A new year
I know it’s kind of late but happy 2011 to all the followers of this blog!
Since coming back to Singapore just after the New Year, I have been terribly busy with house moving and all the hassles associated with it. Thank god it’s more than 90% completed! 
Well, it seems the local tango community is in for a treat in 2011. Over the past week, I have received advance announcements of visiting teachers over the coming months, including of course something I am personally involved in, namely the visit of the wonderful couple Andres Laza Moreno and his partner Isabel Acuna (in planning since late last year) whom I met in Sydney last year. In fact, the list of teachers is already building up to almost middle of this year, and we are only 2 weeks into 2011! Interestingly, compared to previous years, many of these teachers will be staying beyond one week, or a weekend, as the case may be. A sign of growing community, perhaps?
Not really sure how everything is going to pan out but look on the bright side, overall the local tango community will be the one to benefit from all this flurry of activity!
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Music re-cataloguing
With the recent purchases of a bunch of CDs (and a couple more to come, I might add 
) and a new netbook, I have been on the prowl to tidy up and comb through the tags in my tango collection once again. The bulk of my collection is already in flac format, except for stuff that I have exchanged with friends which are variously in aac or mp3. For the new CDs I am using secure rips and encoding everything in flac (option -v) – hopefully to break from the shackles of Apple as far as DJing is concerned by the beginning of next year.
In the process I have “discovered” that I actually have more than I thought originally – albeit those additional materials only in digital format – and the lists (tango A-D and tango E-Z) on this blog have been duly updated. Two invaluable resources I have continually referred to are:
- Tobias’ wonderful database on almost everything related to tango!
- Tango discographies at tangodj.org
The tagging is done using foobar by the way. While there will be the inevitable human errors in any one source, hopefully by cross-referencing and more thorough this time around that the information will at least be more reliable in the long run. The joy of going digital!
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Reconnect with Troilo
Back when I started collecting music (and made heavily use of Stephen Brown’s excellent website) I quickly took a liking to the Anibal Troilo/Francisco Fiorentino combination. Over the intervening years I was to learn that due to the complexity inherent in Troilo’s music, it is in general more difficult to dance well to Troilo. This has also been borne out by my personal experiences and observations over. I suppose, perhaps as a result, and in conjunction with changes in musical taste, Troilo gradually fell out of favour, to be replaced by either the more rhythmic orchestras such as D’Arienzo, Biagi, and Rodriguez or the lyrical orchestras such as Di Sarli or Donato. However, and ironically, as I tried to put the advice of from a recent class with Javier into practice, namely to dance slower, I am rediscovering a liking for the syncopations of Troilo, albeit leaning more to the instrumental pieces (from early to mid 1940s) this time round.
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Some reflections
Simba’s reflections on 10 years of learning and dancing tango struck a chord with me. There is certainly a few parallels between his and my experiences. For instance, I started on the tango journey close to 10 years ago, also in a tango desert of a community. When I went to my first tango festival in Taipei in 2003 (the inaugural Taipei Tango Festival), I met Javier Rodriguez and Geraldine Rojas for the first time. Although I had seen them in CITA videos prior and been utterly impressed, I have to say the meeting with them did not have such a lasting impression. They were certainly brilliant dancers for sure, but I had other concerns to deal with – like, being to dance well technically… By the time I had matured more as a dancer, Javier Rodriguez was already with a different partner when I saw him again.
This is something Simba mentioned that stuck with me especially.
Before we can expect people to find their own tango, they have to see the real tango. Smell the real tango. Touch the real tango. Listen to the real tango. And feel the real tango.
Thinking back, I guess this was probably the main driving force in persevering with bringing international teachers like Javier Rodriguez to Singapore in the past few years, despite the expenses involved. Realistically, one or two encounters with good teachers – famous or not – will not dramatically improve how one dances*. In addition, no doubt each of us who perseveres with tango will discover his/her path to the final destination. However, as of now I firmly believe that it’s important to have the right image early on, an goal of the tango (although not necessarily in the technical sense) that has come before and something that can carry the torch for.
* Incidentally, this is important for event organisers and participant needs to realise in order to manage their expectations.
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