Knowing your music
While Pugliese has been my favourite for many years, from time to time I have felt inadequate in doing justice to the beautiful music and hesitate to ask people to dance when a tanda comes up. These days, I like to recall the words (paraphrased) of two teachers I took classes in the past whenever I dance to Pugliese and, of course, feel “free”!
Ney Melo: “Stay put until you can feel the music ‘bursting’ through and the sensation to take a step becomes overwhelming…”
Hsueh-tze Lee: “Play with the melody and slide into the next position instead of doing it in a hurry.”
Here’s an excellent example of dancing to Pugliese from the recently concluded Seoul Tango Festival. Not a dramatic piece like La Yumba, or Gallo Ciego, and with very simple (well, relatively speaking… 🙂 ) footwork but for me the most beautiful part is the mutual inter-play with the music. Need I say more!
More on walking
This appeared on a friend’s Facebook tonight. Apparently Jaiver Rodriguez, who will be arriving in Singapore in a few days’ time, said the following duirng Hong Kong leg of his current Asian tour with Stella Misse.
Javier: “When a man walks nicely, the woman dies in his embrace.”
Stella: “When a man walks badly, the woman wants to die.”
Well, as they say, the devil is in the details…
Flavours of milongas
After attending a variety of milongas during my brief stay in Buenos Aires (from the ultra traditional to something from the left field), it seems that there are two types of “milonga cultures”, for lack of a better term. By the way, I am not suggesting that they are mutually exclusive, but only that some milongas are more conducive for one or the other types of behaviours, and they do tend to co-exist within the same milonga, to a more or less degree.
The first type is where people – mostly going alone – go for the sole purpose of dancing Tango. Apart from few simple greetings when people first arrive, there is really very social interaction except on the dance floor at the start of each song – especially less so among the ladies. When people feel moved by the music, they cabeceo, dance, separate to return to their seats and the process is repeated all over again when the next “good” tanda comes up. Some examples are the milongas at Plaza Bohemia and El Beso.
Then there are the milongas where people tend to go with a bunch of friends and where more socialising/dancing among friends occur. In general, the mood tends to be more informal. Some typical examples include Niño Bien, Salon Canning, Sunderland and, well, La Viruta. From my experience, these milongas also tend to be more (single) visitor-friendly than others. Naturally there are still many more in between the two extremes.
Putting aside stylistic considerations, it’s therefore not surprising which types of milongas the young people (Argentinian or otherwise) preferred…
Likes and dislikes
The following is a list of the milongas I had a good time at (or not, as it were). It’s not a very “scientific” study but simply my experiences during a 3-week stay. However, having said that, I want to add one qualifier that, as with any public event, it is really the luck of the draw what type of crowd you encounter on any given night, so it’s quite possible your experiences can differ from mine. Finally, while the negative experiences were all based on a single visit, in general I tended to make return visits only if the initial experience was enjoyable.
Milongas I really enjoyed:
- Nino Bien (Monday, Friday): relaxed and good dancing. Good selection of foods served here.
- Lo de Celia (Friday): very homely atmosphere; decent dancing.
- Lujos (Thursday, Sunday): good crowd and good dancing. It did not hurt that, through our friend, we were able to befriend the organisers and usually had decent seats. 😉
- Sunderland (Saturday): huge dance floor and in my opinion good neighbourhood ambience despite being held on a basketball court. The major downside was it is quite far and the taxi fares not cheap unless you can go with a bunch of friends. Don’t miss the fantastic and big beef steak (forgot the exact name?)!
- El Beso (Sunday): good crowd and good dancing.
