Youthful vals
Danced with a certain youthful abandon, in a sort of devil-may-care attitude. While their (Pablo Rodriguez and Noelia Hurtado) style may not be to everyone’s taste, I have usually enjoyed their energetic approach and a nice blend of traditional salon with neuvo ideas.
DJ 101
With the recent increase in milonga venues locally, I foresee a demand for more DJ’s who can arrange decent and danceable music. Now, drawing on my personal experiences and from reading sources online, here’s a basic list of skills I consider necessary for anyone starting out*:
- Understand the role of a DJ.
- Awareness of pros and cons of softwares available for the job.
- Basic approaches on how to a) “pace” for a milonga, b) plan the flow of tandas.
- Start to build up a collection: where, how of acquiring music.
- See/hear some sample tandas to understand the reasons for their construction.
- Develop a ear for danceable music**.
Finally, I think a part of DJ’s responsibility is to get to know your dancers so that you can cater to the right audience!
* Naturally this is not meant to be exhaustive or it won’t be 101 anymore!
** Given that some of the budding DJs may be inexperienced dancers themselves (e.g. as in the case for our community), this may be tough to begin with. One suggestion is to simply watch dance floor to see whether it is chaotic or not, i.e. lots of confused faces that is different to the “not-dancing-to-music” phenomena… 😉
Joy of dancing
This was meant to be the last post related to my trip to Buenos Aires in 2009, which unfortunately I never managed to complete satisfactorily, till now.
“Why do we dance Tango?”
To many people, and I am presuming that you are at least keen enough to have devoted some time to take classes to learn to dance Tango well since you are reading this blog, this may seem like a no-brainer question?
From my observations during the trip to Buenos Aires, the local Argentinians probably took up Tango for the following basic (although this is by no means authoritative) reasons: for the company (e.g. keeping in touch with friends, singles looking for companionship, etc.), earn a living (as instructors, organisers, etc.) but, perhaps most likely of all, for the pure enjoyment of Tango music and the dance itself.
On the other hand, for the endless stream of Tango tourists like ourselves, who finally made the long trek to Tango mecca, I suspect the most common reason for going to Buenos Aires is to improve our dancing. I mean, after spending quite a fortune in money and time, wouldn’t you want to get your money’s worth? We want to perfect our techniques and aim to be a better dancer in the technical sense.
On note-taking
Reading this interesting post about taking notes in classes got me thinking.
Firstly, I think oftentimes people don’t practice enough what they had learnt in workshops (here I mean workshops by guest – usually international – instructors) which is a shame really. Part of the reason is precisely due to lack of revision materials/notes/visuals, etc.
However, I have to admit, I have not always been a good student as far as note-taking was concerned. In fact, during the first 4-5 years I relied a lot on videos taken during classes**. My revision, which I still feel was extremely beneficial, consisted of watching over the same videos countless times during the post-workshop editing process (to remove unnecessary parts, adding section screens, etc.), for quick review in future. Sad to say, the “quick reviews in future” seldom took place but it was the first sitting which could take up to 10x the duration of the video clips which helped to jog the memory.