On this first video Maria and Alexandr Frolov are dancing Invierno played by “Solo Tango Orquesta Tipica”. So we have the Argentine - Russia connection!
When we get more south we meet the same couple in Hong Kong!
I like the small musical jerk they use every now and then. You find an example on this picture, Check the time there and check it on the video! then you can enjoy even the musical accent to this!
Here you have an old milonga summary of Jorge Torres workshop. I think he is one of the teachers who often had his baby around the workshop floor and on the videos. I wonder how the baby thinks about the dance today?
Here a more recent video and at earlier stages but still a sweet family picture. I wonder if Michelle and Joachim are going to have a new baby?
I came across this Chicho interview again and refreshed some information lost during the years! I remember that he has been working together with Naveira and Salas but in this interview he strongly states how important impact Naveira has had on him. He talks also about the base for his dance as well as the changing opinions about him!
This time Giorgio has come together with Francesca for a workshop weekend in town. This video is from the Sunday milonga called 3Esquinas. The workshop starts usually at 3.30 PM and the milonga at 5PM. Then we have four hours to spend on the floor!
This performance was not the only specialty for this Sunday but the event was visited by Los Rivarolas - Carlos y Maria - appreciated traditional tango dancers! Can you find them in the crowd?
I usually don't like this type of music which reminds me about concert but this video made something with me. The combination of movements and the music has had impact on me and I am geting curious. What steps could I find from this music landscape?
I liked the very most the roughly done sandwiches following the roughness in music beautifully! Click here if you want to get there directly https://youtu.be/8OrBB3MVgJU?t=2m31s
I filmed the milonga too but the rest of the songs I just enjoyed! You find them on FB.
If you want to know some more about Los Rivarolas!
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlos_Rivarola
This autumn I will be training on Wednesday practica hosted by TangoNorte, the oldest tango community in Stockholm. Yes it looks empty but I was so busy all the evening so the fotos were taken when it was closed down . . . .
On some Saturdays there is a Milonga Piccola for three hours dance (18-21). It is the most formal milonga here with role based seating (I am placed among the leaders). When you arrived one of the hosts will welcome you and suggest a seat available. (The Pictures: here we have the same situation - I was dancing all the time and the picture was taken in the very end of the event)
Sundays we have a matine milonga called 3Esquinas; usually 17-21PM. Maximo who is running the milonga organizes orchestra visits as well as teachers.
These and the restaurant Grammofon are the places I visit most often when at home!
The music starts at 7 PM on Tuesdays but it is not very crowded at the beginning so it is comfortable to test new figures before you throw them in to a steamy dance later in the evening! This is a restaurang so you can start the evening one hour earlier with a dinner for energy to get through the night!
The well known tango DJ - Tanda of the week - Antti has other skills too!
It is nice to find out that tango is including so much more activities than ordinary dance festivals!
We maybe meet some where else this year! Who knows?
Lucky me to hit this video from Brussels Tango Festival again and I was moved near to tears by the Edith Piaf vals she and Fernando Sanchez were dancing that year! Nearly painfully enjoyable!
Her excellent technique is always visible but the playfulness and musicality came to glow this time!
The year after, 2016, she danced with Chicho and proved the same!
Every now and then there is a campaign for more showers to the dancers! I agree it is nice to dance with someone who smells good or just neutral but it seems that the shower maybe is not enough for some of us.
According to this article there is two types of sweat glands; one for the heat control and the other to remove some substances from the body. So it is not always a missing shower causing problem but the ingredients in your meal can attract a partner or make him/her to break a tanda. It seems that there are several ingredients to be blamed - onions, cauliflower, curry, meat and so on . . .
or should the question be like Is tango a more intimate dance than all the other dances?
you can be that intimate only with your near friends and therefor it is exclusionary
There are benefits to train together with your peers! You learn about the musicality - more so with a good choreographer! How to relax in the moves so the the performance looks like improvised and still stay synchronized with your peers!
There were several groups in the competition but tis one I like a lot!
Without a serious survey I still think that Leo and Eugenia are the couple who has done most performaces with a whole story placed into one song! Here you have one of them!
First time on an ordinary milonga this term and I fell to my knees in front of the follower! (No living thing was harmed in the prosess!)
On the other hand I have managed 3 encuentro milongas in same pants without any problem. I think my feet are working differently in these two types of milongas! At an encuentro I never have had two feet in same leg . . . hmmm
This is a tango event organized by my home community! One tango dancer was flying over on warm-air-baloon filming this video. It seems to be in the beginning of the evening so there is still only few dancers but the number of white chairs shows the expectations for this summer evening!
This is a facebook video so I cannot embed it here but if you click the link below you can get the whole thing with sound too! (It was posted 27th of July 2016)
During last weekend they have been dancing in Shanghai! This is the 6th festival and the first time I *participated* - I did it virtually via a live link provided by my Korean Facebook friend. With other words I was sitting on my soffa at home watching the live link showing me the performances and later on the dancing! All that without any delay!! The time difference is working for me because the performances were some time after the midnight but it was 6 or 7 PM here in Nordic so I could watch them simultaneously with my friends in Shanghai.
The live fb window looks like this with a red eye sybol and a number for the onlookers.
I cannot link any fb videos directly here you get just some links in public mode.
https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100009788375964
(I didn't find any method to link individual videos but with this link you come to his fb profile and can find several performances and beautiful dance crowd videos there around the weekend 24.07.2016)
The organizers have exposed the female dancers most! In the program you can find Guillermina Quiroga, Stella Missé and Alejandra Gutty highlighted and their partners are presented further in to the site.
Here some lines about the organizers presented on the page:
TangoBang, started 2008, has been known the best Tango School and Organizers in Shanghai. Matias Sotto (Argentina) and Vivian Yeh (Taiwan) the two Tango Fanatics that have more than 10 years teaching and dancing experience met in Buenos Aires and are giving Tango lessons and organizing milongas together in regular basic, 5 days a week in Shanghai.
TangoBang has been working closly with Argentina Counsulate to introduce the Tango Culture to Shanghai. World Known Tango Masters have been brought from Buenos Aires for Tango Workshop and shows included: Geraldin Rojas y Ezequiel Paludi, Damian Essell y Nancy Louzan, Pablo Giorgini y Noelia Coletti, Fabian Peralta y Virginia Pandolfi, Analia Carreño y Luis Ramirez, Martin Maldonado y Maurizio Ghella. During 2010 Shanghai EXPO, the two parties hosted several successful Tango events in Argentina Pavilion, including the first ever milonga in EXPO, that brought Argentina Tango to Shanghai, China, and the visitors from all over the world.
In 2011, TangoBang successfully hosted the 1st Shanghai International Tango Festival. Tangueros around the world joined the festival was impressed by the passion and the standard of dance in Shanghai.
I have found no videos from the Festival 2016 so I post one from last year but I promise to update as soon as I get to know a new one!
Below you will find the organizers, Mattias and Vivian, performing!
They are thr most touching couple for me thesee days!
Often times I am near the tears through the video and I watch it again and again. Not happening with any other couple!
Her body moves like a floating whiplash to music and he seems to offer the adventurous enough interpretation of the music for her!
Here two tango advertisement from the Finnish tango community!
The first one has it's connection to sauna - a very central concept in the Finnish everyday life - here it gets it's place on a marathon ad. I think it is quite natural this marathon will be warm, very warm!
According to this news clip the body temperature pattern can reveale if you are in love. The consequensies for a couple could be devastating if a free test will be available in future. There could be terrifying options for bodies which are functioning significantly different and test results will segregate them to a lonely life.
On the other hand there could be different use for this kind of checks! For example there maybe is a difference in temperature when you are in a PRACTICA mode and your brain is monitoring your movements and planning the coming steps compared to when your are actually dancing. I think that in the DANCING mode your brain is in a different state and the emotions are more active, you feel your dance. This could produce a different thermographic pattern, noticable in an external device. It could reveal at what level your dancing shifts back to practica level, when you need to think how to dance. This shift is different for different dancers and it goes together with the skil level. The more skilled couple the later the shift comes!
So in the future the organicer asks you to dance, points her mobile phone at you and places you to level x on the workshop weekend!
Here you have the link to the love version of the body thermography test:
Are you a DJ and for the moment unsure about a song; Is it danceable or not? Does it put the dancers in fire? According to a colleague of yours you can use the Youtube as tool to check it out! If there is a lot performances using that song it could be a real hit at your milonga! But pay attention! There are fals friends like Libertango It is enormous popular as a exhibition song but it is very seldom played in a milonga. I think the only occasion per year for me is the summermilonga; a large informal outdoor milonga for several hundreds of dancers every Friday night - there we will hear it even this summer the Gace Jones version, please! Here is the portal I builded around this song. The subtitles poping up give you a playlist, just cklick the smal video icon to choose that path!
(This youtube solution works only on a computer, sorry for that)
During this song they are dancing with a new partner and the new kind of song adds up a lot to the complexity of the performance! This is really testing the edges of their combined skills.
I have a deep respect for the Fernando Sanchez skill and technical knowledge he has. I have had only one weekend with a few workshops to base my opinion on but he is a great leader with a clear analysis how the movements are created and easy way to communicate his points to a student.
Roxana has developed to be a radiant performing diva without the negative sides of that word. Together here they find the music wonderfully and the performance is playful joyful
Check her smiles on the way!
Roxana Suarez y Fernando Sanchez, 26/04/2015, Brussels Tango Festival, Random couples #2/5 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdtqoOVo5Kk .
Murat Erdemsel is a visual artist too and he has made many efforts, more than anyone I know, to show the dance and music in visual form. Here is one where Sigrid and he have devices attached on their bodies and the researchers show the colorful dance pattern on the wall.
The first part of pista training is formed as a information section on a flight. You may use these clips as a information before a milonga - posted in an information mail about the event or on a facebook site.
Peninsula has been in Argentina for long periods studying tango and Spanish. If I do remember it right she started her tango studies as a Copes student and for a later days her development has been guided by the appreciated tango pedagogues Carlos Peres and Rosa Forte.
Here she is dancing a walz with Yasmin Karatuna, a gorgeous follower.
Jinsuk Muchacha was her follower on the first videos I spotted at Youtube.
Fabiano Sharna is a longtime female leader who started among the first female leaders in the world to lead in public!
Here some of the thoughts she want to share with us others
. . . report greater satisfaction with their overall social tango experience when they share learning and dancing time with other women.
. . . Beyond my own story, though, one of the biggest reasons I continue to offer events for women is simply to keep them dancing! I want tango to be healthy and inspiring for women and the truth is that it is not always that.
. . . Because when women DO stay involved for the long haul, and find ways to enjoy tango on their own terms, everyone wins! The community as a whole grows stronger and benefits both from their dancing skills and also from a multitude of creative contributions that range from DJ-ing to dressmaking.
The whole story you can find via the link below: http://www.sharnafabiano.com/blog/2016/4/27/lady-leaders She has been working on these aspects for a long time. Here her thoughts from 2011
"If we are dependent on having a “good partner”, then we aren’t actually very good dancers."
This was the essence of the blog linked below!
When you are only dancing with partners who are vigorously compensating your low skill level to keep the dance going on you are developing a wrong image about your skill. You probably are not working on the most severe problems in your technique because you are not aware of them, you newer meet your devils.
The whole story! https://karenkaye.net/2015/06/13/delusions-of-competence/
I still think that the BEST COMBO is when the partners are about at the same level!
It seems that there is quite concrete way to find out if a group has reach a stage when a polarization of the group will split the it to two parts. When I was aware of this mechanism I became more calm and the split was easier to accept.
This article points out that the dynamics for groups and relationships seems to have different mechanisms. For groups the high number of shared connections is good but for relationship more separated friendship clusters are stabilizing the couple.
During my tango years I have become aware of the fact that we are transforming a simple process of dancing to something difficult! We define the distances, the way we approach the dance partner and all the other small details presented. Your can open a door but if you need to do it in the Finnish way - then the whole process will turn to VERY complicated collection of steps which are nearly impossible to perform smoothly!
When watching this old video you could think about your tango history in a class!
the rhythmically correct way, the critical left foot step, to change weight correctly
some other similarities?
There are English subtitles for you if your Finish language skills need some support
Shouldn't we start to reclaim the easy way to learn?
She visited Buenos Aires and bought shoes. Different colors but same model, the only one fitting her capricious feet.
At home the pairs were worn out after months of dancing but she liked the model and the old lady who was running the shop was trusted. So the next pair was ordered at distance and was delivered across the Atlantic.
It was a disaster. The new pair did not fit.
After some time she was traveling to Buenos Aires again and the shoes with her!
The shopkeeper took a good look at the model, checked the dimensions, asked some questions about my friends special needs and when there wasn't any she said that the shoes were wrongly build!
The front part was size 37 as it should but the heel belonged to a size 38. That was the reason of the bad fit. But that wasn't a problem for her because they could rebuild the shoe, open up the heel and place a correct size 37 there.
When my friend showed the reminds of the earlier pairs, the highly beloved ones, she offered to restore them. Her team could open up the shoe, replace some of the worn out parts and then complete the reparation. That message gave back happy pista for her and some of the other followers my friend met there!
Asia did participitate in the tango boom before the wwII. Here we have a Korean dancer singing a tango. Seung-Hee Choi - A Garden in Italy 1936
Yuna Kim is not a dancer but a skater and she is sharing the underlying Korean musicality! You may watch the whole performance but if in a hurry check the link to the English speaking commentator who is extatic about her musicality! Starts at 3m10s
As you see it looks different now! Hopefully it is easier to find the postings you are interested in!
Some of the old functions are hidden in the very right side edge! Just hover around there and they will pop up again like in this picture attached.
This dynamic layout provides us the possibility to explore the blog in different ways - YOU decide!!
Check the alternatives under the blog name CARAMBA!
My personal favorite is the second alternative from the left, the light grey one - Flipcard! You get a thump nail for every posting and this gives you a easy overall picture of the total blog content.
Just after the New Year I participated in the Encuentro Milonguero Notches de Invierno in Raichenau, Austria. This was my second time and the event was nice and as well organized as ever!
I had my new camera with me producing videos only in H265 format and it seems to be a bigger problem to get good editing option for that . . .
Here anyhow some of the photos taken with the high speed option! With other words the base for these GIF animations are ordinary photos taken in sequence.
The dancing one of the nights!
. . . and clearing the pista!
Address to the website
http://www.nochesdeinvierno.com/en/
According to the stories from the early days of tango the mothers were following their daughters to the milonga! They were sitting there and watching what was going on and taking care of the young family members. I can see the virtual scenery where these mothers are sitting in the back ground, in the shadows of a milonga and some of them are knitting so the time was not waisted.
Yesterday evening I have seen the opposite!
The daughter was sitting in the milonga sofa and knitting! She was knitting and meanwhile her mother took the tandas!
We have a very popular Sunday late afternoon milonga called 3Esquinas with different DJs.
My exceptional Saturday mood had calmed down but the dancing was still ok. The thing not ok was the loud volume preferred by the DJ and organizer!
I have on my phone a basic type of decibel indicator and the level for this night was constantly over 80db and many times 85db.
I did talk to the dj and he even came to the pista for a check and YES! he turned the volume down for a while but it did creep upwards again quite soon.
The organizer loves chacarera and every now and then there is a workshop and one or two dance options during the following milonga!
If you are interested to have a healthy music volume try to download an app for your mobile. When you can show the actual noise level in the room it is easier to discuss - maybe the only option - and to find a sound level below the harmful one.
(Today the only milonga (among the few I am visiting regularly) where they keep the sound level on a nice level is the RuntRunt milonga! )
Last weekend I started my Saturday round with very low expectations similar to the grey November weather outside. The first stop was Comme il faut - a monthly milonga with strict traditional setup - where I usually have good tandas. But not this time - I just couldn't get in to right mood, just couldn't get into the music or connect to the followers. Only the most experienced followers could reach to me at the bottom of this evening!
I left the place around 9PM to get to my second stop. It was a walk in the darkness.
At arrival I decided to fulfill my promise to dance some tandas and then go home. I started the tanda with my longtime partner and after a half tanda we nearly fell down when she suddenly went to an unleaded sideways volgada in a direction where I had just a fraction of possibility to support her.
But this was the start signal for an amazing night!
After that our bodies started to cooperate seamlessly in a amazing way. Her movements have never been so relaxed and exact! My body must have moved in a similar way because we got deep into an exalted flow and you can not reach there alone but both need to be in the same mood!
We did all the tandas we could manage before we noticed the first signs of fatigue. I danced just one more tanda and left for home. Such a highly memorable night!
Milonga RuntRunt
RuntRunt is also the only milonga keeping the ear-friendly volume!
I made some metering in milongas I visited during last 7 days and it is a huge advantage to be able to dance without earplugs!
The footwork is fantastic and I understand why after seeing her exercise. They differ from other videos because the movements are so small that you are actually able to apply this on your dance, and use on the pista!
Sometimes I feel that just listening the music and dancing is not enough. I have allways loved to study and my brain is often hungry wanting to know some theoretical explanations or stories about deeper personal experiences in tango.
Now I put my hope on TangoTalks. This website presents one hour long interviews with tango personalities.
I found this site for not a long time ago so I do not know how it will be working for me but I am traveling some days in the future and have a plan to listen to these episodes on the go.
