La Nuit Blanche

From a discussion that’s going on right now in New York Tango list — I really liked this. What do you think?

Copy-pasted verbatim:

(Wow, something that’s not an ad for a milonga on this list? amazing.
Perhaps we can see more of that in the future.)

Travis posted this here a few days ago:
> In the 12 years or so that I’ve been dancing tango I’ve always been
> knocked over by dancer’s who studied with Gustavo Naveira. Whether I
> was studying with a leader or dancing with a follower I was impressed.
> It seems like the followers dance in a different plane that the rest
> of mere mortals. Starting two years ago I became a student of the
> master myself and have been steadily learning what it means to be an
> “Active Follower”. He speaks about the role of the follower being an
> equal partner. When I dance socially for the most part I do not see
> that with followers. So I ask the community, what do you think it
> means to be a follower? thanks

That’s a bit of a challenge: “My teacher’s way is better than everyone
else’s, and why aren’t you all like that?” I think you’d be more
likely to get a constructive dialog going if you were a little more
oblique. (This is not, of course, a lesson I’ve fully learned myself…)

That said, I like active followers, but I have never heard anyone
describe what that means. To me, an active follower is someone who
occasionally decides that she wants to dance the music in a particular
way, and leads her leader to do so. It’s not back-leading, it’s not
forced, it’s true leading. And I can’t imagine how hard it must be for
followers to figure out how to do that without being unpleasant, which
is why I think very few do it well. Certainly it’s not often taught. I
remember when I was taking group classes with Robin Thomas once or
twice he asked followers to practice slowing down leaders at certain
points in the music, and leaders were supposed to follow this lead. I
have dome something similar in my classes a few times. But for a
follower to do more than that, she must be comfortable not only with
the techniques of whatever steps she has to be executing at the time,
but she also has to understand how her leader is leading it, so she
knows when it’s possible to alter the flow of his movement without
breaking it. I suspect that this is in general nearly impossible if
she is not also at least a competent leader herself, and I have never
danced with a good active follower who wasn’t one.

There’s another really big challenge facing any follower who wants to
learn to be active. Most leaders don’t know what to do with an active
follower. I know that it’s not uncommon for me to be dancing with a
good active follower and realize just a fraction of a second too late
that I really should have done something else in order to accommodate
her (this comes from my failings as a follower). Dealing with active
followers must be utterly confounding to leaders who aren’t very
familiar with them- which is most leaders. Even, I suspect, most
“good” leaders (and how you judge “good” goes way beyond what I’m
willing to get into here).

I do think that an active follower is a more equal partner in the
dance. When I teach about leading and following I try to get my
students to see it as a means of communication. The more active the
follower, the more it becomes like a two-way discussion, and less like
a stream of directions. This means that the follower must speak up
enough to be heard, but not shout: her intention must be conveyed back
to the leader through the embrace, not just executed in her own body,
but she can’t be rigid and forceful (any more than a good leader would
be). On the flip side, the leader must be willing to hear what she’s
saying: he must respond to the change of the embrace the follower is
creating. In other words, he has to follow. We should have a term for
this sort of leader to match “active” following- how about a
“responsive” leader?

You said that Gustavo talks about an equal partnership. I have a hard
time imagining a truly equal partnership. Even very active followers
spend the majority of their time following. Perhaps dancers far far
better than me dance in truly “equal” partnership, but I doubt it. I
don’t think I’ve ever seen such a thing. Although perhaps “equal” is
the wrong word, because I don’t think followers have an inferior role.
Rather, I’d say that the leader is the person who creates the majority
of the dance, while the follower executes it, and that both are
equally necessary. (Hm, I seem to have recreated “it takes two to
tango” with a lot more words… oh well.) If the leader didn’t do
that, he’d be following, and his partner would be leading, regardless
of how the embrace was shaped.

To directly address your question… a follower does what you lead.
That’s all it takes to be a follower, even a good follower, and I’ve
had some really nice dances with women who do just that. But followers
can add a new dimension to their dance by becoming active.

For anyone who is looking to become a better active follower, or a
more responsive leader, my recommendation is that you make a serious
effort to learn the opposite role. It’ll improve all your tango, not
just this aspect of it.

/a

“…the New Generation program “Volver al Sur” (“Return to the South”) featured four guest artists: Guillermina Quiroga and Cesar Coelho, and Natalia Hills and Gabriel Misse. Where many others, including the New Generation artistic director and choreographer Dardo Galletto, toy with the tango and dilute it out of recognition, these two couples at once swept the audience into the steps, rhythms, body language and music that are the tango’s essence. And with each appearance — each pair doing four duets during the program — they took on not just new costumes but also new moods, revealing still more of what the tango can be.

“Ms. Quiroga and Mr. Coelho often showed the fluent legato that can make the tango so insidiously seductive. Her manner tended to be refined and enigmatic, whereas his was the brusque assertiveness of the self-made man, and at first this contrast made their partnership exciting. The way she maintained her dignity while her spine arched back in a beautiful display of ardor or while she was being lifted had its beauties. All too soon, though, their over-reliance on showy lifts and catches became tiresome. Not even Ms. Quiroga can look ladylike in a dress when being held overhead with arms and legs spread-eagled and being rotated like helicopter blades…”

(Click image for the article)

I was talking with a friend of mine last night, and she told me that she tries to think of her home city as one big huge practica, in preparation for her next trip to Buenos Aires.

No matter what the event — milonga, festival, workshop, birthday, wedding, housewarming, or a real practica — she just tries to get as much dancing in so she won’t be “too rusty” the next time she goes to Argentina.

Hmmm.

(No wonder so many people look and feel like they’re practicing here in the New York milongas…)

6+ months of practica doesn’t sound like too much fun to me, although, apparently, this curbs her yearning for BsAs somewhat.  Not surprisingly, her dancecard has been getting emptier and emptier…

I haven’t been dancing much.  I miss seeing my friends, but the thought of going to the same old dilapidated venues, to the same old DJs, to the same old tangorillas creating havoc on the dancefloors, to the same old cliques that don’t speak to each other, to the same old drama of who doesn’t like whom and who’s getting a big ego these days, blah blah, day in and day out…

It’s all so tiring, you know, and my desire to take my shoes with me on a night out just evaporates.

I miss the variety of the tango scene in Buenos Aires.  Ofcourse, everyone has the local milonga they go to regularly (which do not even compare to most of the milongas in New York City), but one can go to a different milonga every night of the week for a month, and still not have tasted everything the city has to offer in terms of tango.

I think it’s time for some festivals.

I can forgive a crappy floor, as long as there’s some consistancy.  Or, as long as it’s level, I can be happy dancing on tarmac.

However, a crappy floor that is also simulating ocean waves makes me really mad.  Up down up down…  I can’t tell where my toe or heel will end up, so my steps fall too short or too long every other beat, and my knees buckle everytime I miscalculate.  So, I guess this is good-bye to one milonga here in New York.

:-/

Well, I was getting annoyed there anyway.  Every time I go, they’d take pictures of me and post them up on their internet photo album, then use them as advertising for their next milonga.  They do this to everyone who goes there.  I have five objections to this:

One, the pictures are fugly.
Two, they do this without asking my permission.
Three, the constant camera flash disrupts my dancing.
Four, the pictures are fugly.
Five, did I mention the pictures are fugly?

I don’t know how people keep going there.  I don’t know how I’ve kept going there.

In any case, for whatever reason, no more, para mi.

(God, I miss Canning…)

Mariana, 2008

In my five weeks in Buenos Aires, I didn’t take any classes, and didn’t schedule any privates. I took one workshop with Gaston and Moira at Tango Brujo on musicality (which was, by the way, extremely difficult and over my head!). And just danced in the milongas during the nights of my stay.

Coming back to New York, people have been telling me my dance has evolved to another level. Nothing specific… Technique? Posture? Footwork? Embrace? Play? Sensitivity? Connection? In terms of the above, the specifics probably haven’t changed much since I left and (reluctantly) returned to New York. But yes, I myself feel that something has changed.

Looking back to the last few days of my trip, sad that I was leaving so soon, I remember regretting not having taken more classes and workshops… That I could have scheduled at least one private with a celebrated teacher. :-( But Buenos Aires meant more to me than just dancing. Ofcourse, as a tango dancer on her first trip to the city of tango, the first thing I wanted to do as soon as I got off the plane was run, run, run to a milonga. But a huge, glimmering new city and a beautiful man beckoned… one thing led to another, and I didn’t have any time for dancing during the day.

It was the best thing that could have happened to me.

What I have realised in Buenos Aires during my short time there, is that tango is not about the dance. It sounds funny to say it, but tango is not about tango. What I have felt, and what I have understood from being there, is that tango is about being porteño. The dance is merely the means by which a man and a woman can live inside an intensified, heightened state of being for brief moments at a time. That state of existence is the state of being a man and a porteño, of being a woman and a porteña, of being Argentine in the city of Buenos Aires, in a wonderfully distilled form. The expression of (part of) the essence of being a man or a woman in Buenos Aires from its inception all the way through the years till the ever-present changeable Now — that is the tango.

The tango and the world of the milonga were made by something. And that something is the city of Buenos Aires itself, and all of its people, its experience within the context of the rest of the country, Latin America, the world. The experience of the city as an entity in itself — how its unique history has imprinted itself upon the gestures, walk, speech, emotion, joys, fears, suffering, poetry, music, dance, food, politics, geneology, buildings, dreams, life, death, collective memory, historical memory of its citizens — is the stuff that tango is made of. It was essential that I spent time away from the milonga, and inside the city that had created it. If it weren’t for Buenos Aires and its people that define this city and give it meaning, there would be no tango.

After a whirlwind day of spending time with my Lover’s family, his childhood friends, his university professor, with strangers I’ve approached to take their pictures leading to random conversations in broken castellano perched on the window-sills of cafes, with the gentlemen waiting for friends on the streets of every barrio, with the kids who helped me on the colectívos, with the shop-girls on pop music and fashion in the boutiques of Palermo, with the tiny old woman who stopped me and asked me to help her ring the buzzer of her daughter’s apartment, with the candy-men on weaving chocolate in the artesanal workshops, with the waiters at pizza parlours recounting the stories behind the pictures hanging on their walls, hanging high up from the lamp-posts with noisy students watching a parade of Okinawans celebrating the 100th anniversary of their immigration to Argentina, with the newspaper men swearing at the Bolivian demonstrators on Corrientes, the scent of the leather chairs in the cinema San Martín, the shade of pink on the old cracked walls of ancient local cafes, the light of the afternoon sun seeping through the blinds and onto my Lover’s nakedness as we made love in the wintery afternoon, the sight of mysterious hands of old women crouched on the pavement selling spices, the careful hesitation of a fruit-seller handpicking strawberries for me from his basket, the 6-year-old gypsy-boy obediently posing for me, his shining eyes patiently upon me as I set up my tripod to take his portrait…

After all that, I would spend a few hours at a milonga late at night… and I would finally understand. The city had touched me — seeped into me — and its touch manifested itself upon me in every way, including my tango.

I am not, and never can be porteña, because I have my own history, my own childhood imprinted upon me that cannot be changed, my own language I revert to when I talk in my sleep. But while I was there, I was being enfolded, embraced — lovingly — by Buenos Aires, and I was swooning in the sweetness of my first reception. That is what changed in my dance. That is what I brought back with me. That is what New York is lacking — what is absent in the tango and the milongas of the city I call home. That is what is (already!) fading from my dance. That is why I am still in mourning!

A little manifesto:

Art is not a world democracy.
There is no Right or Wrong in art.
Although there is Good Art, and Bad Art.
Then, apart from talent and movement, good or bad, there is also History and Experience. Which make up the Soul of a work of art.

Sure, there is a universality in Art, as in the Tango, which is the reason it is so appealing to the rest of the world, crossing enormous cultural boundaries. Themes like love, loss, injustice, beauty, the dispossessed, melancholy, longing, pain, lampposts, trumpets… in the form of a lovely song…  These things exist across the entire human universe.

However, a love song in the form of a tango, with those particular lyrics, with that particular melody, sung in this particular language, spoken with that particular accent? That is what makes this love song an Argentine love song, this is what makes it porteño. And the same goes for the dance, in the way it is danced in one particular city.

Many who have never been to Buenos Aires dance tango very well. A few of them are incredible dancers. But the soul they bring into their tango is not Argentine.  The city is not a part of their history. It has no place in their experience. It is absent from their dance, simply because they have never been there.

미인도 (Miindo, or “Portrait of a Beauty”), circa late 17th century
Painter: Hyewon, a.k.a. Shin, Yun-Bok

My favorite painter in the whole world is Hyewon, of the Joseon Dynasty of Korea, born in the mid 17th century.  The above is his most famous painting, of a mysterious woman purported to be the legendary kisaeng-poetess Hwang, Jin-Yi, also known as “Myeongwol” (“bright moon”).

Right now, a semi-fictional-biographical film is being made about the painter and his work, and I am really excited. So I’ve been scouring youtube for a trailer of the film, and lo and behold — the music score used for the teaser is a tango. :-D

An interesting version, played with an ajaeng, a traditional Korean 7-stringed zither played with a long thin wooden stick.  You can see some of Hyewon’s paintings in the above video.

Here is another trailer of the film I found:

And yes.  Those fabulous wigs were really worn two hundred years ago in Korea!

(I think I was born in the wrong century).

This is really strange.

I don’t really know what to say…

…swingy curly wig with hat, and all.

I like the dancing itself, you know?

If only he weren’t wearing so much makeup, and that red jacket with raver pants, and those horrible sunglasses…  Then I could see him dancing without all the cringing.