Archive for September 25th, 2008
The poetics of space
I haven’t seen Sally Potter’s “The Tango Lesson” since I saw it when it first came out. Today, on revisiting a clip from the film (above) since starting tango a year and five months ago, and having just come back from Buenos Aires, I was surprised to find that I actually recognize most of the milongueros dancing with her.
:-D
But more than anything, I miss those spaces.
“In the theater of the past that is constituted by memory, the stage setting maintains the characters in their dominant rôles. At times we think we know ourselves in time, when all we know is a sequence of fixations in the spaces of the being’s stability — a being who does not want to melt away, and who, even in the past, when he sets out in search of things past, wants time to “suspend” its flight. In its countless alveoli space contains compressed time. That is what space is for.” – Bachelard, The Poetics of Space
Going out to a milonga taking place at a dance studio, and going out to a milonga in a palatial 19th century café-mansion, with french windows opening onto stone balconies, feels so different. For me, even a basketball court would be nicer than a dance studio. It all comes down to what you’re used to, I guess.
My favorite milongas here in New York seem to take place in dance studios. One of them is very pretty, albeit tiny, with a real mural painting along one wall, and a decadent silk kimono hanging in the bathroom — the others are pretty sterile, sometimes smelling of a week’s worth of sweat and lysol. Countless times, I have wished that these milongas took place in a more beautiful space.
Then it’d be (almost) perfect…
