Wednesday, 21 Jan 2015 Snowed last night. Pretty outside. As always, had a good nights sleep in the studio. Other dancers who have stayed in the loft say the same thing. It is a peaceful semi-rural area south of Santa Fe, high-elevation and dry. Lots of beautiful sunsets with blue, gray, red, orange, and yellow. Danced a morning tanda starting with La Cumparsita. This is a routine we are in. No matter what amount of dancing we do during the day, we always start off with a morning tanda and an evening tanda at the end of the day. This is just for enjoyment, so we try not to critique the dances. Sometimes if we hear some good music before the morning tanda, we will have a few prior dances. No matter where we are, we try to keep this routine. Even in hotel rooms, etc. It is amazing how one can dance in the most confined spaces. Two Moon Studio is just about the ideal place for a tango retreat. The loft arrangement really makes this into a small apartment, complete with kitchen and bath, wifi, etc. Charming decor with tango motifs. Below the loft is a quality wood sprung dance floor. And the sound system is great. One of the real advantages of the arrangement is that loft visitors are free to use the entire studio when it is not otherwise in use. Students do come by for private lessons, and one can often get a few dances before their lesson, because they need the warm-up. There are also group lessons and a monthly milonga. So, just from staying here, one absorbs a lot of tango. But of course, the big attraction, and the essential element is the instruction. Which brings us to Liz, and her partner Masami. I know the following will sound like a promotional text, but it is not. The focus, depth, dedication, and quality of instruction for Golden Age social tango would be difficult, perhaps impossible, to obtain elsewhere from United States instructors. Melinda and I spent a lot of effort to find instruction conforming to what we saw decades ago in that old couple from Buenos Aires. And we did, indeed, find it in Liz and Masami, and now, Alicia Pons. At times, it is hard to believe how patient Liz can be with me, considering her substantial credentials in dance from a lifetime of study. And Masami’s quiet stability, both physically and in personality, serves as the model of a milonguero’s embrace as a safe harbor. My lessons with Liz remind me of two things. 1) She still is a resource that is barely tapped. 2) Seeing, hearing, and imitating tango is not enough, an experienced dancer must be connected physically with your body to indicate how certain movements feel. I have danced with both of them as both a leader and follower. One time Masami once led me for a whole song. I now realize why women like this dance. I closed my eyes and went into a dreamy state among the stars for three minutes. It was like a drug-induced cloud. One wonders if it really does cause some physiological change. Because of his milonga experience as a lead, Masami gives a lot of good advice about handling situations in the milonga from trivial to substantial, for example: 1) If you are trim, and don’t have a big stomach, your belt buckle can hit the woman, so rotate it to the side. 2) You have to shift your “energy” (focus?, lead?) higher or lower to accommodate women of different heights. And 3) In BsAs the men will test your space to see if you will defend it. Hold your own, they will back off and respect you. Our private lesson lasted 1-1/2 hours, plus a break. Well, as I expected, there are lots of fundamental issues to work on. Liz sees everything and feels everything. Sometimes I feel like one of those monstrous diesel engines that my father used to work on. Despite lots of highly technical instruments, chemical analyses, and scientific staff, he would often just close his eyes, put his hand on the running engine, and listen. She does the same thing, she dances with me, and you can see in the mirror this distant gaze, feeling for all the body parts and how they are working. She keeps extensive handwritten notes of everything in the lesson. And there is usually lots wrong. I am not maintaining the shared container. In other words, I am not staying with the woman. This is especially noticeable with cruzadas from both parallel system and cross system. I seem to fling Melinda forward, out of the container to get her into the cruzada. Well, it does work, but destroys the embrace, and thus the connection. Liz wants to make sure my hips remain parallel with her hips, and then rotate with her to carry her into the cruzada. I also have problems with both axes, and like many leaders, especially the left. On the standing leg side, I need to flex all four joints: ankle, knee, hip, and shoulder. And to rotate them in unison, in contrabody movement with the opposite pelvis back, and allow the free and opposite leg to be propelled forward as a result of the contrabody movement, rather than just stepping on its own. This is what she said Ricardo Vidort meant by “shoot the feet.” I also need to use up-axis movement to absorb energy to stop on a dime without propelling the follower outward. Other issues are with my relationship with the follower. I need to “carry the woman within my body.” The list goes on and on. But one thing is for sure: steps are relatively unimportant. Movement and connection are paramount. Melinda seems to take naturally to all this (She protests, that she does indeed have her own issues.). I do not, although I always considered myself fairly athletic. We joined in the intermediate-level group class for 1-1/2 hours. Not a big crowd because of the snow, 11 people plus the two of us. Worked on fundamentals. Basic movement. No steps. It is obvious that Liz has lifetime of serious study in dance, and knows body movement inside out. This is no sideline. She is a hard-core professional. She has danced many styles of tango, but that all changed when she danced with Ricardo Vidort. Within the first 20 seconds of the first dance, everything changed. She became infected. And she switched over to what we now call milonguero, which is her full-time focus. So no discussion of Liz would be complete without a bit of mention of Ricardo Vidort. He is sometimes called the last of the dinosaurs, one of the few remaining at the time who had danced in the BsAs milongas of the 1940s, and had learned his craft by apprenticeship. And as with so many who have learned this way, found it difficult to describe what he did. Liz studied with him in New York. Later, she invited him Santa Fe where he died in 2006. A fuller discussion of Ricardo is given at tangoandchaos.org. And the day ended with an evening tanda.
Posted on: Fri, 23 Jan 2015 07:01:50 +0000