Tango taster videos are a concept that emerged from sharing short video clips of festivals and milongas on Facebook, and people who’d never been to them telling me how useful they were.
They said that while still photos can be fantastic for capturing the romance of an event, there’s no substitute for video when it comes to giving a sense of what it’s actually like to be there …
Continue reading Taster video: Tango Secrets is a world away from London (yet only 36 minutes)I know, I know, I’m a man who can turn any conversational subject under the sun into a discussion about tango, but I genuinely had no idea that the topic of my latest interview would turn out to have dance as a core element.
After really enjoying listening to people talking about tango, my plan was to conduct some other interviews where the common thread was people talking about things they love. Admittedly, the second of these was with a dancer, but when it came to the third, I had no idea that the backstory involved dance …
Continue reading Thought Experiments in Pubs – a conversation that wasn’t supposed to be about dance …I was born without the spectating gene: even with activities I love to do myself, I have very little interest in watching someone else do them. It’s probably not coincidence that I haven’t owned a telly in more than 25 years.
There were three additional reasons I used to grump about tango performances, which I’ll get to in a moment. So it may seem rather strange that I have seemingly filmed 45 of them over the past few years …
Continue reading A man who used to grump about performances has apparently filmed 45 of themIt has been known for me to receive a comment or two about my stamina on the dance floor. It’s been observed that I’m at every milonga, always there from start to finish, and spend way more time dancing than sitting.
This contrasts with saner people, who do things like choose between afternoon and evening milongas; arrive late; leave early; or pace themselves during each milonga. You know, smart things. I do not do any smart things during a tango event …
Continue reading My approach to tango festivals is exhausting, but I wouldn’t change a thingI said last time that I’d finally been able to write a short blog post about a Feast, because I’d reached a point of having said it all before. Exhibit A: all my previous Feast posts. That’s again the case with the March edition, and this is really the highest compliment I can give to the event: they are just consistently blissful.
But there are a couple of additional reasons I’m resisting the temptation to add to the many thousands of words I’ve previously written about the beautiful dancing and wonderful warmth of the atmosphere …
Continue reading There’s no March Feast blog post, but there are collated video clips
ben lovejoy 