Tango and Chaos (rebuilt)

Training the Eye (Continued) We should remember that this dancing is not necessarily meant to be aesthetically pleasing (although it is to me), and that Alej and Pocho aren't trying to demonstrate anything. They are simply riding the music together… or maybe riding the  entrega  of the music. What we want to do is to take a look inside. We're trying to "see" what it feels like to dance with a good milonguero. We want to understand what Alej means when she says that milongueros “feel the music with their whole body”. In this video, Pocho is only using three or four variations of the basic elements of tango—but he uses them in exactly the right way, and at just the right time. Here's something that may help: In the video you can see the feet and legs of some of the other people on the floor. They’re not bad dancers, but they’re not at Pocho’s level. Throughout this short clip Pocho hesitates, and waits for surges in the music—but notice the feet of the other ...

Training the Eye Sometimes I check out the tango videos that people post on the Internet. They're often accompanied by comments about how spectacular the dancing is—but I usually don't find them very interesting. And if I ask Alejandra to take a look, she usually feels the same way. I think Alej and I must be looking for different things—so I’d like to take another look at a video we posted earlier to see if we can show more clearly what it is we look for in tango. It’s a short clip of Alejandra and Pocho we used in the  Entrega  article ( page 19, Chapter 3 ). When I first posted it, Alej didn’t like it much. She said, “I remember that one. It’s just normal dancing. I hadn’t danced with Pocho in a long time, and you can see I’m not sure which way he’s going to go after he pauses.” But that’s not really important. We used it earlier in Chapter 3 to show some of the elements of women’s technique, and now I'd like to use it here for something else: What Alej sa...

The Perfect Tango I know... tango isn’t science. You can’t measure it by any objective standard. But I have seen two dances that are so good that I simply can’t imagine a way to make them better—so for me, they're "perfect". We've already shown one of them. It's the first video we posted of Ismael dancing to  No Me Extraña . Now, here is the second one. It's a video of Miguel Balbi dancing to Biaggi's  El Trece  at a party in  Almagro . Watch how he moves to the music: At the end of the video you can hear Alberto Dassieu comment,  "Muy bien pareja de bailarines." — "A very good pair of dancers". For the milongueros, this is the absolute essence of what dancing tango is about: a pure, unadorned expression of the music; unpretentious and simple on its surface, but profoundly complex in its use of cadence and melody. To see what's really happening here—to actually get a feel for it—you should first just listen to this tang...

El Chino This next video is the first one Alej and I had a real disagreement about. I’ve been watching it for about two years, and I’ve learned a lot from it... but Alej felt that people from outside the milongas wouldn’t be able to see it. She thought they might think it was less interesting or less exciting than the other videos we've put here. She even felt that some people would think the dancing wasn’t as “good” as the others. It is a clear change from what we’ve shown before—but remember, there are lots of different kinds of tango. To me,  El Chino  and Ophelia represent an older and quieter tango that’s more common to the “ salida del sabado ” tradition in the neighborhoods (Saturday night milongas with dinner and dancing for couples), than to the more frenetic milongas downtown. Here are  El Chino  and Ophelia dancing to one of my all time favorite tangos,  Como se Muere de Amor  ("How She Dies for Love"): I’ve watched this one so many t...

Gerard & Alej Video (continued) Let's talk about the Gerard and Alej video from the previous page for a minute. Gerard's way of expressing the music is to use a lot of energy, and to constantly vary his velocity. He's always speeding up and slowing down. It happens in his  corridas  (a run of steps), and also in his  giros . Gerard and Alej surge forward in the  corridas,  then they slow, hesitate, and go again. At times, Gerard runs back, hesitates, switches over to Alej's left, and then runs forward again. Throughout, he inserts  giros , and he varies the rate of turn to match the music—even more than Carlos and Nelida. For me, it's a very active, exciting way to dance tango—it's like he and Alej are riding the music on a roller coaster. He doesn't worry a lot about the niceties of posture or step; all of his passion goes into the movement. But that doesn't mean it isn't sophisticated—in fact Gerard is one of the most complex dancers in tang...

"Five Runs" in  Vals We're getting farther and farther off the track. The plan was to move from basics to the more complex secrets of the milongueros, but we've already skipped over the fundamentals, and now we're heading off into some difficult  vals  cadences. But we're rolling, so let's stay with it. Please just keep in mind that these pages about cadence, and also the upcoming one about  enrosques , are very advanced tango. Only a small percentage of dancers do them, and it's a waste of time to attempt any of them without very solid fundamentals and a complete understanding of the music. **** Here comes one of my very first videos. One afternoon Alej and I were dancing, and I mentioned I'd like to get a good  vals  on film. So she said, you want  vals , you got  vals ! Then she jumped up, asked Dany to put on a  vals  tanda, and went over and asked Gerard Gellé to dance with her so I could film it. Now, Gerard can be grumpy....