tango rather fabulous. As some of us were invited up on the stage for some serious bobbing up and down exercise, I realised the concert was worth every penny.

If you get the chance to see & hear & feel them live, grab a ticket immediately. Tracks from their new album sound pretty fantastic too… In conclusion, my rating for Coventry went up a notch :-)

Richer!

This blog has just become a bit richer. Lucas Dixon will share with us his tango experiences. Welcome Lucas!

Argentina with France

I could go on with the Rugby antics after last World Cup's opening game but I am here to talk about tango. Paris has always been a second home for tango and without being cliché about Bertolucci's sexual extravaganza, the feeling of tango fits quite well with that of Paris. Not that I have ever danced (any, let alone last!) tango in Paris. Unfortunately, I haven't been to the city of Light since I've started tangoing...
Since the death of Piazzolla, the circles in Argentina were agitated, everybody was expecting the new big thing to come from BsAs. But the hit came from the other hemisphere. It was in Paris that a Swiss and a French duo, a bit bored with remixing Brazilian music decided to invite an Argentinian friend, Eduard Makaroff, to start something new. And they created Gotan Project, a rearranging of the word tango that both echoed a dialect spoken in the streets of BsAs where syllables are shifted around but also says a lot of their attitude to tango - to take something that is there and turn it inside out, make something new.
And those who were crying over Piazzolla's tomb, unable to move Tango forward, weren't very happy about it. Dismissively, they shrug off the new groove but only to find that the rest of the world had been absolutely taken by the sound. Crowds of young people came to look for tango, know more about it and in places like Edinburgh it is amazing the amount of under 30s dancing in milongas. There is pretty much a new tango group sprouting every month in the UK. Places where you wouldn't think of finding a tango group are now vibrant and up-and-coming scenes.
It would be unfair to give all the credits for this Tango Renaissance to Gotan Project but it would be as unfair to exclude them as the main reason for the revival of tango.

Pablo Villaraza y Dana Frigoli

Bristol

My time in Bristol was too short. In a city with so much personality I wanted more time to discover the hidden gems of the city, to get to know more people and, I cannot hide it, to observe the growth of tango.
There are a few bi-monthly and monthly milongas. The monthly milongas attract people from more distant places and are worth going. In Tango Alchemy's milonga you may struggle to find a tango being played but it's good if you're a Nuevo Tango fan. The milonga in Pucklechurch is quite nice and in a fantastic setting. Jocelyne lends all her flair and passion to create a peculiar spirit to it. The music is good (although you shouldn't expect structured tandas) and the level of dancing is possibly the best in the region. The weekly milongas have less external visit and therefore the level of dancing is lower. The Dance Café can get quite crowded and nice but the level of expertise is quite inconsistent. As for the Tango West milongas, they have good dancers but the spirit is a bit muffled by the sometimes tedious music and by the man that shouts people around every change of track.
Bristol has got the right ingredients to be a centre of excellence in the British Tango scene. It's a reasonably sized city, it has a history of great music and arts scene and it is the central point in the Southwest. Is not uncommon to see people from Cheltenham, Bath, Exeter, Wales, Southampton, London or Oxford coming to dance in Bristol. Such a variety of dancers and schools create an influx of techniques, styles and practise that are essential for the increase in numbers of skilled dancers. But, nearing the celebration of 10 years of Tango, why is Bristol still waiting to boom? Shouldn't it have boomed already?
Some people over there will not like to read this but the problem in Bristol is that different parties do not collaborate with each other. I am not going into who is right and who is wrong because I don't believe that nobody holds the truth. What I am saying is that it will be difficult for Bristol to get out of the quicksand if people don't stick together.