Two takes on a crazy woman
- by Steve Morrall
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- 04 Oct, 2018
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How two different orchestras and styles can transform the same song
I would like to propose a challenge to dancers. It is as much a challenge to myself as to other dancers because sometimes I get lost when I dance by focusing on the wrong thing. My challenge to you is to hold the music first and foremost in your attention as you dance. Sounds simple doesn't it. [There goes a gameshow klaxon in my head....]
Sometimes when we think we are listening, we are only hearing. To dance to tango music and hold it foremost in our attention requires the art of deliberately listening.
I have a couple of tracks of tango music to share with you to illustrate this. And there I go again using a visual descriptor for an audio process. We take hearing so much for granted that the english language only has a few words to describe sound. To illustrate something is to enhance and describe it using visual media. I want a word to enhance and describe something in the audio spectrum. I am tempted to take a leaf out of Roald Dahl's book and invent a word to do this like "audiflicate".
Sometimes when we think we are listening, we are only hearing. To dance to tango music and hold it foremost in our attention requires the art of deliberately listening.
I have a couple of tracks of tango music to share with you to illustrate this. And there I go again using a visual descriptor for an audio process. We take hearing so much for granted that the english language only has a few words to describe sound. To illustrate something is to enhance and describe it using visual media. I want a word to enhance and describe something in the audio spectrum. I am tempted to take a leaf out of Roald Dahl's book and invent a word to do this like "audiflicate".
"Loca" performed by the orchestra of Juan D'Arienzo, 1968
The first of the two tracks is the amazing up-tempo version of the tango "Loca" played by Juan D'Arienzo and his orchestra. It has been doing the rounds on YouTube for a couple of years so you may have already seen and heard it. As you watch this showman whipping his orchestra into a frenzy with his baton, consider this. All the members of two different tango orchestras he directed walked out on him. Twice. Everyone. And when the young virtuoso pianist Rodolfo Biagi started to get his own standing ovations, D'Arienzo is reported to have walked to the piano in a fit of pique and said to him "there is only one star in the orchestra, YOU'RE FIRED". OK, so now I have set the scene for you to watch and listen to this orchestra in action. This was first recorded by D'Arienzo in 1942, but here he is playing to the camera and the audience in 1968 on TV Argentina Canal 9.
"Loca" performed by Libertad Lamarque with the orchestra of Francisco Canaro
In 1951, Libertad Lamarque performed the same song with a completely different artistic take. I was so moved by her performance the first time I heard it , I had to find out what the story of the lyrics was. Now every time I hear this song, I remember this heart-breaking story. Even in the upbeat dynamics of the D'Arienzo version.
Simply hearing or deliberately listening?
As a dancer I am fascinated by the challenge of the art of dancing. I personally describe the art of dancing to be movement through time and space that reflects and expresses the music the dancer is listening to.
In the two examples of "Loca", each version is so different in dynamics and expression, emotion and timbre, they each demand and inspire a completely different dance of movement through time and space. But as dancers we often miss out on this amazing source of creativity and inspiration by defaulting to simply hearing.
In the two examples of "Loca", each version is so different in dynamics and expression, emotion and timbre, they each demand and inspire a completely different dance of movement through time and space. But as dancers we often miss out on this amazing source of creativity and inspiration by defaulting to simply hearing.
As adults learning to dance this brilliant, fascinating, complicated and highly expressionate dance we can also get distracted from deliberately listening by the physical challenge of making moves and keeping connection. Also as novice dancers, the classroom often fails to develop the student dancers' understanding of how movement can connect to and express the music.
We are distracted from the most crucial influence on our dancing - the music. If we deliberately listen to the music it can become a catalyst that helps bind us together in movement with our partner. If we pay enough attention to it it becomes the musical intoxication that reaches past our body and mind to touch our soul. If we let the music be the only leader in the room, the musical storyline can engage and enrapture us. It is the inspiration that creates movement full of gesture and expression.
Simply learning steps cannot do this. We need to learn how to listen and craft our steps around the music. Dancing steps from memory traps us in functional movement and excludes the music from our focus. Deliberately listening can create emotional reactions that naturally create gestured movement. If we concentrate on deliberately listening, we can release our movement and let it belong to the music. This is where tango bliss resides. In an embrace, we are both but a conduit for something the flamenco dancer calls "duende" the spirit of the dance.
Let's audiflicate
the music with our tango dancing.
Steve Morrall, October 2018
Tango Tangks were started in 2004 to provide dancers with a weekend of immersion in Argentine tango, hence the play on the word tank. The Tangk concept was based on the kind of teaching Debbie and Steve had experienced at international events in Europe and they wanted to make this standard of teaching accessible to the local community.
To generate enough participants to cover the cost of flights and fees of international teachers, they needed to assemble a larger group of dance students than the local community could muster. But as well as keeping the ticket price affordable, they wanted to keep the group small enough to facilitate intimate, effective learning. So they started with a hired hall, a couple of maestros and spread the word like crazy.
The concept worked as seventeen odd years and seventy-nine editions of the event later, the events are still selling out and going strong.
The original formula of the weekend had workshops on Friday, Saturday and Sunday, and milongas on each night. Over the last seventeen years, this has been refined to its current format.
The Tangk offers six hours of progressive workshops in four ninety minute sessions. The maestros start from a simple didactic idea, and then progress to more elaborate and complex movement, style and somatic technique suitable for musical, social dancing. After each session, there is a one hour practica to help get the new ideas from the head to the body. With milongas on Friday and Saturday night, there is the opportunity to immerse yourself in up to eighteen hours of dancing over the weekend.
As well as the dancing and training focus, Debbie and Steve are also aware that tango is, in essence, a community pastime. There is something about dancing in a circle and sharing food that satisfies an ancient, almost forgotten need in us. So they attend to making the space welcoming and homely, ensuring there is a time and place to sit and talk and eat as well as dance. The participants can sit together at lunchtime so they get to know each other ‘off’ the dance floor and share their experiences.
There are kitchen facilities for chilling and warming food. Participants bring their own lunches, and free hot and cold drinks are available all weekend.
All the maestros invited to a Tango Tangk are world class dancers and teachers. They are present and approachable in classes, in the milongas, in the practice sessions, and during refreshment and meal breaks. Teachers are chosen carefully as it takes a special kind of passion and stamina to maintain this presence from 8pm on Friday though to the event closing at 5.45pm on Sunday.
At the end of the weekend, the immersion in the Tango Tangk’s mixture of excellent teaching together with so much dancing and sharing the space with other enthusiastic and passionate dancers will take your dance to the next level.
To see the 2018 line up of visiting maestros, go to our events page.
Pictured at the top of the article: Visiting maestros Kim and David Benitez with the participants of the January 2018 Tango Tangk #79.
Steve Morrall, February 2018
The eponymous "cabeceo". Catching the eye of someone else to pass meaning without words. It is a skill worth using off the dance floor as I found out in Rome.
