I was awake and out of bed at the crack of noon, as I had a packed afternoon schedule ahead of me: drinking a hot chocolate at Cafe Tortoni, one of the city’s Grand Cafes.
While most of the city virtually defines ‘faded grandeur,’ there’s nothing faded about the grand cafes. They’ve been beautifully maintained or restored, and the impressive settings leads to queues of people at the door …
Continue reading Cafe Tortoni; Pablo & Noelia class; and a sociable night at BilongónMilonga (the dance) and I have an unusual relationship.
Most leaders run a mile from it during their early years; I didn’t. Because I could dance to the beat long before I had the vocabulary to dance to the melody, I was actually very happy with milonga tandas from a very early stage. And because a lot of leaders hide, it made it very easy to get dances, even as a raw beginner.
But as my lyrical dance emerged and evolved, my rhythmical dance felt increasingly unsatisfactory – all the more so at milonga speeds. I wasn’t so much afraid of boring followers as feeling bored by my own dance. I was doing the usual leader’s milonga journey in reverse: I’d now become one of the leaders who avoid it …
Continue reading Milonga with Diego; a workshop with Corina and Ines; and an unusual Tango GardenI was going to say it was less than a month ago when I described my tangostential crisis, but as I caught a lurgy and was out of action for half of it, it was actually four milongas ago that I wrote:
I’m now at a somewhat odd stage in my tango – and I’m not quite sure what to do about it […] I feel simultaneously delighted with where I am, and frustrated with where I’m not.
Every problem in tango turns out to be either far simpler, or far more complex, than I imagined. Fortunately in this case it was the former …
Continue reading Four milongas later, my tangostential crisis is over (for now)I wrote last time about my tango crash, feeling that with my newly-improved posture, it was like I was starting all over again when it came to learning how to dance.
Emma diagnosed the issue and provided me with a way forward, but circumstances conspired to delay my first real-world test until the Los Angelitos 10th anniversary milonga on Sunday …
Continue reading Five hours of wonderful dance, and I feel back on trackTuesday night saw the first London milonga re-opening after 14 months of lockdown, one day after ‘freedom day’ in England and Wales. I was of course there, despite the 30C temperature!
The evening began with a one-hour mixed-level lesson that turned out to be more mixed-level than expected …
Continue reading Dancing at the first milonga in london after lockdownI’m currently awaiting a hospital referral for recurring abdominal pain which has left me largely out of action for the past month or so. The unpredictability of when the pain will strike, coupled to tiredness from broken sleep, has made it difficult to commit to anything in advance.
However, when a friend suggested an on-the-day decision to attend the Tango Amistoso class and practica, I decided to give it a go. By the time I got there, I was already questioning the wisdom of this decision …
Continue reading The healing power of tango, and musical hilarity
I wrote last month that I was feeling like I’m on a roll now. Things that once would have felt complicated now quickly feel straightforward; things I would once have had to think about now feel obvious; I’m able to think about how I want the follower to move, rather than my own steps; and finding exits to new things is now instinctive …
Continue reading A tale of two cities, tango edition
In Luis and Natalia’s intermediate class, we’d been playing with the contra-giro over the past few weeks, so they decided to do the same with the giro tonight. Or, more specifically, a medio-giro.
You can obviously enter a giro from any step – forward, backward or either side. The version I’ve used so far has been from a side-step, and the one we used tonight was from a back ocho. We played with a few different variants …
Continue reading Connecting some dots, and returning home to Tango Terra
The theme of this week’s Tango Space intermediate class was advertised as a cross-system sequence. This would usually be enough to send me running for the hills but for two things …
Continue reading A minor mystery solved, and a bit of Tango Terror
Thursday’s lesson was on ‘dancing to the pause.’ This was familiar territory to me, but was still a really useful lesson – partly for one simple movement, and partly as a reminder of how far I’ve come from my mathematical days.
The lesson started with the 8-beat phrase, and an initial suggestion to slow on the 7th beat in order to pause on the 8th. This is a very slight variation on what I usually do when walking to rhythmical sections, which is to decelerate on the 7th beat in order to do a weight-change instead of a step on the 8th …
Continue reading Tango maths revisited, and the fragility of tango heaven
journey of a trainee tanguero 
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