We have only one verifiable "Old Milonguero" in Seattle, and he is a good friend. He often sends out videos and stories of Buenos Aires milongas. There is a warm feeling of nostalgia in his stories.
His most recent videos are seen here.
There are several striking realizations:
1) Many people are not dancing in strictly close embrace.
2) Collecting, adorning, extending, and other showing business does not seem to have a place or meaning here.
3) People are often smiling and radiating joy, and fun.
4) Ordinary clothes, although carefully chosen, do not display a lot of sequins, fringes, feathers, etc.
5) Many people appear to be wearing street shoes.
Since we here are all converts, we are the worst. As they used to say when I was growing up Catholic, the convert is the most fundamentalist, the most annoying, the most vigilant, and generally the most trouble for those who grow up in the fold. (Note: I actually have nothing against converts or any religion...just making another half-baked analogy.)
When, as in our tango world, the convert is not even getting trained in the true church, it is even more likely to go wrong, or at least to go dogmatic in the extreme.
So I enjoyed, even got goose bumps and lots of dopamine, just watching. I even know a couple of the folks. But their church is kind of far away. But they are the root of my religion to be sure. A religion And I love seeing and believing that tango is not really so hard, so complicated, or so serious for the true practitioners. It is about the neighborhood, however global.
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1 comments:
I heard many comments, stated with great conviction and dogmatism, about how tango is danced in Buenos Aires whilst I was in Europe over the summer visiting. (I live and dance mainly in BA). It was an interesting experience. As a BA resident, I found almost all the generalisations misleading and partial.
The one thing you can definitely say about the Buenos Aires tango scene is that it is HUGE. There are milongas full of very young people (try El Yeite); milongas full of the top professional dancers and almost no one else (such as on a recent visit to Practica X); milongas of locals and amateurs almost exclusively (Glorias Argentinas, for example); gay milongas (La Marshall); extremely formal milongas (Sunderland); milongas of mixed age groups; milongas (like Lo de Celia) where most people are well over 60. And the scene or, rather, scenes, are constantly changing and evolving.
Currently, many people are dancing salon, especially young people: a style in which dancers switch fluidly between close embrace and open embrace (the latter mostly for salon-style giros). Tango nuevo is out of fashion. And many dancers switch between milonguero-style (staying in close embrace all the time) and salon, depending on how much space is available (BA milongas get crowded at peak hours, much more so than in Europe). Tango nuevo is out of fashion.
But ask me in a couple of months and I may give you a different answer. There is no one Buenos Aires tango: there are many tangos. Which (together with the concentration of very good dancers, much higher than anywhere else I´ve ever danced) is what makes it so exhilarating to dance here.
I think there ARE some generalisations that can be made about tango here versus tango in Europe. If anyone is interested in my personal perspective on this, I talk about those in my blog, here:
http://tangoaddiction.wordpress.com/2011/06/29/dancers-on-two-continents/
and here:
http://tangoaddiction.wordpress.com/2011/09/13/marathoners/
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