[Tango-L] Gustavo Naveira Interview, Part 2

[Brian Dunn]

Dear Tango Aficionados,

The following is Part 2 of an extended interview with Gustavo Naveira.  If
reading this provokes additional questions for you, please respond offline
with your question(s) for possible inclusion in later installments.

Gustavo Naveira Interview, Part 2
=================================
DoTH:  During the first workshop we took with you in 1999, organized by
Daniel Trenner, we visited your Friday practica at Cochabamba 444, and heard
the stories about how for many years this was a famous gathering spot for
you, Fabian (Salas), "Chicho" (Frumboli), and others who worked closely with
you for a long time.  How did this begin?

GN: I had been attending the practica of Pepito Avellaneda, at Cochabamba
444 in the Club Belgrano in San Telmo.  At one point in the 1980's, Pepito
was very much in demand as a dancer and teacher in Europe and elsewhere.  So
he asked me to take over his practica on Friday nights.  Students who were
working with me would come and practice things there. 

I remember Fabian in the beginning - he was kind of a wild man.  I'd be the
one to organize the space, rent the rooms, then we would get together and
try crazy things, to find the underlying structural possibilities.  I
remember one night we discovered that there were 98 possible ganchos in the
turn!  We were forever discussing tango, looking for good information and
ideas from anyone who would talk to us that seemed to know something.  

You know, in my study of tango, often I would encounter a “tango master”,
and even if you approached them respectfully, they would have an attitude
of, “I know everything, you are sh**, don't bother me”.  This is a typical
attitude from an earlier way of looking at tango.  So it was often very
difficult to learn useful things about tango from them.

One night, I remember Fabian turned to me and said, "Gustavo, we are on our
own.  We need to look at the dance from a point of view of underlying
structure, and rebuild our approach to the dance from the things we discover
trying to do that."
(Note: Fabian’s point of view of many of these events can be found in a
fascinating interview at Keith Elshaw’s website at www.totango.net – Ed.).

DoTH: "Chicho" (Mariano Frumboli) said in a recent interview that everything
he knows about tango structure he learned from you.  When did Chicho enter
the scene?

GN: I don’t remember exactly the dates, maybe around 1990.   I was very
successful as a teacher from the beginning.  And at that time the tango
community was very small, so everyone knew about me more or less
immediately.

I met Chicho through Victoria, his partner at the time.  Victoria was a
contemporary dancer, actress, & many other things, a great artist. And she
was learning tango, & she met Chicho as a partner in her acting work.
Chicho was going to play a character in a piece of dance theater with her.
It was necessary for him to do a few steps of tango as part of his role.
So, she brought him to me for lessons.

By the way, it’s interesting about Victoria.  Before, you mentioned how Ana
Maria Stekelman’s work was important for you in Boulder.  (Stekelman’s
"Tangokinesis" dance troupe gave a very influential series of tango
performances at the Colorado Dance Festival in Boulder in 1997. – Ed.)  Some
years before that, I was called to be the “tango maestro de baile” in an
opera in Teatro Colon, where Ana Maria Stekelman was working.  She was the
primary choreographer for the work, & she & the director hired me as an
“assistant director of tango”. They needed a full choreography of “classical
tango”. It was a major opera with 15 singers, 100 musicians, & 300 singers
in the chorus. The production was called “Maratón” - a world premier of a
new opera.  Stekelman, right at the beginning of the work, had to travel,
and finally she couldn’t continue, she left. So the director named me to be
the primary choreographer. He told me, “You need an assistant,” so I called
Victoria to help. Finally that was not enough, so the director called
another woman to work with us on the choreography.  This new woman, Lea,
Victoria & me - we built between us two hours and a half of choreography for
50 dancers in 22 scenes, in 3 months in 1990. 

But, with Chicho, around this time, with only 6 months of study, he was
amazing as a tango dancer.   After that, I think he left acting, music, and
everything else.  He became so obsessed with the tango – I will always
remember one day, in my studio, he looked at me very seriously and said,
“Gustavo, what are we going to do with this?? This is such an amazing way of
making art, we must do something really great with this, something huge!!!”
And he got very excited, very crazy in telling me this, and, well, in that
moment our story really began.
 
Chicho was absolutely the best dancer I ever saw.  He started working with
us, with Fabian and me, and we said, "Well, we have to get him to really
join us in this work, or else we have to break his legs!"  He did crazy
things no one else could do!

DoTH: In your seminars, your students often videotape themselves practicing
the material, but you discourage this.  Could you explain?

GN: In our classes now, we often tell the students that we encourage them to
take written notes, instead of just making video records of the moves. 
First of all, when you perform the action of making a video, what you are
actually doing is practicing using your camera.  This may be beneficial to
you, but in itself it has nothing to do with learning tango.  Then, most
likely you will never look at the video again.  And if you do, we predict it
will not be nearly as useful to you as you had hoped when you made the
video.  

We say this from personal experience.  When I first worked with Giselle in
1995, we had both been invited to teach at a festival in Sitges, Spain. 
Since neither of us was attending with a partner, the organizer suggested
that we perform together during the festival. We agreed, and in two days or
so we put together a performance, which went quite well.  After the festival
was over, we did not see each other for a year, until the same organizer
asked us to return to the same festival.  But we didn't have much time to
prepare, so we were not sure about performing together.  The organizer
assured us there would be no problem, because someone had made a video of
last year's performance, and we could use it to reconstruct the same
performance this year.  What we discovered was that it was much more
difficult and took far longer to reconstruct the performance from our
own video than it had been to come up with the performance in the first
place - and we had designed it ourselves!  

I should say that one unexpected benefit was that the joint effort to
accomplish quickly this very difficult task was the main reason we fell in
love.
 
But the real point is: if you take written notes instead of just making a
video of yourself, it's true that you may never look at the notes again
either.  But the ACT of making the notes will start to change the way you
think about your tango.  You will find a way to analyze and explain what you
are doing to yourself in symbolic terms.  These symbols will become valuable
tools for you to analyze the tango you do and the tango you see others do,
and will remain at your disposal when you are improvising the social dance.
So the act of writing notes about your lessons WILL make you a better
dancer, much more than the act of operating your camera.
 
DOTH: We often have great difficulty making our private practice effective,
because of the conflicts that can arise.  We know this is a difficulty for
other tango couples as well.  How is it for the two of you?

GN:  It is an important thing that took me a long time to learn: sometimes
you should not worry about doing it perfectly - you should just let things
happen, for whatever reason they are happening in your dance at that
moment.  Often, if I wasn't practicing as well as I wanted to, I would start
to get very upset with myself, and become even less able to dance well.  If
you judge yourself too harshly about not doing what you intended as well as
you wanted, you will simply become more tense.  This won't help you or your
partner.  It is important and useful to find a way of relaxing as you do
your work, especially when you are working on difficult things together.

(To be continued)
=================

We hope to publish Part 3 within a few days of Gustavo & Giselle's arrival
in Boulder for the Colorado Tango Encuentro on July 8th.  Thanks to all for
your appreciative messages.

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”