The Tangosynthesis Blog
with Graham and Nathalie
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25 Oct 2024 - by Graham
This week’s blog post is about a feature on our website that you may not have noticed. Did you know you can subscribe to our calendar and have events or classes appear directly in your phone or computer diary as soon as we publish them? No? Well… Although everything is already published on the Diary of Everything page on our website, people regularly ask us to add all our X/Tango events, workshops, classes, and anything else we do as “Events” on Facebook so it is easy to add these to their calendar. That is certainly one way to broadcast it, but there are problems: It is a lot of work to add everything into Facebook as well as on our own diary as there is no way to cut/paste between the two. Even if we did do that, we would be at the mercy of the [read more...]
Beginners' Workshop
22 Oct 2024 - by
Last Saturday (19th October 2024) we held our first dedicated Beginners' Workshop afternoon in Borough Green, Kent, and I am pleased to say that it was a roaring success. Over the four hours of the workshop, Angelique and I took a group of mostly absolute tango beginners through the basics of the hold, walking, some ochos, a giro, and even a gancho. We had wondered if four hours in one session would be too much, but copious tea, coffee, biscuits, and donuts (!) saw us through the workshop and time time passed in a flash. We will be running these events every three months (or thereabouts) so if someone you know wanted to give it a go but was unable to attend this one we will be doing it all again in January. Please check our diary for dates and details. If you were one of those beginners [read more...]
A Conversation about Tango
15 Oct 2024 - by Graham (from Newsletter)
The very public meltdown of Gustavo Naveira recently at the Gavito Tango Festival in Los Angeles has got the whole dance world in a buzz. Two weeks ago, had you Googled “Naveira tango” you would have seen page after page of discussion about his contributions to tango and his essay on Nuevo Tango published in 2009. Now that same Google search will return videos of him arguing with his partner Giselle Anne on stage and attempting to humiliate her by walking away during a performance piece in front of a paying festival audience. Thousands of words have already been written about the incident, and no doubt there will be thousands more before the dust settles. But what this has also done is to open the doors to a discussion about respect in dance and how we should behave on the dance floor. On the Dance Floor [read more...]
Traditional or Nuevo
11 Oct 2024 - by Graham (from Newsletter)
The question of what makes tango “traditional” or “nuevo” has been around since the 1970s but in that time there has never been any real consensus as to what these words mean. People say “he is a nuevo dancer” or “that is a very traditional style” as if that explains everything, but what is being described? Is it the hold? The steps or techniques? The way they stand? The rhythm? The music choice may be an obvious difference, but does it affect the dance all that much? The rhythmic structure of a track by Pugliese is no different to a Tanghetto track or something from the modern album chart, and there is at least as much musical variance in a jazz or blues piece as in anything from the golden age. So whilst different music may give the dance a different feel, it does not change anything fundamental about [read more...]
Tango Terminology
04 Oct 2024 - by Graham (from Newsletter)
When you first start to learn tango you soon begin to hear lots of unfamiliar words, such as ganchos, ochos, giros (although your teacher will insist it is pronounced ‘heroes’), sacadas, and more. If you speak Spanish you may recognise some of them – although probably badly pronounced, but what do hooks, eights, turns, and ‘taking away’ have to do with anything? And why do different teachers seem to use them to refer to slightly different things? Most dances are based on a variety of steps that are strung together – or choreographed - into a sequence. The steps all have names, and there may be some sort of agreed standardisation of what a particular step must look like. This is particularly true for dances that have exams or grades, but even for less formal dances there are often commercial interests or agreed standards that teachers are expected [read more...]
