Reading The Tea

“Don’t put your follow where you want her [or him], open up space that you invite her to fill.” 

Last night D & I took Tango 2 from Adam Hoopengardner at Empire Dance. Even though I alread knew how to lead the steps themselves (ocho cortado and variations), Adam brought some really interesting thoughts about leading it to the class, ways of making it an advanced step. When first learning it, you can step with your partner, taking each bit as it comes, in traditional timing. Later on, you can start to play with the rhythm, hearing the music. To really make the step advanced, you play with the dynamics, and give the follow room to have a voice. To me dynamics are different than timing. Timing is long or short, 1 count or 2. Dynamics are feeling — stacatto, legato, playful, melancholic, nostolgic. Then you are really dancing. Someone once said to me (referring to ballroom) that beginning dancers want to dance intermediate steps, intermediate dancers want to dance advanced steps, and advanced dancers want to practice the basics. I would take it a bit further and say that there are no advanced steps — just advanced performance of steps.

Julie Taylor’s autobiographical, lyric look at the experience of violence, both public and personal, explored through tango. It’s effective and affecting. Though it was a bit hard for me in the beginning to get into her style, by the end the book had absorbed me.

One of the things I love about summer in New York is all of the dancing (much of it free!) that takes place outside. Last Friday Dustin and I went to the Midsummer Night Swing Ceili Dance. The last time I went to a Ceili was in early high school, when Bronwen and I went to one in Portland that was in the common room above a police station, so I’d forgotten exactly how much fun it is. It’s also amazing exercize — a woman in our set was wearing a pedometer and a couple of hours in announced that we’d danced four miles.

On Sunday we make it over to the Pier 54 Moondance for swing to the Sultans of Swing (Who Dustin actually danced to at Crystal Ballroom in Portland about six years ago.).

   Argentine heist flick… The plot twists don’t quite add up in the end, but it’s enough fun on the way that it’s hard to care.

Whenever I’m performing obsessive searches for tango-related books, I get really irritated when tango is used in the title, but the book has nothing even remotely to do with the dance or the music. I was relieved, then, when this one did. It’s rather trashy chick-lit, but the descriptions of dance and the dance world are interesting. Living in the NY area, one gets to experience the warm fuzzies of recognition when Palmer mentions gossip about classes at this studio, or milongas at that one. It’s a sherbert book — sweet, sticky, enjoyable, but not really filling.