Un pedazo de vida
In Buenos Aires, you can get a tango lesson anywhere. Even on a street corner on a crisp, sunny autumn afternoon, on your way home from the bank.
I was standing in line to get coins (I do this a couple of times a week, since they’re in extremely short supply, but are the only way to pay the fare on the buses), when an Argentine man in his late seventies began chatting with me. We kvetched for a while about the long line and the bad service, then talked about the economy, life in Buenos Aires and in Argentina in general, the weather, being a tourist here and in Europe, plus a few other topics. He spoke heavily-accented, rapidfire porteno Spanish, but I understood the better part of what he was saying, and he had no trouble understanding me, so we continued to talk outside the bank. It turned out that despite his age, he was still actively working with tourist agencies around the world to bring tourists to Argentina, and continues to travel to Europe and Asia regularly. He talked about the neighborhood where we were, saying it was called Villa Freud because of the high concentration of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists living there and said it had become one of the most expensive places in the city to buy an apartment. Then, when I explained that we were here for tango, he said that he used to dance, but doesn’t anymore because of his age. So we started to discuss tango, I told him how it’s danced and taught in Europe, the USA and in Argentina, my perceptions of milongas here, alternative music and the increasing interest in Golden Age tango music around the world.
He said the same things I had heard in private classes as well: that to dance tango, you don’t need to do a lot of complicated steps and acrobatics, instead, you must listen to the music, the lyrics of the song you’re dancing to, and dance to the compás and the cadencia with your heart. As we continued to talk standing on the sidewalk in front of the bank, he quoted several lines from Naranjo en flor and then from Volver, saying that they were beatiful poetry that one needs to be able to understand and appreciate in order to dance to it:
“Toda mi vida es el ayer
que me detiene en el pasado,
eterna y vieja juventud
que me ha dejado acobardado
como un pájaro sin luz.”
“Volver . . .
Con la frente marchita
Las nieves del tiempo
Blanquearon mi sien”
I said that as a foreigner I found it hard to understand some tangos because of the old lunfardo (Buenos Aires slang) used in them. He suggested that I ask local teachers about these, so I can really get the meaning, and, therefore, feel what the poets meant when they wrote them.
He also talked about the importance of the embrace and how he much he liked the elegance of dancing tango de salón at the milongas where everybody used to take great care to dress and look their best. I was starting to wonder if he was one of the milonguero types who stay up all night to dance and womanize, but no, he’s been together with his wife for over 50 years.
He said society has changed a lot, for the worse, that the city is less secure, human, and friendly than it used to be. He used to go to the same bank for several decades, where he was on a first name basis with the employees, and before talking business, they would always have a bit of small talk about what they had done since the last time they had met. Now you get impersonal service and long waits in line, with special service reserved for the bank’s “Privilege” clients.
He mentioned an address, Boedo 777, where he used to dance. I told him we had been taking classes just two blocks from there with Jorge Dispari. That part of Boedo, near Avenida San Juan, is a very famous tango neighborhood, where many well-known figures of this dance were born or lived for a while, with name plaques on a lot of buildings and street corners in their memory. There is actually a tango titled Boedo y San Juan, written and composed by Enrique Cadicamo, who grew up in that neighborhood. Like many tangos, it describes a nostalgic longing for the past, a love of the streets where the poet grew up, and the changes in the neighborhood as the old streets and buildings disappear . . .
We talked for nearly an hour (including the nearly twenty minutes spent waiting in line). As we said goodbye, he wished me a pleasant stay and said he hoped I will want to come back again one day.
peter | Buenos Aires, musicality, tango classes milongas in BsAs | Comments (2)Musicality – Edgardo Donato’s La melodía del corazón
Edgardo Donato’s music is special for me because of its upbeat, joyful rhythm — similar to D’Arienzo’s, but less driving, less insistent. As a dancer, I feel like his songs are inviting me to dance rather than insisting or driving me to the dance floor with an incessant beat. As a soloist, Donato also took the spotlight quite frequently with his violin, making his orchestra’s recordings more lyrical and melodic than most other Golden Age performers. In La melodía del corazón, he has a quite lengthy solo starting at around 35 seconds into the song.
In milongas in Europe, one can see quite a bit of energy and sometimes even acrobatics on the dance floor, but less of the simple pausing and dancing to different instruments within the same song that can be observed in milongas in Buenos Aires. It is these qualities that can give a milonga its flow and special energy, so I was very happy to find several videos of Sebastian and Mariana performing to La melodía del corazón. As far as I can tell, these are not choreographies, rather, the dancers know the music very intimately and improvise each dance in a way that expresses the qualities of the various parts of this song.
Sebastian Arce & Mariana Montes -- Dublin performance:
Watch how the quality of their movement changes two minutes into the video, when the violin solo part starts — it’s almost like slow motion, but watch Sebastian’s left feet for just a second at 2:13.
Sebastian Arce & Mariana Montes -- performance at La Viruta:
Here, the violin part starts at 53 seconds — again, note the flowing, soft movement they switch to immediately. At 1:07, they take a few quick, playful, rhythmical steps, then immediately return to the previous quality, slowly transitioning back to more complicated, faster movement over the next 15-20 seconds.
Sebastian Arce & Mariana Montes -- Sitges performance:
Unfortunately, the first few seconds of the song are cut off, but you know what to look for. The changes are obvious at 0:27 and at 0:41. Here, instead of a gradual transition into more energetic dancing, they preserve the flowing quality until the end of the violin solo.
Sebastian Arce & Mariana Montes -- Moscow performance:
One more beautiful interpretation of the same song. Again, note how the changes in the quality of their dancing follow the changes in the music.
peter | musicality | Comment (0)
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