After the tango micro-documentary, people kept asking me what was next? At the time, I had no response to that because it was only ever planned as a one-off thing.
But almost two years later, I do finally have an answer …
Continue reading Talking Tango, Talking Life – a new video interview seriesI’m a big fan of pauses – or, more precisely, suspensions – in tango. Not only because there are moments where the music is very clearly asking us to wait (though with apparent ‘not applicable in London’ asterisks), but because followers have often said it’s one of their favourite elements of the dance.
I have been known to lead a suspension for a full phrase, but my current one is lasting rather longer …
Continue reading A longer pause than usual in my dance (a 5-8 month one)Sunday’s primary task was to change time zones – which is to say, prepare for a week of 6.30am starts as I returned to work for my final week here.
I resisted my favoured Sunday evening milonga, and instead had a relaxing day: a leisurely lunch with a friend, followed by a visit to the nearby cultural centre …
Continue reading A day without dance! But a great deal of tango talk …A tango lesson we all learn rather early is that there are never any guarantees. You can go to the same milonga in the same place with the same DJ – even dance with some of the same people – and have wildly different experiences on different occasions.
While our head may know this, however, it can still prove difficult to convince our heart that we haven’t found the secret formula …
Continue reading A dangerous visit to Perfume de Mujer at El Beso; go to dinner with Ale, but never travel with her!Diego has been encouraging me to cabeceo more and more advanced followers, and I have been doing this – very happily here, and with a little more trepidation in London. I did, however, draw the line at teachers and performers.
Until last night, when I danced with at least two, and I suspect more. Entirely by mistake, mind, but hey …
Continue reading A sleep-deprived mistake turning into a wonderful surprise, at Milonga en lo de BalmacedaThe last time I visited Confitería Ideal was back in 2019, when it was a building site. The good news was that the bags of cement had been replaced by tables and chairs. The bad news is that the new owner has no interest in sullying his shiny new building with milongueros.
They allowed us in, but strictly on condition that we consumed calories rather than burned them …
Continue reading A visit to post-building site Confitería Ideal, then Sans Souci at La NacionalAlessandra hasn’t quite grasped that mornings and I have an uneasy relationship at the best of times, and when operating on BsAs milonga time, I view them in much the same light as Guardia Vieja tandas.
Instead, she decided that pre-9am was a good time to suggest going out for coffee, and about an hour later was the perfect time for a Spanish lesson …
Continue reading A very Argentine afternoon, and closing Parakultural at 4amIt was a year ago to the day that I was last here in BsAs for a month-long stay. As a freelance writer, I don’t earn any money when I’m not working, so my last visit was one week of pure holiday, and three weeks working holiday. This was … not a good plan!
Don’t misunderstand me: I had a truly wonderful time. What I did not have was much sleep! So this time I decided to take the financial hit of three weeks’ holiday and just the last week of working in the mornings …
Continue reading A wonderful welcome back to my second home: closing El Beso at 3amNot sleeping after Salon Canning finally caught up with me at 5pm yesterday! I went for a stroll, bought some pastries and then had to admit defeat at go to bed at 5pm.
I felt more human by the morning. After coffee, tea, breakfast, and more tea, I set up my Buenos Aires office, ready for the morning …
Continue reading Setting up my Buenos Aires office; prepare for shorter blogs!
… I’ve booked a private COVID-19 antibody test. More on my generic blog.
I wrote a post about Brexit on my mostly-neglected non-tango blog; you can read it here if you’d like to.
Continue reading Let’s try to make our tango embrace just that little bit warmer this month
As is usual this week, I had work in the morning. Getting up at 7am is never pleasant in my world, but it wasn’t as bad as yesterday thanks to me exercising restraint where milongas were concerned.
After work, it was time for my second Spanish pronunciation lesson, dealing with the rest of the consonants …
No, don’t worry, I don’t mean I caused another diplomatic incident, this time by mispronouncing something, I mean I actually took a lesson in Spanish pronunciation …
Continue reading A lesson in Spanish pronunciation, and Misteriosa Milonga
Today was a fairly thorough introduction to Buenos Aires. In particular, how Argentine time works.
Our plan was to attend a class, an afternoon milonga, another class and an evening milonga. We only managed the latter two – mostly because we spent a great deal of time getting our hands on some cash …
Continue reading A busy first day – but just the one milonga …
A recent wardrobe re-organisation reveals that a full 25% of my shirts and trousers are Designated Tango Clothing.
Not actual tango clothing – that would feel a bit pretentious at my stage of the game – but clothing almost exclusively used for tango. This includes an unlikely mix of expensive shirts and cheap trousers …
As some of you will know, I suffer from mild facial aphasia, also known as partial prosopagnosia. Since tango people are often curious about it when I mention it, I thought I’d write a brief primer …
Continue reading Mild facial aphasia, or why you have to introduce yourself to me multiple times
Bridgitta had suggested I needed to find my inner 8 year old to give me ideas about new ways to improvise to the music. I’d assured her I didn’t have one, and that I was born aged 40.
However, it turned out I was wrong: it just needed rather specific circumstances to find him …
Continue reading Practicing energetic tiny steps with 89,999 other people
I began my tango journey at the end of October of last year, making today 8 months AT. In that time, there have been private lessons, group lessons, workshops, practicas, milongas, books, videos, forums, Facebook groups … YouTube pretty much assumes I only want to watch tango dances, and my Spotify playlists contain tango, the whole tango and nothing but the tango.
As for my schedule …
If I were in any doubt about my addiction to tango, this evening would have dispelled it. This was the first week since I started dancing in the milonga after the Tuesday class that I was unable to do so – and I really, really missed it …
Glamorously attired in the bottom half of a Virgin Atlantic sleep suit and a loose-fitting Nike t-shirt, I looked entirely unlike any ballerino the world had ever seen. Me, one other bloke and about 15 women, waiting in a dance studio in a Kings Cross college for a one-hour ballet taster class to begin …
Continue reading A ballet taster class, and a simple dissociation tip
You’ve got the tango bug pretty bad when a friend talks you into doing a ballet fitness class.
Bridgitta’s argument was that ballet training offers a lot of benefits for dancing tango. It was hard to argue against this given that I’d already booked a ballet taster class next month for exactly that reason.
I’d expected the class to be all women. As it turned out, a third of the class was male. But that third was me …
Continue reading Ballet fitness, musicality, and a truly shared dance
Judging progress can be difficult. People talk about a kind of zig-zag in tango. One lesson, everything clicks and is perfect and you feel you’re doing fabulously. The next, everything feels terrible and nothing works and you feel you’re a lost cause.
I’ve been doing pilates for only a little longer than tango, and there it feels even harder to see progression. Maybe an exercise feels a little smoother here and there, but mostly I rely on our teacher’s assessment.
But every now and then …
I can balance really well on a bicycle or motorcycle: I often used to win ‘slow races,’ which are all about balance. But I’ve never had great balance when standing on one foot. I generally carry out a site survey and formal risk assessment before putting on a sock. I knew I’d have to improve my balance for tango, so asked our pilates teacher for one lesson focused on that.
Aside from standing on a balance board for a while, it didn’t feel like much of the lesson was overtly geared to that, and trying a balance ball at home afterwards, I could see and feel no visible progress. I looked rather akin to a yacht being tossed around the ocean in a force ten gale.
But side-steps in my next lesson did feel more solid. And putting on my sock the next day, I discovered something amazing: I was able to stand, almost perfectly still, on either leg! When I got back on the balance ball, I was almost stationary on that too.
I could even manage a yoga move, lifting the other leg up and alternating between holding it in front of, and behind, me. That’s something I could never have imagined would happen so quickly. I was so surprised I almost fell over.
ben lovejoy 