Happy New Year

To me, the turn of the year really happens at Christmas, which in my family is an entirely traditional feast-day with no religious side. We rejoice in those we love, we create warmth and light, we spread it around as we feel inspired, and after this, the days get longer.

When I get home I'll upload a picture of the family table [Done - on left], with a goose properly stuffed and cooked by my sister (with help from my father and me) potatoes, carrots, and parsnips all roasted in goose fat, sprouts sautéed with pepper and bacon, gravy and fine Australian wine, to be followed by a Christmas pudding prepared by my mother and me and containing an apple, a carrot, the candied peel of several kinds of citrus fruits, the rind and juice of a lemon, grapes preserved in three seperate ways, breadcrumbs, a little flour, brown sugar, almonds, marmalade, beef suet, eggs, a small glass of stout, a sherry glass of brandy, and four kinds of spice. Then you steam it for six hours, mature it for up to a year, steam it for two more hours, then set fire to a ladleful of brandy and pour it over the top.

If you have enjoyed my blog, and have not finished all of your giving this winter, please consider a donation to Centrepoint. I contribute £12 a month to the upkeep of a room at Centrepoint. On the inside of my front door is a photo of the young woman who lives in it for the time being. She was homeless, and alone, in danger from those who ought to have cared for her as my parents still care for me, and now she has a safe place to start, a room of her own, with a bed and a bathroom and a quiet place to study. But they can make good use of one-off donations, too.

Tango stuff:

This year all I did with my tango was work on musicality, musical understanding, and posture and embrace. I did get noticeable improvements in all those things. Two six-hour small-group workshops (with Andreas Wichter) for technique, and some private lessons (with Tango en el Cielo) for technique and musicality gave me a lot to work with. I took the occasional group class, but mostly on tango music. I'm ok with where my dancing is, I'm only willing to give it a certain amount of time and priority, but it's important to me to be a good social dancer, not less good than I should be, and it's probably time for some more work in the new year. I tend to develop random, bizarre little quirks at a fairly constant rate, so I need checkups and feedback from time to time. It might also be time to step out of my comfort zone a little bit and look for some new partners.

I learned that it's possible for women to have a significant influence on how men dance, and how they think about their dance, simply by the way we dance. More than I thought. It matters if he can weight-change you a toe at a time. It matters whether you have or haven't got a default step length. It makes a real difference if you know how to vary the way you move to express your personal impression of the music.

A couple of people emailed me or spoke to me to say they liked the blog or found it useful. A couple of women found the reviews helpful when going out dancing on their own for the first few times. And that was the idea, with the reviews, so I like that. Commenters added a lot - you know who you are. As for the friends and relations and silent readers, you know who you are too, even if I don't.

Thanks for reading, and I wish you a happy New Year.

Out of Office Message

I'll be on holiday for a few more days. I hope your Christmas, if you are somewhere they do Christmas, was as nice as mine.

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.

Around the blogs in Winter

The solstice has passed; the days will grow longer. I'm tidying up some of the links on the right, and perhaps I'll put one of those blog-watcher things. While I get on with that, a few good things you might have missed.

Tangocommuter, in case you hadn't noticed, is back in Buenos Aires and his posts are even more interesting than last time. Today, he's getting very good advice from Cacho Dante, and noticing that lots of the students are very young. He's also going to Porteno y Bailarin. Also, art.

Mari is writing beautifully about the embrace, about Tango Moments of WIN, and about Entrega Soup and the impossibility of doing any such thing on a chaotic floor.

Simba has written a fab article about what to listen for in tango with proper examples, written out as well as made available for playback. In November he finished reading Anne Hollander's book on the history of the male suit, and wrote a great post on suits, skirts, and the modernity of tango.

Pilgrim has been thinking about angry men (it's funny), musical women, and floorcraft.

Read them all.

The sort of thing that you might do for fun

The reason I post this video by Céline Deveze is not that there's any particularly wonderful dancing going on (though most of it looks pretty good to me and it's crowded but doesn't look bumpy), but because everyone seems to be having such fun.



The tango that appeals to me is a relatively simple, physically undemanding dance, with all of the complexity provided by the music, and it's the sort of thing that you might want to do at a party, for fun, with lots of different people, some known to you and some new, sometimes perhaps even in fancy dress.

I think we often make it too difficult and dramatic.

On the other hand, it's rather a subversive thing to do. All these people are much closer together and involved with each other than ballroom dancers, or jivers or lindyhoppers would be. They're much more intensely connected; they are varied in age and in other things, and some of them are very beautifully dressed, or wearing ears or tails or elaborate feather masks or imaginative costumes. And they really look as though they're enjoying it. Naughty, huh? Almost as outrageous as four women swiping a meeting room and knitting together for an hour at lunchtime.

Céline's next "Week-end milonguero," with fancy dress ball, is in the last week of January.

The music they had in their heads

I have always felt, without being able to specify very well, that tango music has a lot in common with 19th century opera, which I like, but with the advantage that you can dance to it. It may be simplistic, but in the same way that Argentinian Spanish sounds, to me, like Spanish spoken by an Italian, tango sounds to me like Puccini for dancing.

It makes sense, because Puccini, Verdi, and so on would have been what all those Italian musicians grew up with and had as the furniture of their minds - the sort of music that would have been performed not just professionally but for fun, as indeed it was by my grandmother's Scottish family.

Here's a well-known Puccini piece. (Man about to be executed sings about the last time he slept with his girlfriend - "e lucevan le stelle").



That's a modern operatic tenor (José Carreras, 1978) with a full orchestra. Caruso, with 1910s recording technology and taste, sounds quite different singing the same song - and perhaps the weakness of the technology makes him sound much more like those Italian immigrant musicians would have sounded. If you have time, it's worthwhile to compare:



Mix that up in your head with some of that zarzuela Domingo has always been so fond of (Spanish operetta - "pretty woman in love"):



This next one is Caruso again, in 1914, with Ruffo, singing Verdi's version of Othello. The higher voice is Caruso (Othello), the lower voice is Ruffo (Iago), persuading Othello to an unjust vengeance. I put this in because it's Verdi and he has his particular zip which I keep hearing in tangos, still without being able to tell you what the zip is.



For those who like the sheer emotion in traditional tango, here's Domingo for a second time, singing Donizetti's "una furtiva lagrima" - the pictures are out of sync with the music. The story of this song is that the woman he loves let fall a tear, and he's just realised what it means - he has her love. He could die, and ask nothing more. Domingo is just the best at this stuff.



This is the kind of thing that the golden-age musicians must have had in their heads when they set out to create their music. They weren't imitating it at all - but this, it seems to me, was what gave them their concept of what music is all about and how you use it transmit emotion.

I do have a recording of Domingo singing tangos, which I bought to find out what it sounded like, and I don't think it works. It sounds wrong, in tango terms, from start to finish, and incidentally totally undanceable. But it is very interesting to see what happens when a great singer just treats a tango as a Spanish-language art song, and here he is singing El dia que mi quieras (Carlos Gardel) with Daniel Barenboim at the piano. Fast forward to 00:48 to skip the tedious intro, I did.



You wouldn't dance to it, but you see what he's doing.

Of course it goes without saying that all the music above would probably have been familiar to Gardel's audience, too. But it's not that widely known here. It's not difficult or inaccessible music, but it's not a routine part of the popular culture in the same way that it would have been when Gardel was playing El dia que mi quieras, or even as it was when my grandmother's relations were making their own entertainment in Australia with performances of Bizet's Au fond du temple saint.

I don't really like going out when it's so cold!

Hello Dance Today readers

Hi there!

I sent off the commisssioned article for the December issue of Dance Today and then forgot all about it. I've just received my copy in the post and noticed that the editor has put my blog address at the end in case anyone wants to look. So this is specially for you, most of all if you have not done tango before.

If you're coming to tango from an interest in dance, you have probably already worked out for yourself that argentine tango is not the same thing as ballroom tango, and social tango is not necessarily similar to what Vincent and Flavia do, either (that's stage tango - some teachers make this distinction more consistently than others, but if you want to dance well I think it's helpful to keep it in mind, it makes everything a lot easier). I personally think the social form is much more expressive and interesting, though less spectacular, but I came to tango from a different perspective with no experience of dance.

Here are a blog and a website by tango dancers with previous experience of other kinds of dance:

Ampster Tango - Ampster did ballroom first and has a lot of interesting things to say about his experiences making the transition, especially the parts where he went down the wrong track.

Learning Tango - David and and Chris both started from Ceroc, and their articles about their experiences are good and there are some contributions from others and London class listings too. I don't agree with it all by any means, but it's always interesting in one way or another.

Here are all my posts that I think are likely to help tango beginners. If you're thinking of taking a class, the most useful might be the Beginners' Questionnaire.

The 'beginning' posts overlap with the longer lists I've labelled musicality and music. Not all of those are tango, but most are. Or if you want a laugh and some tango music, just watch the dancing flower. All those are fun whether you're a beginner or not.

[Edit some hours later: I hadn't read the whole magazine. For an example of candombe, which is great stuff, see part way down this post.]

And generally, there's a large and lively tango blogosphere - you can start with the links on the right, and those will take you to lots more, but Tangri-La has a really long list. On very rare occasions I contribute to Dance Forums, and there's a lively tango discussion board there. And there are lots of calendars around - here's one at Tango En El Cielo.

Have a ball! Or a milonga.