Two takes on a crazy woman

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".

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.

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.

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. 

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