Thursday 27 October 2011

FCA2011 - Carole Beauxis et Bernard Casas-Reales

I've been raving about what a good time I had without actually telling you where I was. I was at the 2011 edition of "Festivalito con Amigos" in Saarbruecken, Germany. As for the social dancing, which is the actual point of the whole thing, I'll just tell you I had an amazing time and leave it at that.

The actual reason that I wanted to post this video of two of the guests of honour, Carole and Bernard, is that I thought her look, ROCKED. [Sorry - 2 links to same vid - will fix later fixed, embed now shows the Rodriguez that I was trying to show.]



The dress, the hair, the necklace, the shoes. You can't easily see it, but the skirt is translucent, and embellished near the hem with two plain bands of black velvetyness, about two fingers wide and two fingers apart. I just loved this look. It was a sort of fairy-goth-mother incarnate. (I know that's a shop in Spitalfields - link not necessarily safe for work - there is no connection - it was just the name that came back to me when I saw this outfit in action). Here's their other dance, the Biagi. I also think her following is superb, and her dancing really inspires me. But it's the look I wanted to rave about. I can rave about dancing whenever I want.

The other guests of honour were Alexis Quezada and Céline Giordano, from Barcelona, and Monica Paz. Here are Alexis and Céline doing a lovely squiggly Di Sarli to unusually well-informed applause, and another Di Sarli, but a milonga. (Here's Monica Paz dancing with Andreas on the Friday). The two small demos plus this seemed rather shorter than single demos seem at home, possibly because it was different people, possibly because I was actually sort of interested, and possibly because the night was so much longer than at home that the demos seemed very short in proportion, plus I was already knackered and rather enjoying a rest.

I enjoyed watching all of the guests, especially dancing socially. People who have social dancing as their main focus like this, tend to dance even better socially than they do for exhibition, and it's a big part of the fun of these things for me.

The DJs this year were Uwe Willié, Andreas, Bärbel Rücker and Lampis Zalavras. Bärbel was new to me, I found her music really interesting and I remember enjoying the Pugliese tanda a lot. Lampis had an amazing day - this was my first experience of the DJ getting an ovation from the floor at the first notes of the last tango of a tanda. The whole thing went brilliantly for me. I was blown away. By the middle of Sunday afternoon my inner self was somewhat confused about whether I was currently physically dancing or not. I also believed, during one dance, that I had giant wheels, like a Ferrari, that went round exactly once with every step of our walk.

I wrote up details last year; as expected, they abandoned the workshops (there were none, at least not as part of the event) and simplified the whole locations business. Info at http://www.tangodesalon.de/en/ehome.htm (link goes to English-language page).

2 comments:

Modern Tanguera said...

Did you have an opportunity to dance with Lampis? I'm lucky to live in his adopted hometown, so I hear him DJ and dance with him relatively frequently. A fabulous, musical, connected dancer--very similar to his musical choices as a DJ.

I'm very much hoping to attend FCA next year. In fact, I'll be trying to visit a number of EU milongas in the next year ... perhaps we'll run into each other at some point!

msHedgehog said...

@ModernTanguera, yes indeed, and I've actually danced with him before, in France - quite, and and interesting illustration of the fact that being apparently seven feet tall is neither here nor there if you get the basics right. There aren't really quite enough of this type of event for the market at the moment so they tend to fill up super quickly. If you haven't done it already, I'd suggest emailing the organisers of the ones that interest you most, well in advance, to let them know you are interested.