I love afterparties (and heels and flats)

I love afterparties - especially when everybody's almost too tired to stand up, but they still want to dance. They just want to dance. They're high as kites on dancing. Somebody DJs. Somebody has a portable speaker. Somehow a room has been found. And it just sort of happens. There's that wonderful no-obligation feeling where everything that was supposed to happen has already either happened, or not, and everything else is a bonus. If only we could bottle that feeling.


It's quite a bit easier, as a follower, to dance close-embrace tango on a bit of a heel, especially at first. To dance well in flat shoes with your feet properly down, you need pretty good posture and technique. Of course, you can do that, and a few women never wear heels at all. Others just don't feel right without heels. Others just see heels in moderation as part of the dressing-up fun, which is where I am most of the time. There are some men I prefer to wear heels for, and it's usually more a matter of dance style than height: if someone throws boleos around my axis then it works more smoothly for me in heels. I'd rather be in flats to lead, but the better the follower, the less it matters. At an afterparty, I'm going to be in flats.

But the point is, I often think flat feet are wonderfully expressive, and these ones are particularly nice, which is why I started videoing them in the first place. Try watching it with the sound off, and notice how much you can hear the music. A minute later I was dancing again.

Dancing with DJs

Dancing with DJs is fascinating. A few experiments over quite a few years:

Dance results	..... DJing results
Always on the beat, but nothing in between the beats, and no concept of the musical phrase.	..... Strong music, senselessly arranged.
Plain vanilla Salon, sense of emotional  engagement hard to find	..... Careful, well-organised, reliable sets, if unexciting
Talented and fun, salted with a few things he can't actually do, but only occasionally	..... Enjoyable set, with a couple of interesting failures.
Original, interesting, rather vague, and very difficult to follow	..... 20% enchanted, 80% asleep
Good, give or take temporary obsessions with something-or-other, so that you dread it coming.	..... Good, give or take temporary obsessions with second-rank orchestras and omitting the Di Sarli tanda.
Smooth, sensual, salon with a heart, good allrounder, averts eyes from Wonderbra at the perfect moment	..... Strong, unpretentious, disciplined sets with a good connection to the floor
Totally secure in what he does. Total calm, simplicity, self-belief, and feeling.	..... Full range of top tracks, so immensely arranged that everyone present is still dancing in the 24th hour of 24 hours of dancing over three days, or so the icebreaking impetus of an opening set lasts the whole weekend, and I've seen him do this over and over again.

.

Sharing music

Completing the incomplete thought of my previous post, I want to explain again some of what the pleasure is, specifically, in dancing the way I dance.

Imagine you were very young and you had some favourite music and you found a friend who thought it was as just as cool as you did. You could listen to it together and you knew it very well, but you were still two people, hearing it with four ears. You could look at each other and you could wave your arms or go "dum, dum, DUMMMM!" at all the cool bits, and sometimes your friend would notice something you hadn't noticed and go "Laa laa laaa diddly PLINK!" and you would pick up on it as they were saying it and by the time they got to the PLINK! you were doing the same thing, only differently, and more so, and there was so much more happiness in sharing that, than in appreciating it all alone.

And imagine you could hug each other and climb inside the music together, telling each other's bodies without any words exactly how it sounded for each of you.

[Edit: here's a video suggested by Matthew in the comments. It's lovely, and it pretty much makes the same point. :) ]

Musicality with Dawn Hampton and John Dokes (Swing)

My favourite thing about this video is that the band is LIVE and both of them still dance as though they know every split second of the music. Because they understand it as dance music, and so does the band, and they're all paying attention to each other, and when you cooperate and you understand the form and what each other are doing, you don't need to know exactly what's coming next.



For example: at 00:50, the feigned surprise is funny because he completely hit that, and that's why he seemed like a leaf on the wind of sound. And at 05:05, again.

The band would appear to be The George Gee Jump, Jivin' Wailers of New York City.

I've posted this video before, in 2009. It still makes me happy - it might make you happy, too.

Tuneage

A tango that recently got stuck in my head for twenty-four hours - Ventarrón, Orquesta Típica Victor. I would have posted a performance but I couldn't find one I liked.


I actually rang up a friend in another country in order to hum it to her: and just like me, she and the other tanguera sitting with her knew it perfectly well but couldn't think what it was called. The words are here; only the first two stanzas are actually sung, but the whole (as far as I can guess) appears to be about an aged warrior of the streets, his fame once, his loneliness and infirmity now.

I didn't know the words, which is why I couldn't remember what it was called. But one of the reasons it got stuck in my head was that this wonderfully rhythmic, fighting and plangent tune reminds me very strongly of the final scene of the first act of Tosca - specifically from where Scarpia (the villain, chief of police) comes into the church to the point where, after soliloquising of sex and violence (he's planning both, but sex is the current priority) with his back to the pious crowd, he joins, with magnificent baritone hypocrisy, in the Te Deum. That whole bit would be too long, but there are lots of versions on YouTube that just do the last bit of it, from "Tre sbirri, una carozza". This one is good and doesn't suffer from anything particularly bizarre in the sets or costumes. Scarpia's makeup is explained by this being a stage production - inevitably strange on screen.


I don't know exactly why the one reminds me of the other. Of course, there's a fairly close relationship between these two genres of music, only two generations apart. Something about the melody, something about the rhythm, something about the relationship between them.

There's a Lego Tosca on YouTube. If you look.

Actually Good

The thing that really hits me, watching this again, is the ludicrous contrast between Miss Hampton and Mr. Dokes, and all the other dancers you can see. Is he doing anything particularly fancy, fast or physically demanding? No, I don't think so, and neither would you if the lady were 80 years old. But they seem to be in a completely different world from everyone else visible — except the band. Especially towards the end, from about 04:30, where the youngsters seem to be thrashing around more and more like ‘brute beasts that have no understanding’, while everything Dokes and Hampton do is there for a reason.



It gets more and more revelatory to me every time I watch someone Actually Good.

Of course Mr. Dokes can dance more energetically: here he is again, with a plainly delighted young lady (Denise See). But he still always knows when it's time to stop one thing and do something else, or just stop.



Dance is playing Air-Sax, Air-Drums, or Air-Bandoneón with your whole body, each instrument infinitely mutable in shape and function, but keeping its sound.

Charlie Watts

Playing with Jools Holland, and others:



And on playing for jazz, playing rock and roll, and dance sounds.



I like the way the musicians work together. The bit where he says he's winging it, I think that's what people call 'musicality'.

The Dancing Flower does Libertango

This week in Tango Silliness, Libertango. Piazzolla was really interested in tango as concert music, and didn't particularly write or play for dancers, but this particular piece is very driving and does make me want to dance. All his works, like classical music in general, tend to be known by his name rather than by who plays them.



There are lots of versions of Libertango but this is the only one I have, played by Quinteto La Camorra. I think the flower's reaction to the dynamics at about 2 minutes and 3 minutes is nice.

The Dancing Flower does D'Arienzo

This week, the Flower interprets El Flete, also quite often encountered by beginners [implausible, and I think my memory of this must be just wrong - there must have been some one class where it was played repeatedly over several weeks and I remembered it disproportionately. No- Maya has the answer in the Comments]. Now in stereo, as I've rearranged all the speaker wires.



The flower appreciates all the comments on last week's video and looks forward to your remarks on this one.

Next week, milonga.

The Dancing Flower does Di Sarli

In case you were taking this tango lark a bit too seriously, the Dancing Flower is here to help. Today, it interprets a track sometimes used for beginners' classes - Viviani, from the Carlos di Sarli album Instrumental vol. 2.



This is definitely going to be a series.

A class on musicality

Long ago (well not that long, but it seems like long) I went to a lesson on how you physically express musicality. It was pitched at recent beginners, and the first half was all walking alone.

It was pointed out that when we walk, we start the movement at one time (in relation to the music) and end it at another where the next step starts, but at what point we pass through the middle is a choice. I don't remember the examples or exercises exactly, but the way I'd explain it to myself is this: If you are stepping on the ones of a waltz, for example, 1 2 3 1 2 3, you might pass through the physical middle of the step, when your feet pass each other, at the 2, or at the 3, or in the temporal middle at 2½, or somewhere else. It's up to you — what do you hear? Try it as you walk round the room.

Then try to lead and follow it, as we did in the second half of the lesson. It was one of those lessons where I went “oh, ok, that's how it works, now I get it, what fun!” — it wasn't necessary to be told twice. But I did need telling once.

You may think it's obvious. I didn't.

It made a real difference, was within my powers at the time, and would have taken me forever to work out for myself. The kind of simple-but-necessary information that enables someone with very basic skills to dance in a more satisfying way, mainly for herself but also for her partner. Free of metaphor and mumbo-jumbo, too.

Realising that that stuff was possible, and might be led, made an important difference to how I followed, and it also gave me options for musicality of my own.

[Since someone is bound to ask, it was Tom at the Crypt, one of the odd Monday-night lessons he does occasionally when Paul and Michiko are away. If you want my opinion, he is a talented and intelligent teacher. But his lessons are rare, and are never advertised, so you will never be able to take one intentionally, unless you take the Monday beginners' course, which is always him. I do know what his last name is, but since their website - El Once in the links - makes it a secret, it would obviously be rude of me to do otherwise.]

It's got rhythm

Good trailers have rhythm.

I really enjoyed Zatoichi. It's violent, but in a very stylised, absurd way. (I don't like being frightened). The timing is good, and that feels like musicality. I like opera too, much more than I like most movies.



My enjoyment of this well-crafted trailer is probably enhanced by not understanding Japanese. There are versions with subtitles, but they hardly seem necessary. I can't help feeling that too much dialogue is often a mistake in trailers in almost the same way that talking while dancing is a mistake. If there are words, they should be delivered with full and skilful attention to their rhythm, and properly part of the music, as they seem to be above.

This next film was remarkable for its sound, especially some of the music, but also the sounds of wood and water and living things. But the trailer doesn't quite work for me. It feels both lengthy and hurried, doesn't use any of the good music, and draws attention to Russell Crowe's slightly dodgy accent, which seemed fine in the film.



It was actually a rather good Patrick O'Brian pastiche if you watched it in a cinema with a really good sound system. And, like the books, it wasn't mainly about any of the things that the trailer tells you it is about; specifically not about fighting the enemy. Although that does happen. It was really much better than you'd think from watching this. But that was the clever part; that was what got them the action-flick budget to spend on a thinly-disguised art movie.

Joaquín Amenábar - book now available

You can now get the English version of Joaquín's book/DVD set on "Music for Dancers" here. [Edit - priced in Euros, and it seems they can't yet ship it to the USA.]

It seems worth saying that he doesn't bill or present himself as a dance teacher, or anything more than a reasonable social dancer. He said this more than once in my hearing, when I took some of the classes, and I saw nothing in the classes (or the book, which I've now reached the end of) that I would interpret as contradicting it. What he's teaching is listening skills and musical information. You read the explanations, and do some listening exercises, and then you use walking exercises familiar to dancers to get your ear and body working together. You can then repeat them walking and dancing with a partner, to practice leading or following and listening properly at the same time, so that your brain doesn't trip over itself.

I have not interpreted any of the walking or dancing exercises as generally-applicable instructions as to how to dance. They're not presented as such, and for example, I don't think you would do this with chapters 8, dialogue of melodies, or 12, off-beat. I don't think it's practical, and the results would be mostly bonkers. (Gamecat's sent me a link - the third video down is a non-bonkers interpretation of the music used for chapter 8). The point is that at the end of chapter 12 both your body and your mind - working together - understand what an off-beat is, and why it feels funny if you step on it, accidentally or on purpose.

But I mention this because I've been told that some people do take it that way.

Anyway, the whole thing fills a gap, at least if you think listening skills are something that can (and should) be taught to those who have no aptitude, or should (and can) be taught to those who do. Mine have certainly improved. I don't know whether my dancing has improved or not. If it has, it's probably more to do with fixing my posture. But I definitely hear better now and appreciate musicality better in other people.

There are dance teachers who have something to say, other than merely by example, about what musicality actually means in dance terms. I haven't encountered it often enough to say anything about how far they agree with each other, or not. I assume that they sometimes disagree, which is not exactly uncommon on matters of technique, either. If I do encounter disagreements I think it's my responsibility to decide what appeals to me on whatever basis seems to make sense, just like I do with technique. Some people use a race test; if my criteria are less silly than that, and include at least some reference to the merits of the case, at least they aren't the worst logically possible.

I personally have got a lot out of doing the exercises and exploring the details of music in a much more productive way than I would have been able to alone. Some of the people I dance with have made good discoveries, too.

Raising expectations

Yesterday I went to the Crypt earlier than I usually would because it was Adrian and Amanda Costa, and I wanted to take the class. Unfortunately I still missed the first third, partly because of the rugby, but mainly because I'd forgotten my Tube route was partially down for some scheduled repairs. It would have been rude to join at that point, and it was also extremely full (good thing, too) so I just watched and listened with a cup of tea. But I was told this:

Adrian had started the class by explaining and demonstrating the rhythmic distinction between milonga, tango, and tango-vals, and how to tell the difference.

And I am pretty sure of this:

This simple, necessary information was new to a large proportion of the students, most of whose faces were not new to me, and most of whom had been dancing for more than one year. And important parts of it would have been new to me, too, if I hadn't happened to take that class with Joaquín Amenábar.

Which — is a scandal. And here I cut two paragraphs of rant: but I think it's a scandal and I don't really give a bugger what the excuses are.

So, back to the class. Adrian gives pretty good quotes and I really wished I had a dictaphone, but in running for my train I had neglected to bring even a pencil and paper. So paraphrases of what stuck are the best I can do.

"If the traspié it is there in the music I can choose, to do it or not to do it. If it is not there I cannot do it."

(The class was working with a tango here, not a milonga, and by traspié he meant what is usually called "double-time" in English, in the sense of double the number of steps, each of them in half the time.)

The class was asked to dance doing whatever they liked, but mostly just walking, and always doing the double-time only when it was there in the music, not always then, and not otherwise.

And the women were expected to listen, too! Amanda assumed that we could figure out ourselves how to do whatever ornament we liked, and told us to do one for the traspié if and only if the traspié was there but the man didn't put a step in himself. The women were not treated as being there to serve, nor were we treated as lawn ornaments, studying to look as nearly as possible like a tasteful display of identical plastic flamingos. It was assumed without apology or discussion that we were there to learn to dance well, for our own pride and enjoyment; that this was a possible goal; that it was worth attaining, without other justification; that we were capable of attaining it, with some work; and that we wanted to do so. Yay!

Towards the end Adrian made the class stand still and listen again to the entire tango, pointing out that it repeated the same pattern, with the double-time in the same place each time, and a suspension (opposite of a double-time) also in the same place each time, and if you missed it the first time, the ability to count to seven and find the start of the musical phrase gave you numerous other chances. He pointed out that this is very common in tango. There are repetitions following some structure that you can understand and predict with fair reliability if you can count to eight and listen as you do. Yay!!

The class concluded with a rather long lecture, and hardly anybody dropped out. They all appeared to be listening carefully. All of it would, if applied, make anyone who heard it dance better. Yay again!!!

"There are two kinds of dancers, dancers and movers. If I don't know why I am doing what I am doing, I am just moving. If I hear it and I choose to do it, I am dancing, even if I am like this [contortions, posture of an old man]. If I choose not to do it, I am still dancing."

That last one reminded me of the class they gave on Friday at Conway Hall, which was about floorcraft, and nothing else.

"If I am this close to him [too close to the man in front] I cannot go here, because he is there. I cannot go here, because the woman is there, and I cannot see. I cannot go this way, because it is a backward step and I cannot see. I have no possibility at all. But if I am this close [leaving a metre of space] I have many possibilities."

Yes! It was made explicit that you do not step into the blind spot. You do not step backwards. You leave space, just like on the motorway. You look where you are going, not at the steering wheel. You do not weave from lane to lane. Whenever you learn a new figure, said Adrian, before you make use of it in the milonga, you have to practice it; and when you do that, you find out which way you'll be facing when it ends. If it's any way other than forwards in the line of dance, or if the figure means that you change lanes, step backwards, or step into the blind spot, it's your responsibility to work out how to start it or adapt it so that you don't have to do those things. You can make your salida diagonal so you don't have to cross lanes sideways into traffic. Women were given advice about posture and footwork that helped to keep everything straight and the couple to move with confidence and safety and control.

I know!! Shocking!!!

And the point was this: if everybody follows these rules, it does not matter at all what style you dance — you can do whatever the hell you want, whatever you think is right for the music, whatever appeals to you, because everybody is respecting each other and giving each other enough space and not taking more than their fair share. Everybody gets to share the love. Everybody gets to see what you create. Nobody has to feel restricted. Again, I wish I'd had a dictaphone, because that's what I heard rather than what he said, but you can ask anyone.

The whole class was made, through various exercises, to follow these rules for one dance, and it was a revelation. Everybody had space; the whole room was dancing together, each couple doing its thing, not a chaotic mess of predators competing for territory, but a large gathering of consenting adults there to have fun.

It only lasted five minutes and it instantly fell apart when we tried to do something else as well, but I can only hope those five minutes left an impression on the participants that the skills of basic respect for your fellow dancers were skills worth aspiring to, worth giving some attention, and worth encouraging in other people. And I at least had fewer bumps for the rest of the evening than I usually do there. I think the total was one and a bit.

And since those little rules of thumb sound more complicated than they are, here is a diagram of Adrian and Amanda, with the green arrows showing safe directions and the red dotted line showing the contrary. Suppose that the couple are in the outside lane, the wall or seating is to the right, and the boundary with the inside lane is about where the arrow marked 'line of dance' is. (For example, you can see that they could rotate a little bit to the right about their centre, and walk straight; or they could go the way they're already pointing and zigzag, pivoting at the boundary; or if they took one step in that direction they could then quite safely do a clockwise turn about the woman's axis).



I don't think A&A are coming here again till October, but I hope they do because this sort of teaching, and the sort of dancing they do, raises people's expectations of themselves, of their teachers, and of each other. More, please.

xx Very Stroppy Phase of Moon Hedgehog

Oblivion - very delicately danced

Here is another video, in which I think are good illustrations of not dancing to what isn't there, and making choices about what is there. I have to turn my head to avoid feeling queasy (I think the sideways framing is a way of getting their feet in the picture, in a space where the camera can't move back and can't get a clear shot from any other position - the cameraman, bec, is a pro, which is why this looks so nice). I liked this video the first time I saw it, but I like it more now because I'm less ignorant and I listen and watch better.



I always like the sense, in Adrian and Amanda's performances, that they really are dancing as equals, in every way, but in musical expression specifically.

On the question of how you understand musicality, this is a popular and challenging track and there are lots of different interpretations you could compare. Like this one for example; it takes quite a different approach. One difference is that the music in the video above is played live by the Luis Tango Quintet, at a more or less standard dancing speed for a slow tango, whereas the recording in the other is much slower and includes a longish silence towards the end. Both performances are described by their authors (Adrian confirms it, in Spanish, in the YouTube comments) as improvisations, so that is not a difference.

Adrian and Amanda Costa are in London again this weekend, schedule here or here. I'm seeing a lot of searches for their names, and I like people to find what they are looking for - but if you want listings and announcements, you're better off at Arlene's, 'cause I only talk about what's happening if I feel like it and have something to say. I really like A&A though.

Not dancing to what's not there

The most challenging thing in those musicality classes with Joaquín Amenábar was not dancing to what isn't there. It's the same exploring music with the help of his book.

I decided that for me it was the most important thing - because I found it surprisingly difficult. You listen carefully to find the beat, you start the clock in your head, maybe you count to orient yourself, maybe you even continue counting. The count in your head adjusts smoothly to variations in speed, but it can overwhelm the detail, and it's very easy to keep dancing mechanically to this count and think you are dancing to the music when you're not.

You catch yourself doing it a few times, and you manage at least once not to do it when you might have done, and you feel the difference. Suddenly, you see other people (or yourself) gyrate through silence and fill it, not with stillness or a movement that expresses silence, but by dancing to what just happened, or what they anticipate will happen next, or what they imagine is happening in some alternative universe. They were doing it before, and perhaps so were you, but you never noticed and you can't remember. It's alarming.

Where the tango was

I took a class with Adrian and Amanda Costa last weekend. It was about milonga traspié, and Adrian was teaching us to listen for the beat of the bass and dance with it. There is a point where it stops, for a moment, and he wanted us to learn to respect this in our dancing.

This is a paraphrase; his English is not fluent, my memory is not perfect. But it went something like:

“I loooovve this milonga. When I was three years old my grandfather had a game, he used to make me listen to it and I would be an aeroplane [leans forward, makes aeroplane wings] with the bass. Pom, pa-pom pom [walks forward, wings moving with bass] - and it stops - the plane is falling it's falling! And here it is again! Pom, pa-pom pom Pom [wings return to rhythm] ...”

A French three-year-old, his Grandad and a record collection.

I nearly cried.

I'd like to illustrate that with Adrian and Amanda dancing milonga later the same evening, but nobody's posted that video yet, so here is one from Paris.

Joaquín Amenábar - post list

I've written a lot about Joaquín Amenábar's workshops on tango music for dancers, so here is a housekeeping post with a list of everything else. It's worth reading the comments on each, especially the first one.

[Update 4th April 09: you can now buy the book-DVD set here.]

Joaquín teaches Bandoneón at the University in Buenos Aires and another conservatoire, and he also dances in the milongas. His classes are very carefully designed for the nine out of ten dancers who have no music education at all.

Music for dancers
Why tango music is like it is
Modern Tango
[Update 04/04/09] Book available - and a note about it

But even if you do have some musical education (mine is not much, but more than most - I can sing my part in a madrigal, with practice) I'd still very much recommend them. They're fascinating.

What what these classes did for me was raise the problems of musical understanding from the level of the animal or child, and expose them to the firepower of adult human intellect. This is an effective way to get improvement quickly. It's like letting an elephant solve a problem with its trunk.

The three classes I took were also great fun, and so are the exercises in the book/DVD set (which should become available, eventually, from here). They are much fun as being three and doing Music and Movement, or sitting crosslegged on the floor and watching Playschool with Floella Benjamin, or Life On Earth. I love it.

Joaquín Amenábar on Modern Tango

This was a very educational class and I'm just going to summarise what I remember, because it's so interesting I can't shut up. To make sense of it all, you really need example recordings. I don't think this topic is directly covered in the book, so I can only suggest taking the class if you have the opportunity.

The topic was “modern tango”, with special reference to the musical relationships between Pugilese, Piazzolla and what is called nuevo tango. Modern, then, meant broadly “after 1945”.

Pugliese:

During the period of dictatorship where there was no tango dancing in Argentina at all, Pugilese's band played concert tango, for people to listen to, not dance. Passages of strong rhythm are contrasted with passages where the melody stretches and wanders and does its own thing, abandoning the rhythm, which disappears completely. You can dance to the melody when the rhythm goes missing, but you can't rely on your internal clock to predict where melodic accents will come, and you won't be in time when the accompaniment returns. If you want to improvise to this stuff, and represent it exactly with your body, you really have to know the recording by heart. Or you can use it for choreography. (Non-concert Pugilese, however, is fully danceable — I think that means pre-1945).

At this point I think we practiced hearing and understanding the different rhythms and melodies, and walking to them, especially not mechanically. That meant not stepping if the accent isn't sounded. Surprisingly difficult, and an interesting thing to try at home.

Piazzolla:

Piazzolla took a different direction. Contrasts are provided not between rhythm and melody, but by different melodies and their accompanying rhythms, arranged in an overall structure characteristic of tango (the structure was explained in the class I missed, but is in the book). The melody is in charge, just as it is with Pugilese, but it respects whatever rhythm was chosen to suit it, and you don't need to know the piece to dance to it. If the rhythmic accompaniment disappears and you only hear melody, the melody accents you are dancing to will still be in time. You can use your internal clock, and you will be in time when the accompaniment returns.

I may have confused two classes, but I think it was at this point that we spent quite a lot of time learning to recognise and move to the 3-3-2 rhythm used in a lot of later Piazzola, the one that goes PánamaPánamaCúbaPánamaPánamaCúba. We looked at its structure in relation to the underlying four beats, and Joaqín's ingenious visual aids involving the velcro spots with little shoes on them were very helpful here. He mentioned that because Piazzolla uses the 3-3-2 a lot, some people suppose he invented it. In fact, it is ancient and universal and can be heard in the earliest tango recordings. [Another rhythm from the repertoire of the Ur-Busker — examples from flamenco and Arabian music are on the DVD. And in the café where I have my lunch and the Iranian Kurdish family play their favourite music.]

In dancing to either of the above, he said, your challenge as a dancer is to adapt and choose from your vocabulary to represent a rich, varying rhythm or melody or combination of the two. In both cases, the music is giving you lots of lead and lots of different things to do. If you know how to hear these things, and dance to what is there (not mechancially to a beat that may or may not actually be sounded), you're dancing in a way that is very satisfying to the couple. For this kind of dancing you need a vocabulary of fairly simple units, not longer than four to eight steps, the length of a musical phrase. And you need to understand them in rhythmic terms, so you can use them.

I'll note just there that the chapter in the book on teaching explains in detail one possible way that they might be taught in rhythmic terms. It assumes access to a reasonably good multimedia computer and moderate skill in using it, some sort of percussion instrument like a claves, and some equivalent of a box of Velcro Spots.

Nuevo:

It's really too early, in Joaquín's opinion, to make any broad musicological statements about the Nuevo tango. There are only a few groups and it hasn't been around long, so there's hardly any material to look at. Asking us to put aside our personal tastes, and promising to do the same himself*, he played an example (I think it was Gotan) and asked us to listen carefully and consider what was happening musically, in the light of what we'd learned so far.

What was going on, he said, appears to be this: An extremely steady, unvarying and continuous rhythm all the way through the recording, with passages of melody and various sounds whose function is not thematic, but ornamental. They're not in charge.

He remarked that this makes a lot of sense in terms of the history of tango and the kind of dance done by younger dancers in Argentina.

‘Nuevo Tango’ the dance, he said, usually refers to the kind of thing developed by Gustavo Naveira and Giselle Anne, and pupils, since the 80s. At this point, [“and people will kill me for saying this, but it's true,” he added] tango had been entirely dead in Argentina for many years, effectively killed off by a determined government that regarded it as a threat. But it survived abroad, with foreigners who prized it, and with performers who toured mostly abroad**. And with the end of the military dictatorship, people in Argentina wanted to recreate it at home. Naturally, the people best placed to do the spadework on this were professional dancers who came to it with artistic and technical interests in dance for itself, not just as a means to a social or musical end.

For this, such music is ideal. It gives you unlimited scope to experiment and develop the technique, pushing it as far as it can go to see what you can do with it in terms of dance. You have total freedom to improvise whatever*** your imagination suggests and your body can deliver, with highly creative and complex variations, and the music isn't going to stop you. Here the music is artistically subordinate to the dance, not the other way around. The music is not dictating what you do.

Musically speaking, he saw it as a giant leap backwards, all the way to the 19th century — a return to a dance with a fixed rhythm, just like dance music generally has, as discussed in a previous class. Proto-Tango rather than Nuevo-Tango, musically speaking. [I'm not sure whether he actually said “Proto-Tango” or it's just what I understood and wrote down in my notes.]

People argue about whether it's really ‘tango’ or not, but Joaquín wasn't interested in going there, and nor am I, and I ask you not to go there in the comments, either (This Means You). I also ask you not to meta-comment about the fact that you're not going there.

As well as dancers, I think this class would be a help to DJs who aren't also musicians. I think it was new in the programme this year; and perhaps one day Joaquín might design a class with DJs in mind. And I'd be fascinated to hear whatever he said on that subject.

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* His band is called Orquesta Típica de la Guardia Vieja — “Traditional Old Guard Band”.
** I think I remember reading what must have been an interview with one of these in a newspaper on a train in the eighties. I remember a mad woman saying passionately “It is with the legs. There is nothing with the head, nothing! It is the legs!!”.
*** Or indeed whatever else(!).

Joaquín Amenábar on why tango music is like it is

Here's a point in last week's classes that was a revelation to me, and might interest you as well. I was vaguely aware that tango music was like this, but because I've never personally learned any other dance, or had any education about dance in general, I didn't understand why it was important.

The factual content of this is what Joaquín said, but the way of putting it is mostly mine. He's much more dignified and didn't mention buckets or buskers. It's all in the book as well, so you can check there. Anyway, here it is.

Music that is dance music has a consistent, fixed rhythm: a basic count, and then a rhythmic pattern that divides the beats up in a fixed way. The accents are always in the same place. The pattern continues all the way through, and it's the distinctive element of each dance. That's what allows you to hear a piece of music and say it is a waltz, or a salsa, or a rhumba, or whatever it is.

This is true of milonga, which is the ancestor of tango. Milonga has a rhythm called habañera, which goes POM pa-pom pom, POM pa-pom pom. It's very old - you'll find it in the middle east and Africa. It came to Argentina directly from medieval Spain. If you hear that rhythm, you can say it's a milonga and dance milonga to it.

A digression: I hadn't noticed until he named it habañera that this is the same rhythm over which Carmen sings L'amour est un oiseau rebelle, que nul ne peut apprivoiser .... Not just reminiscent of it, but the same. Of course this rhythm, as Joaquín said, is old. I listened for it this week in the café where I have my lunch, and the family play middle-eastern pop songs - they're Iranian Kurds, I think. And sure enough, there it was. You'd probably have heard it from the buskers of Ur.

Tango isn't like this. It varies.

Traditional tango music developed by taking milonga and throwing it in a giant bucket of Late-Romantic-Classical mostly-Italian immigrant musicians. Think Puccini meets the Ur-busker and they start jamming while they compete for the girls. You can't play Neapolitan folk songs or bel canto or German or French art songs to a habañera rhythm without very distressing results, so if these musicians wanted to dance to their own kind of music, the rhythms had to change to fit the melody. It so happened that the dance technique could accommodate this.

Consequently, in traditional tango there's no rule about how the beats are divided up, no rule about where the accents are, so no fixed rule about which beat you step on. It frequently changes within the same piece. The melody leads - the rhythms are chosen for the melody, the leader has to follow both, and the follower has to follow all of them. That gives you an extremely rich and satisfying dance.

On the other hand, [this is partly me, now] there's no need for much imagination in the figures. Anything longer than four to eight normal-time steps has a very good chance of being torpedoed by a change in the rhythm, so there's not much point. So if you're going to improvise well to this music, you want simple little modular bits of dance that you can adapt whether it's POM pom POM pom, or POM pom-ty pom pom, or POM pom pom-ty pom, or PánamaPánamaCúba, or POMPOM pom POM pom, or even pom POM pom POM or whatever they throw at you. Whether you dance well or not is entirely about how well you manage to stick with the music. And that means [said Joaquín], it's best to teach figures rhythmically, with the rhythm as a starting point, so that dancers understand where they can use them and where they won't work. (The chapter at the end of the book, on teaching, sets out one way that might be done.)

The next part of the classes covered the larger-scale structure of tango music, and how you can tell that a change in the rhythm is coming, and when. For that bit, buy the book. The exercises and examples take you through it, and you can go through them in lessons with Jill. (One of her assistants is Audrey Pattison, whose YouTube debut I posted here).

A second class discussed the later history of tango music and what's going on, musically, in 'Nuevo'. I thought that was really interesting too and deserves a post to itself, so I'll come back to that.