Limerick Tango

More than anything Tango is a language. It is not, like other dances, the repitition of certain steps to a certain rhythm. It is not something you do it is something that you say. And so when you start learning it you should place upon yourself the same expectations you would when learning French, for example. After your first hour of French lessons you don’t expect to be able to say much more than “My name is”, “I am so old” and “I live here” in a poor accent.

We are always told to walk before we try to run, well we spent plenty of time tottering before we could even stand.

Edit:
This language thing is catching.

Ruth Creen, a fellow Limerick resident and fashion re-designer, was interviewed in the local paper last week. In it she speaks about entering the fashion trade by a path other than the norm.

While she freely admits that she never really learned the trade - she didn’t go to fashion school - Ruth doesn’t feel that it has in any way impeded her progress.

“I absolutely feel that I’m free – the fact that I didn’t study it. Doing the fine art and all that – you learn the creative process rather then the design process. I see my fine art, the illustrations and the graphics and fashion all as one thing. There are lots of girls who do fashion who begin to hate it because it can be such hard work and such pressure. It is a really excellent course and people do really well from it, but it can turn it into a chore. Whereas I am still excited and happy with what I do.”

I have similar views on my own cooking. I’m a bloke. I was never explicitly taught to cook, in contrast to my sisters who were. Consequently I have no hang-ups about culinary failure or a benchmark of success against which to measure myself. My cooking is free and easy.

Allegedly when the American forces finally joined in in World War One they took a look at the trenches and scarpered across open spaces in attack, their British and French counterparts crying out after them. However the Germans were also surprised by this tactic having got used to trench warfare.

Sometimes not being able to see the drop makes the wire easier to walk.

The performance. If you wander along to YouTube and search for tango videos what will be returned to you will be a selection of recordings of tango performances and perhaps a class or two. If you dig very deep you might find a shaky clip of a full floor of social dancing. There is a good reason for this, social dancing doesn’t lend itself well to filming and the performance has become the prime marketing tool of the tango couple. The issue is social dancing and performing are two different beasts.

Now we can think ourselves milongueros and shoot the breeze endlessly on how it is they are or aren’t but my typing isn’t that quick and I don’t have that much time. Either way performance pieces¹ are what are placed in the window to attract in new customers or excite the newly initiated. Given that today’s marketing images are manipulated so far that they bear little resemblance to the original product I shouldn’t be too surprised. But a.) social dancing is nice, b.) it’s what you are actually going to teach them (usually) and c.) it might help people to learn what tango is better if you didn’t confuse them with all this spangly high kicking nonsense.

¹Not show tango, performance piece. The almost de rigueur interruption in the middle of the milonga where the teaching couple display their ability to navigate an empty floor.

Over the past number of months I’ve read several posts by tango bloggers who find that performances are leaving them cold. A consistent theme was the dislike of performances where the dancers focus was on the audience and everything was on display. Conversely the performances that were favoured were those where the dancers focused in on each other and not everything in the dance was visible to the audience. A little bit of that is down to the power of suggestion. What we cannot see draws our eye and engages our imagination. What we cannot see is limitless and goes on beyond what is actually on offer. Our sight fills in blanks, rounds out figures and tells subtle little lies. We are seduced by the dance because we want to be seduced in the hope that it will reveal what we cannot see.

One of the hidden difficulties of tango is learning as a couple. Every couple I have seen start taking tango lessons, be it boyfriend and girlfriend or husband and wife, has always had greater difficulty than the individual who started at the same time as them.

Pourquoi?

Because the couple think “But we know each other, we should be able to do this”. Yes they may be no stranger to each other but they are a stranger to tango. It is this presumption that familiarity will get them through the difficult bits that causes so many couples to drop out.

Couples, mix, change partners, avoid each other as much as you can for most of the class and when you rejoin work with your partner in the same manner that you worked with those strange to you.

With two songs down in the tanda the music suddenly changed to milonga.

“My milonga’s a bit rusty”.

“Ah, we’ll give it a go”, she said.

It was true. I hadn’t danced a decent milonga in months. I had lost the rhythm, the mojo, the milonga.

I went on to dance my best milonga in a long time.

It happens.

While often guilty of leading long and convoluted steps he is a calm and steady dancer who ruins it all with a missplaced comment as he returns you to your chair.

Movement invites movement have at last made their move to Buenos Aires, where they will be there for six months. While they are snobs and have a habit of intentionally annoying people they can also string more than one sentance after another and are in search of the finer points of tango. Plus it’s always nice to read of peoples experiences as they undertake the tango hajj.

On that note another blog to mention is Niki and Scott’s Tango Trails, an Australian couple currently sojourning in Buenos Aires.

While you’re down there call in to Veronica Alegre in Club Glorias Argentinas and tell her Nev says “Hi”.

“I’ve been trying to play the guitar for sixty years”

BB King

The basico cruzado.

Dear Jesus there is so much going in this step.

Do this and this and this, but not this… and don’t forget to do this.

However, the advantage of the preparatory cycle is that you get to revisit and add nuances. So this time around, for those who were on the second time round, I added in a change of weight for the leaders.