[Tango-L] Interview with Gustavo Naveira, Part 1

[Brian Dunn]

Dear List,

The following is the first part of an extensive interview with tango maestro
Gustavo Naveira (www.gustavoygiselle.com).  The interview is ongoing, and
I'd like to include some interesting questions from others - if you have
questions you'd like to ask, please send them to me offline for possible
inclusion in later segments.

Gustavo Naveira Interview, Part 1
 
DOTH: When did tango begin for you?
 
GN: I grew up around tango – my father was a tanguero, and we always had
tango music playing in the house.  But regarding the dance, there was a
special moment that I remember.

When I was 12, we went with my family to a wedding.  It was nobody we knew
personally, my mother was the seamstress for the bride, so we didn’t know
anyone there.  During the reception, someone put on a tango, and a woman at
the reception, when she heard it, asked in a loud voice,”Is there any man
here that has what it takes to really dance a tango with me?” Nobody
answered at the beginning, but my father, a stranger to that group, suddenly
said, “It would be my pleasure, senora.” A big silence fell over the room.
My father was on the other side of the room from the woman, and he stood
there, waiting for her acceptance.   When she said yes, he walked towards
her & they met in the middle of the ballroom. And they danced. And of
course, they had never met before. And they danced perfectly well, as if
they had done it for a long time. This situation was amazing for me & for
everyone at the party. At that moment, my father became for me a hero. 

As a comment on this culture, I should say that another reason this happened
was that the women of my family were not there in the room at that moment.
It was just my papa & me. If my mother had been there, I think my father
would not have done it. 

When I was sixteen, I wanted to learn to dance tango from my father, but –
well, it wasn’t very successful.  So when I was in my twenties, about 1981,
I started studying with Rodolfo Dinzel.  I was one of his best students
within that course, and he took special notice of me and worked me very
hard.
 
At that time, I had found a practice partner that I met at the University of
Buenos Aires, in the folklorico ballet.  And that partner was Olga (Besio)
who afterward was my wife. She began to encourage me to start teaching. I
first started teaching with her in 1983.
 
There was something very important for the development of tango that
happened at this point, relative to the political situation in Argentina.
Yes, democracy returned to the government in 1983 – but the military
dictatorship was not the reason that tango had been dying out as a social
dance – even in the Golden Age of tango, we had Peron, who was also a
military dictator!  In Argentina, many people like to blame many things on
the government, because then it means that they don’t have to do anything
themselves.  It’s a problem we have.
 
No, the important thing for tango at this time was that the new president,
Raul Alfonsin, took a very significant step.  He created a network of
cultural centers throughout Buenos Aires, and created a program to hire
people to give classes in a wide variety of subjects to the people of the
city, at no cost to the students.  

What they discovered was that, while someone would teach photography and
have five students, or teach painting and have ten students, or teach guitar
and have fifteen students, people who taught tango dancing had fifty,
seventy, a hundred students in their classes.  
 
One time, at the cultural center where I was teaching, the class size limit
was supposed to be one hundred and fifty students.  The administrators were
supposed to stop taking applications for the class after they reached the
limit, but someone forgot to do that, and just kept accepting applications.
When I went to class on the first day, there were five hundred students
packed in this tiny room!  I could barely get in the door!  I got a chair in
the middle somehow, stood up on it, and said “All right, everybody to my
left, stay here - everybody to my right, come back in July!”
 
This was very new - a large-scale structure and program that made it really
easy for anyone to learn how to dance tango.  And all the teachers taught as
best they could, with no organization to determine who was “right” and who
was “wrong”.  I know many teachers who are claiming to be "authentic tango"
teachers, who started dancing tango in my classes!
  
Many people in other countries think that it was the show “Tango Argentino”
that triggered the "rebirth" of tango in Argentina in the 1980’s.  But that
show didn’t return to Argentina until late in the decade – by that time I
had had hundreds and hundreds of people in my classes at the cultural
centers and elsewhere.  That show went to Paris at about the same time as
the popular interest in tango was unleashed in a flood in Buenos Aires,
but the flood didn’t start with the show – people just wanted to dance, they
just wanted to move their bodies.  So people in other countries heard about
the tango from those shows – but in Argentina it came from inside the
people.  And this desire to dance, to move - it wasn’t just happening in
Argentina, with its return to democracy - at that time all over the world,
you saw the same thing – people became interested in participating in
sports, running, triathlons, aerobics – health clubs suddenly became very
successful and popular – anything to be moving!  In Argentina, for many
people this movement took the form of learning to tango.
 
When it was time for me to start teaching my first class, naturally before
the classes I was busy working on what I would say, how I would teach.  So
of course I was sitting down with a paper and pencil, designing the
classes.  Olga and I created extensive notes before the first classes we
taught, which I still have – yes, here they are. (Notes, charts, tables,
diagrams, drawings - more than thirty pages worth! –Ed.)  In a way, that is
what I have been doing ever since - sitting there with that paper and
pencil, analyzing and synthesizing, looking for the structure underneath the
social dance that surrounded me.
=============
(To be continued)

As part of their visit to Boulder next month, we're planning some roundtable
discussion format events where we'll get to explore Gustavo & Giselle's
experiences in more depth.

Abrazos,
Brian Dunn & Deb Sclar
Dance of the Heart
775 Pleasant Street
Boulder, CO 80302 USA
303-938-0716
www.danceoftheheart.com
“Building a Better World, One Tango at a Time”