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Internal Audit Technique
This cycle prevents us from ever reckoning with the costs of either. We can’t seem to finalize a cost-benefit analysis. The phone beeps, we are packing our shoes.



Friendly but not Friends
Dear Dancers, I write today with a sad confirmation of things I suspected. I hope to learn that it is somehow incomplete. As you know,



Berlin: The Directors’ Cut
From 2021 Berlin will no longer be our headquarters. Now is the time to revisit our Berlin productions. Accompanied by superlative collaborators, we used every opportunity to tell new stories and make tango bigger.
Thank you to: Mona Isabelle, Andreas Rochholl, CJ Yetman, Max Thomas, Fritz Schadow, Abisko Lights, Gökhan Aksakalli, Antoine Gallix, Alan Nguyen, Stefan Brenner, Yoko Onodera, Swan, Frauke Nees, Andi Hackenberg, Jaina Hirai, Eva Curtius, Ibon Goitia and Orquesta TRYST.



The Advent Pearls’ Oyster Farm
The TangoForge Advent offered the pearls of delight and wisdom I have collected between dances. If you want more of the Advent’s type of pearls, I welcome you to the oyster farm.



Endurance and Action
This year we have seen our fragility, we have lost control over our lives, we have surrendered freedoms and privileges. And we have also decided what to do, what we can do, how to protect, how to connect, how to live.



Cluster Tango in and beyond The Distance
Germany is, as always, a bit special. This post is intended to share with others the corona-cautious dancing system here. I am not interested in debating the mathematical and epidemiological theories. Instead I want to draw attention to aspects of the cluster system that may be useful and desirable beyond the viruscrisis.



Productivity versus Pleasure
My relationship to work presumes that completion is the main pleasure in life. My overwork is often a drive to finish something. This finish fetish is utterly arbitrary. Usually there’s no urgency, and most things get better with more time (and sleep). I practiced: stopping when it’s not done yet.



The grammar of creation
I resonated, and I was intimidated. I slog away at the day and although I use a lot of creativity to get through problems and take pleasure in every word I choose, every bite of food I eat, and moving my body around, I would hardly call the experience or the result “a love poem”.



Pivot
As I prepare to return to Europe, I want a new relationship to tango well before any milonga beckons. I suspect many of you also hope to return differently to tango – or hope that it will be different upon our return.



A new intimacy
We associate tango with large, crowded rooms, and anonymity – milongas. Yet we all know that peak tango can happen in a room with only three couples dancing. Let’s take that certainty and build tango around it. The courage and imagination that brought each of us to tango can be brought to bear on creating safe and fulfilling tango right now.



Surrealism
Besides flawless composition, Gorey’s art is the conjunction of an “aesthetic preference for the understated and the unstated” and an “attraction to the highly stylized”. He tended to “leave out most of the connections” so as to offer his witnesses “ambiguity” and “subtlety” which give space “for imaginative participation.”



Avigation and Transgression Redux: Performances at CTF 2016 and 2017
The agendas of our 2016 and 2017 shows, remastered in 2020: To show tango with contemporary culture: fashion, music, and gender concepts. To get tango off the stage, out of the milonga, and into daily life (symbolized by the architectural space of the station). To celebrate tango’s place in the African diaspora and propose tango learning and socializing in a hip-hop cultural context.



Neoliberal Tango
Most of us are familiar with deskilling in manufacturing. It means designing the production line so that each worker does only one small job over and over, and it’s easy to train anyone to do that one thing. This increases flexibility and power for the company while decreasing the meaning, opportunities for development, and power of workers. Deskilling also applies to retail, where workers are no longer experts on what they are selling, and do not provide personal service to their customers, but just stock shelves and ring cash registers. I observe that the deskilling of manufacturing and retail depend on the deskilling of the customer, who is no longer able to assess quality of products, nor repair them.



The Industry
A few days ago Maestra Dana Frígoli announced by youtube video that DNI, the school she founded with Pablo Villarraza in Buenos Aires, will not reopen.
A few days before that, Mona Isabelle announced definitively that Tangoloft will leave the luscious and beloved Gerichtstraße location.



Notes from the Accidental Exerciser
Willpower has limits, especially with regard to deep wounds, compelling habits, and self-destruction. Many people find meditation or spiritual rituals more effective. I like to find rituals that don’t involve hallucination. I like to rearrange material things or relate to them in differently in ways that radiate, echo, and hopefully restructure my bad habits. Rather than doing an affirmation about overcoming fear, it seems useful to me to actually induce panic and get through it, every morning. To start every day discovering that I am stronger than I knew.
- all
- addiction
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- body
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- Considering Tango?
- curated shopping
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- embrace
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- fashion
- ForgeProductions
- frustrated?
- Fundamentalism
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- Getting Started
- GirlLeaders
- hip-hop
- history
- improvisation
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- interviews
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- pedagogy
- philosophy
- power
- projection
- queer
- Secrets for Men
- sex
- shoes
- style
- Style Guide
- teaching
- technique
- the Berlin interviews
- transfer
- travel
- trust
- underthings
- work
- zouk
Thoughts on the Alfa bandoneon by Pez Pearson
Fabián Salas, interviewed by Keith Elshaw 2001
Gustavo Naveira, interviewed by Brian Dunn 2005-8
Andrew Chiw interviews Vio 2020
Making Tango Your Own
The Good Girl
Internal Audit Technique
Friendly but not Friends
Berlin: The Directors’ Cut
The Advent Pearls’ Oyster Farm
Endurance and Action
Cluster Tango in and beyond The Distance
Productivity versus Pleasure
The grammar of creation
Pivot
A new intimacy
Surrealism
Neoliberal Tango
The Industry
Notes from the Accidental Exerciser
Your and Our Power is ready to be used
Crisis Sunrise
Addiction II
NeoTango Rage 2020
Tips for teaching your first tango class
An unethical industry?
How to work at home
Relief
Retreat is an aperture
Tango is not a place for aggression
Why I will never call myself ‘nuevo’
WARRIOR
Another Improvisation: Interview with pianist Dietmar Schlabertz
Retrospective: The First Post
What is Neotango?
What is Fusion? Interview with Bo Wang of Angel City Fusion
Alarm
No means no
Pleasures of the Cabeceo
Pain games
Out the Other Side
The hardest job in Tango
Meeting your Dream
Gentrification
FIskabäck Österlen Sverige July 5-7, 2019
The Merry-go-round
Treasure
Hope Whisperers (and Italy food guide)
Why Learn All of Tango
The strength of a Tanguera
Are you doing the right dance? (Tango vs. Zouk)
The Hard Sell
New Year’s 2019: Fuel for your Fire
Let’s Make Tango Popular
Buscamos – The Search
The Lexicon and the art of Distillation
Searching for the Italian in Argentine Tango: second entry
Altertango Tryst 2018 in Lotus Loft
Vogue Demaciado
Altertango
2018 Seminar Encuentro Compañeros
Bad Surfaces, Real Music, Action Heros
Be an angel, not a fairy
The Old World
Organizing a Milonga
What is the Evil Sequence?
The back room
Near Death Experience
Altertango Action Plan v1
What not to say on Swedish television
The Tradition Tension
From Milongas to Altertango
Ignorantia juris non excusat
Hugs and Laughter
The Blog comes to life: Roles
Elegance
Gender Liberation
Ignacio Santos, Orquesta Tipica Ciudad Baigón
Mano y Vio 2017
Carlos Libedinsky’s Tango
The Perfect Tanguera
If tango were a videogame…
Bankers
The Tradition is Transgressive – CTF 2017
Black Magic White Tango
Quality Control
Fairy dust
How I Revel – 2017
Tango Addiction
Conformity and power
ForgeTube: Improvisation from the Elements
Why isn’t Argentine Tango more popular?
Argentine Tango Dancing Flow
Real Improvisation
Partners
Seminar Encuentro Compañeros TangoForge 2017
No more Mastery
We Open a School ! … Studio Berlin
Better than Sex
Tango Sisters
How to be a Good Man, as you become an Advanced Tanguero
How to become a Hot TangoMan
The Pleasure Principle
Biomechanics: The Arch of Connection
Inversion
Expectations
Embracing Nuevo?
Prayer for Virtuosity
Why I love Eugenia Parrilla
No crash trance
The hostile period
Abracadabra
The codigos (advanced)
The evil sequence
Divine Time Machines don’t pivot alone
The Hug to Break a Thousand Hearts
El Encuentro
Dancing with Germain
No Hungry Women
Berlin Tango Histories
Vio Music
A social milonga
Improvisation
“The interesting questions” interview with Judith Preuss, Mala Junta
DJ Jens Stuller, Interview
Dancing in the Berlin Hauptbahnhof
Martin y Maurizio: elevating revelations…
Experimenting to popularize Tango
The gender journey
Is it a conversation?
A manifesto for dancing
Elio Astor, NeoTango DJ
Fundamentalism Embodied: I try it, as a Mark.
Tango as psychotherapy
Game Tango: Watch the Avatar
And then when you least expect it
Tango Fundamentalism
TangoForge does Burlesque
Code of Ethics for Tango Communities
Something added in translation: Lead with the chest
What is the role of the embrace in maintaining connection?
Go!
One Tanda with Ekaterina
the grind
The Big Tango Lessons, Berlin 2014
Interview with Henning Klose, TangoLoft Berlin
Why I don’t ask Marks to dance…
Zurich first night last tanda
Consumption, creativity, celebrity
Follow the music, and other evasive truisms
The uninvited.
Keep the candles burning
The deeper cabeceo
Interview with Thomas Rieser, Nou Tango school, Berlin
Pathos princesses
Milongas oscillation
Victims and angels
Bolting
Berlin Queer Tango Festival 2014
I am not a teddy bear: a gender breakdown
Milonga Strandbar
NOW I’m in Heaven
And then it’s over
Marathon psych
So a tango marathon, or at least this one
Tango Vicioso at Insomnia
Tango class
Clärchens Ballhaus I and II
Milonga Popular
Happy tango.. so right I want to cry: Tango Loft
Professionalism and commercialism in tango
Taste of Freedom at Walzerlinksgestrickt
Milonga Tangocafe (Tango Tanzen Macht Schön)
Maestro’s reflections
Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui’s “Milonga”
Music in which the rhythm doesn’t make noise
The state of biomechanical science
not good enough
Renaming the Roles
Jewel Lab honors Graeme Dallow
Interview with Roberto Martinez
Anatomical technique
The Embrace
One tango . ?
Tango Complex: An honest introduction to Argentine Tango
Tango and Carbonara (or the Should and the Could)
So about Gender and Tango…
I am not a teacup
Argentine Tango out of the clichés
The reverse cabeceo
Factions
Right, wrong, and handsome
I don’t think that’s style…
Why Women should learn to lead, by Mitra Martin
Why rebel?
Making tango your own
Leaders’ versus Followers’ musicality
Slippage and fracture in transmission
Tango bigotry
Moody milonguera / Us and the Onda
Experience the “real” tango…
Is tango art? Entry I
Tanguera’s tale
88 keys…
Welcome to the Moveable Milonga!
What’s in a style?
A Passing Embrace
Rethinking cortinas
What is Confidence?
There’s nothing wrong with Contentment
The power of desire
Nuevo Tango Reloaded
Girls who want more
About “Authenticity”
Damian and Vio hit the streets, Sydney
Vio’s weird shoes
DNI is a controversial school
Inhabiting the tango roles
Art and global culture
Why we need Feminist Tango
La Maria Practica, Buenos Aires (the complete interview)
What is Rainbow Queer Argentine Tango?
The Chicho Interview
Slideshow from 2009 Celebration of Women Leaders
Gender, desire, and drag
beautiful, complex interview with Pablo Veron
Queer Hip Hop
Pablo Aslan on tango music
Tango: Reflections from one year in (before facebook)
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