Blog - Tangosynthesis

Twenty-Twenty Vision

11 Aug 2020 - by Graham

Well that didnâ€™t go quite according to plan. Iâ€™ve not written any blog posts or published much anywhere this year because honestly, what was the point? There was nothing to talk about and no real clue when things might change, so I just kept quiet and got on with the projects that have been accumulating in my workshop. And anyway, with no tango and no events happening anywhere I was not really in the mood to be talking about that sort of thing. But at long last it seems that life is starting to move again, so itâ€™s time for me to start talking about what Iâ€™ve been up to during lockdown and what we can look forward to over the next year. For the last few years the mainstay of our business has been from dance events, tango festivals, local music festivals, vintage fairs, and other [read more...]

Tangocrisis - Global Edition

23 Mar 2020 - by Graham

At the start of the month I wrote an article about the Tangocrisis, that moment in everyoneâ€™s tango journey where they start to doubt everything they think they know and they wonder if anything will ever make sense again. I was writing in response to a friendâ€™s moment of tango self-doubt, but little did I know that within a matter weeks from then the whole tango world would be thrust into a tangocrisis the like of which has never been seen before. I am of course referring to the global shutdown of tango - and all other dance events - as part of the attempt to slow down the spread of COVID-19. Over a period of about seven days in mid March, every tango class, workshop, milonga, marathon, and festival around the world closed its doors for an as yet undetermined amount of time, leaving dancers and teachers alike [read more...]

Tangocrisis

03 Mar 2020 - by Graham

We have all been there. We have all hit that moment where we start to think that tango is impossible and that no amount of practice or tuition will ever make us any better. We become convinced that instead of moving forwards in our tango progress we are taking giant leaps backwards, and that as it is only a matter of days before we are no longer able to do something as basic as an ocho we should probably give up now before its too late. Anyone who compliments our dancing is obviously wrong or just being nice, and our teacher must be pulling his or her hair out in frustration whenever we are not looking. The tangocrisis seems to be a natural part of learning the dance, but why is that the case? And is it something unique to learning tango? For most of us, learning tango [read more...]

Happy Neo Year!

30 Dec 2019 - by Graham

It is a few days after Christmas and nobody has any idea what day of the week it is. Weâ€™ve unwrapped all the presents, eaten too much food, and drunk all of the mulled wine, and yet the kitchen still seems unusually full of â€˜stuffâ€™. There is an impossibly large pile of turkey leftovers in the fridge, and we are all wondering if thereâ€™s anything more creative we can do with them than make a curry. Your body is yelling at you to step away from the mince pies, switch off the Harry Potter marathon, and go do something physical instead, but you have no idea what as everything is closed. In rare moments of lucidity youâ€˜ve had flashbacks to when we used to do something called â€˜tangoâ€™ once a week, but itâ€™s all a bit of a blur and didnâ€™t that have something to do with tea [read more...]

What do you dance at a milonga?

21 Oct 2019 - by Graham

I keep being surprised when people ask me this question, but it is something that crops up from time to time and so I should probably address it a bit more often. People know about 'milonga' as the faster form of tango which uses quick regular steps and lots of repetition, and they know that people travel a long way to go to 'milongas'. A connection between these two things is made, and the next thing I know is that I am being asked "Can you teach us the dance that people dance at milongas?" or "I see that there are a lot of milongas around, but where can I go to dance tango?" So let me clear this up once and for all: you go to milongas to dance tango. Okay? Is that settled? Tango is danced at milongas. But I can already start to hear the [read more...]

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