[Tango-L] Di Sarli "Don Juan"/Gustavo & Giselle: Part 1

[Brian Dunn]

> Here's Gustavo & Giselle dancing their majestic version
> of "Don Juan" 
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5FOjT959J0
Trini wrote:
>>>"Thanks for the video, Bryan.  They dance it beautifully, but to my eye,
it's not quite right.  As if there's a little too much work involved.
Personally, I would have preferred touches of nuevo instead of swaths in
their performance.  However, this was a performance piece and perhaps the
swaths were there mainly for his audience."<<<

Yes, it's certainly a carefully crafted performance piece, meant to express
for an audience's pleasure a very particular "dancer's view" of Di Sarli's
"musician/arranger's view" of Don Juan.  As audience members ourselves, we
are all entitled to our preferences, and need not defend or explain them, so
I fully accept your opinion that there's something "not quite right",
although from my perspective I disagree.

Gustavo once said in a seminar that, whatever they may dance in a
choreography, all the things they do COULD be "led".  From my perspective,
that's an interesting constraining compositional requirement that I suspect
nearly all "performance/fantasia tango" choreographies can't meet. It also
raises the possibility that those who CAN lead and follow these elements
might choose to successfully and appropriately use them in social dancing at
a milonga for their own expressive pleasure, especially since the social
dancing context is so much less stressful for them than the performance
context.  This is what I've observed when watching Gustavo & Giselle social
dancing in milongas at the Mercury Café in Denver or the Avalon milongas in
Boulder.  And in those milongas, they do indeed dance with the "touches" of
"nuevo" you'd prefer, rather than "swaths".

I mean, tango is an improvised dance, right? And some good dancers have more
improvisational tools than others, especially if as a couple they have a
combined total of tango experience approaching forty years.  They can use
these elements within their share of the floor space, they can use them
successfully without disturbing the ronda.  So we shouldn't be surprised
when their social dancing may contain elements which are more complex and
refined than those used by the average dancers around them.  Their other
social dance partners certainly seem to enjoy their choices, to put it
mildly.  Many experienced tango dancers may even see this level of mastery
manifested in this way at the milonga as setting a kind of "gold standard"
for improvised social tango.  I mean, they're just dancing for enjoyment
with each other in the moment like the rest of us, except they have the
benefit of 1) a lovingly honed artistic perspective, 2) superb technique,
and 3) decades of dancing in Buenos Aires milongas.  

(continued in Part 2)

All the best,
Brian Dunn
Dance of the Heart
www.danceoftheheart.com
"Building a Better World, One Tango at a Time"