[Tango-L] Milonga Reviews

[Meredith Klein]

On the night that you went to Villa Malcolm, Los Tubatango was playing
and the place was totally packed.  It's likely that more than 500
people entered Malcolm that night.  For that reason, it was barely
possible to dance and there were more collisions than usual.  Due to
the fact that the Buenos Aires Tango Festival was going on last week,
and that CITA is coming up, there were a huge number of tourists in
the room.  And because Adrian Veredice and Alejandra Hobert were
dancing at Canning that night, most of the professional and better
social dancers went there instead to see the performance.

Any practica or milonga has better and worse nights, so it's not a
great idea to generalize based on what you saw on one night.  Your
comments also made me realize that you and I look at the social dance
floor in different ways.  When I'm sitting at Villa Malcolm, Salon
Canning, or any other milonga/practica venue, I look for the amazing
dancers and I watch them.  I want to glean whatever I can from the
technique they use, the choices they make about musicality and style,
and the way they resolve problems (technical, navigational, etc.) that
come up as they dance.

Besides the fact that I find the people I want to dance with at
Malcolm, I love it because I see people who inspire me there.  In the
past month, for example, I've seen the following dancers at Malcolm:
Chicho Frumboli & Lucia Mazer, Pablo Villaraza & Dana Frigoli, Gaston
Torelli & Mariela Sometband, Ricky & Soledad, Matias Facio & Kara
Wenham, Ishmael Ludman, Javier Antar & Maria Trubba, Federico Farfaro
& Laura de Altuve, Ezequiel Farfaro & Eugenia Parrilla, Mario
Consiglieri & Annabella Diaz-Hojman, Lucas & Vanessa, and many more.
I know that if I go to Malcolm, Practica X, and La Viruta every week,
I will see practically every important younger dancer (i.e. age 45 and
younger) who lives in or comes through Buenos Aires.  Attending these
venues enables me to keep my finger on the pulse of ongoing
developments in tango and to be part of the community of professional
dancers who, by traveling to give workshops, are taking tango to every
corner of the world now.

You can go to any milonga in Buenos Aires and focus on the less
experienced or simply less talented dancers in the room and come away
making generalizations about the decline of tango.  Or you can focus
on the talented dancers who are committed to taking their dance as far
as it can go, and leave the milonga uplifted and inspired.  I
understand that there were fewer dancers in the latter category on the
particular night that you went to Malcolm, but there were some there
nevertheless.

And the fact remains that if you want to see people like Sebastian
Arce, Mariana Montes, Chicho  Frumboli, Damian Rosenthal, Celine Ruiz,
Pablo Inza, Moira Castellano, etc. "really" dance (i.e. show the full
range of what they can do from traditional tango to nuevo or
experimental tango), you simply need to go Villa Malcolm, La Viruta,
and Practica X.  Because even if you run into these people at Canning,
they are going to be dancing a traditional social style that is only
one facet of their dance.

On 03/03/07, Keith <keith at tangohk.com> wrote:
> Hi Everybody,
>
> After 5 weeks in Buenos Aires, last night I decided to check ot the Tango Nuevo scene at Club
> Villa Malcolm. My god, what a nightmare. It was, without doubt, the worst standard of dancing that
> I've seen since the 70s disco era; in fact, I hesitate to even call it 'dancing'. Previously I'd
> taken the view that Nuevo could be accepted as another style of Argentine Tango, together with
> Salon and Milonguero. But, based on what I saw last night, my opinion has changed. It bore
> absolutely no relationship with what I consider to be Tango, i.e. what you can see in any of the
> mainstream milongas of Buenos Aires.
>
> So, what was wrong at Club Villa Malcolm? Well, very few couples had a connection or even a proper
> embrace, most men spent the whole time looking at their feet, there was no ronda and collisions
> were the norm, and don't get me started on the music because it didn't seem to be connected in any
> way to what people were dancing. It didn't really matter while they were playing Neo Tango but
> when they started to murder some beautiful Golden Age Tango, it became almost too much to bear.
> And, finally, there was absolutely no sign of the elegance, style, serenity or beauty that I
> associate with Tango.
>
> My view now is that Tango Nuevo can be good, or even excellent, when danced by professionals or by
> trained dancers, but for normal social dancers it's just plain ugly. These people should video
> themselves to see how bad they look. But they were having fun so maybe they don't care. But was it
> Tango? No way.
>
> Keith
>
>
>
> On Fri Mar  2 20:36 , "Janis Kenyon"  sent:
>
> >Post and read commentaries about the milongas in Buenos Aires:
> >http://www.10tango.com/html/baile_milongas.php\?lang=en
> >
> >First you need to register at the site under Community.
> >
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