This post is for ME-What I have learned.

1. Silvina Valz: Go with my body, Go with ease, Look out at or above eye level (this organizes my body), Walk on the beat, Caress the floor, Move leg from my diaphragm, go at the last minute (tension and release)
2. Cecelia Gonzalez: Use more disassociation, Use the torso and back in the molinete, Keep my hips facing the man.
3. Amanda Gris: Improvise and interpret on my own, Keep body soft (ice to water)
4. Johana Copes: Don't go up and down, Make a definite step, Use the standing leg for power, Don't collapse my left side. In forward ocho- torso, hip, leg and then the foot, In the back ocho- hip first.
5. Maria Angeles Rodriguez: Weight over front foot in forward ochos
6. Marcela Duran: Long leg back in the ocho before the weight goes down( cross the leg a little), Ice-cream cone theory- enjoy every part of every step.
7. Augusto Balizano: Dance the pivot into the floor, Posture erect, Take my time- slow it down, Follow through with the right arm.
8. Olga Besio: Find the pause in the tango, Dance to the floor and the music.
9. Daniela Arcuri: Don't collapse my left side, Don't collapse my right side.
10. Carina Mele: Lift torso, Lighten my upper body
11. Eliana Sanchez Arteaga: Follow the man's left arm
12. Marissa Quiroga: Feet on the floor, Beauty in the foot.
13. Pablo Veron: Put the back heel down, Look over the mans shoulder and up a bit (posture up, head up)
14. Sonia Peralta: Move like a methodical cat, Don't go up and down.
15. Pablo Alvarez: Keep hip level in the side step
16. Noelia Barsi: Open the hip on the back step, deeper cruzada
17. Aurora Lubiz: Free leg totally free, small beautiful adornos but seldom
18. Gabriel Misse: Use the diaphragm for balance forward and back, Use the back muscles for lateral balance, lag the back leg
19. Oscar Gauna: Breathe together.
20. Silvana Nunez: Vary the speed between fast and slow
21. Me: Perservere, Keep a blog about all this, Thank all the above and all the below in some way.
22. Privates and group lessons with instructors who nudged me with some of the above ideas. Junior Cervila, Jesus Velazquez, Natalia Rojo, Miguel Zotto, Alberto Paz, and more to come.
ADD ONS from April 2014- Of course, Rodolfo Dinzel
 Beto Barsellini and Lis Dorin: Complete the pivots, relax the ankles, knees and hips, lift the chest at a slight diagonal, push the floor on every step. More disassociation.

WATER to ICE - ICE to WATER

About 70% of the human body mass is water Amanda Gris tells us at our Thursday tango lesson. It is easy for a couple in a tanda to realize that one or both has a great deal of tension in his or her embrace or frame- ICE. If the woman has the tension, the man tries to soften her body by breathing with her and relaxing his own body back to WATER before the first step of the dance.  If the man has the tension- ICE, the woman can do her best to relax her own body and dance to the floor. The goal is to get out of the ICE and turn it back into the flowing WATER- in Spanish- being tranquila y relahada.
The goal of the lesson was to work with improvisation. The improv part of the lesson was clever and new. After the side step, I go. Mike goes. I go. Mike goes, etc. Doing this back and forth for a three minute piece of tango music was fun and funny. In the real dance if he is going to give me a chance to improvise, he opens the embrace and allows me to play until he is ready to move again. We can't wait to try this at our Wednesday pracitcas this summer in the TENT.

Copes- THE COPES

Karen Lucey

We are living in BsAs because we saw you dance in the movie TANGO. We dance tango because we saw you dance tango. Thank
you SO MUCH. Karen and Mike Lucey on Calle Florida

1:35pm

Juan Carlos Copes

I miss you so much , I will see you in the Ladys Tango.

Reagars. Copes.

Borges "El Sur" and tango

Michael (not my Mike) recounted the short story El Sur while we enjoyed ribs at our monthly BAIN luncheon. Luckily I can search and find these files on the internet, which I think would have amused Borges. His writing makes me laugh and makes me cry all  in the same moment. Here is an excerpt

He placed his suitcase in a luggage net.  

When cars lurched forward, he opened it and, after some hesitation, took

out the first volume of the Thousand and One Nights. Travelling with this book, which
was so linked to the story of his misfortune, was an affirmation both that that misfortune
had been erased and a joyous and secret challenge to the frustrated forces of evil.
On both side of the train the city gradually broke apart into separate suburbs.
First this view of them and then the sight of truck gardens and small farms delayed the
start of his reading. The truth is that Dahlmann read very little. The magnet mountain
and the genie who has sworn to kill his benefactor were—who can deny it—
marvelous,16 but not much more than the morning and the fact of being. Such joy
distracted him from reading about Shahrazad and her superfluous miracles. Dahlmann
simply would close his book and let himself be alive.


So in tango. Close the lessons and let it be only the music and the floor. Let it come alive.

Please Roy! Don't Ask Me to DELETE This.

Roy has given me a place to think about tango in a different way.


Here are some of my thoughts on Tango as a dance, a form of expression, a philosophy, if you will.  Some is old material.

Roy  

P.S.  It is a bit kitsch.

                        On the Spiritual Physicality of The Tango
                                             by  Roy Whitman

 The Tango begins with the embrace between consciousness and necessity, or the spiritual and physical worlds, which assumes a restricted form (Adorno & Horkheimer).  The embrace represents one physical unit, like an anchor, with its own weight and synergy.  The steps of the tango, however, are light and ephemeral.  It is both Beethoven and Bach at once, or the physical and spiritual entwined (Kundera).  The dance is both spiritual (heavy) and spirited (light) with two physical beings together like Jacob wrestling with the Angel (Genesis).  It is both a restricted physicality (Cohen) and a restricted spirituality (Whitman).  It is the forces of nature colliding with the forces of heaven (Wagner).  It is the very breath of God (Michelangelo).

 

The Tango is neither a purely physical phenomenon nor purely a spiritual phenomenon.  The physical attributes of it can influence the spiritual attributes and the spiritual attributes can influence the physical attributes (Osborne, “Marx and Freud,” Elster “Making Sense of Marx,” and Engels on Marx) and each can interplay with the other in a myriad of nuanced and subtle ways.  The Tango is pure physics; to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction (Newton), combined with improvisation inspired by the primitive Id (Freud).  Think of “Summer breeze makes me feel fine/tangoing with the jasmine in my mind” (Seals & Crofts); “Dust in the wind/all we are, are tango partners in the wind” (Kansas); and “The answer, my friend, is tangoing in the wind/the answer is tangoing in the wind.” (Dylan, Peter, Paul & Mary)

 

Tango is a most utilitarian form of dance, satisfying both the higher and lower pleasures, or the spirit and the body. (Stuart Mills)  It is both a Gemeinschaft, or community, and a Gesellschaft, or society. (Marx)  While the former is based on a relatively homogenous culture and tends to be intimate, informal, cooperative, and imbued with a sense of moral obligation to the group, the latter is more formal, goal-oriented, heterogeneous, and based on individual self-interest, competition, and complex division of labor. It is Japanese discipline, teamwork, and craftsmanship, (Toyota) combined with a pursuit of egotistical advantages. (Smith)) As such, it is subject to relativity or the influence of space and time. (Einstein)

 

Tango is art and the culture of love. Colorful and dream-like (Chagall) yet abstract, angular, and obtuse while being sensual and hypnotic (Modern and Impressionism), Tango captures the essence between two people or forces. It is Eros and Thanatos vying for predominance or the Ego reconciling with the Id. (Freud).  It is Romeo and Juliet, Samson and Delilah, Marc Antony and Cleopatra, Tristan and Isolde, Maria and Tony, the King and I, and Captain Von Trapp and Maria.  Our daddies always said :”It takes two to tango.”. 

                     

Florida Garden

Huge thunderclaps and bolts of lightning.
A downpour that was mesmerizing.
Sheets of blowing rain.
Mike says let's walk to Florida Garden -1/2 block. I'll buy you breakfast.
Umbrella in hand we scurried across Florida and watched people going about their daily routines as if the sun were shining.
Our favorite waiter, Oca, brought the lagrimas and medialunas while we read the paper and chatted. As usual, the conversation turned to tango. Yesterday was a tango marathon. 4 1/2 hours at La Viruta with Noelia and Javier + the famous old timers Osvaldo and Coca. A great review of the basics.
I decided to strike up a conversation in Spanish with Oca who has no English. I told him about the tango lesson and how we had a chance to study with the greats- Osvaldo y Coca. In Spanish he said we should have had Osvaldo with "vino" instead of "Coka". Mike, as usual with is quick humor whispered in my ear, "Right about that. I guess he must have seen Coca."

Tango Skirts

We are tackling our postage-stamp size closet. First I started with the skirts. 30. 30 means I am crazy. It took me an hour to try them on and cut the amount in 1/2. The ones with the elastic waists are all back in the closet- too much pasta.
Mike started with his Levi's. He uses a marker to mark the 514 from the 511's. Some have no labels so he tries them on and models them before he decides where to stack them. He wonders how they could have shrunk when they sat in the closet for almost 6 months- too many medialunas?