Themes

Authenticity & Buenos Aires

Cabeceo & the Codigos

The Nuevo Files

Paradigm Shifts (Important)

Experience the “real” tango…

From Milongas to Altertango

Renaming the Roles

The Pleasure Principle

The reverse cabeceo

Chronological Order

The Hard Sell Unfortunately tango's backward gender politics did not turn out to be its only anti-social gesture. As a student and then a professional, I learned that tango is a profoundly anti-ethical industry.

Let’s Make Tango Popular Milonga Popular is an extraordinary tango project. Founded by Sven Elze and Pedram Shahyar in 2013, Milonga Popular has proven to be a sustainable and successful model for building new tango communities. This year, Sven and I have spent many hours working together to analyze and articulate exactly what are the questions and lessons which [...]

Buscamos – The Search She imputes joy to my movement which is in fact the urgent beating of wings to fly aimlessly in a storm that never ends.

The Lexicon and the art of Distillation Through years of study and practice I have developed the TangoForge technique. Like many teachers, I offer students “systems” for learning. Since many teachers have developed some kind of personal system for teaching tango, students are rightfully confused. It is possible to create many different systems for describing the same thing. Each of these systems [...]

Searching for the Italian in Argentine Tango: second entry The "something", I believe, is the fire of urgency. And this is what is missing in Europe, and it is what makes Americans relatively good tangueros. It is the desperation which drives you to invade a stranger with your personality and with the utter confidence that you are SEXY.

Altertango Tryst 2018 in Lotus Loft Klik hier für DEUTSCH We have been making experiments with Altertango throughout 2018 and we are now ready to host our first open event, Thursdays 25.Okt-29.Nov 2018 in Lotus Loft, Gerichtstraße 23, Aufgang 4. Dancers who have attended our experimental Altertango events describe the experience as “precious”, an unrepeatable, rare experience of connection with a [...]

Vogue Demaciado As a tango dancer, I have not been graced with the right body or the right beauty. Of course, I want to be the tango princess, with the skinny legs and the delicate shoes (except that I don't want that boring hair!). But I'm driven to create images that express my ethics, costumes which say something. This comes at the cost of traditional beauty.

Altertango The history of Altertango began at the beginning, my beginning anyway. My first dance partner, Fritz, liked to dance to street musicians. I had special plastic-soled shoes that could pivot on anything, even straight asphalt. We found a saxophone player practicing in an alley and danced amongst the garbage cans. We danced over the stars [...]

2018 Seminar Encuentro Compañeros III Seminar Encuentro Compañeros TangoForge, August 2018, Berlin. 27 students from 12 countries, 10 musicians, 3 beautiful rooms, 6 workshops, and pure Argentine Tango dancing with contemporary gender perspectives on diverse music.

Bad Surfaces, Real Music, Action Heros Committed now to Altertango (getting our tangos out of milongas and into popular culture), I developed three short workshops designed to make our tango more worldly.

Be an angel, not a fairy Most women are paranoid of being “heavy” as dancers. They try to be “light”. The result is actually that they disconnect, they break the arch of connection. To stay in the experience of sublime connection we have to adjust everything all the time. When the mark produces more force to create a certain movement or [...]

The Old World I went to Italy to eat tortelli, not to dance. I am immediately disoriented. Everything looks, and smells, like Buenos Aires. The hallway of the apartment, a delicate mustiness. The smell of marble. I arrive in the dark in a foreign land, Modena. There is a milonga nearby. I feel an old, now-unfamiliar, excitement. I [...]

Organizing a Milonga It's necessary to give up some of the space on the dance floor in order to provide a seating area that is *inside the party* where people can feel part of it when they're not dancing, where they can watch the dancing, and from where they can cabeceo.The seating areas must have pretty lighting so that people feel attractive and dignified there.

What is the Evil Sequence? I first observed and wrote about the Evil Sequence in 2016. Now I hope to shine some sunshine on it, and hope we can grow some more beautiful things with new awareness.

The back room At the moment, my favorite place to dance is Milonga Popular’s “Candle Floor”. The second room is overseen by DJ Gökhan Aksakalli, who plays almost entirely music that I want to dance to. It’s dark. The dancing here is languid and sensual. Pairs of all (and often mixed) levels explore Organizer Sven Elze’s first commandment: [...]

Instruments… I’m learning about music, as it relates to tango. I’m not going to do any counting, or any playing. Mostly more listening and more asking questions. So far the findings are preliminary: Get rid of the drummer. This is the boring part of rock and roll ballads. The electric bass can stay because he’s softer. [...]

Near Death Experience I sit in vigil at my beloved's bedside, guarding his corpus against the authorities who seem to be practicing careless amputation ("ganchos aren't tango"), bizarre bloodletting ("voleos aren't elegant"), justified with dishonest claims about tradition. I stay awake to intercept the doping administered by ill-trained volunteers who appear in the night, zombies muttering insipid reactionary truisms ingrained by tango's Fox Newscasters...

Altertango Action Plan v1 All other travel and events, and the focus of my tango work will shift to developing AlterTango. This means three things: Expressing Tango as an art form and cultural practice beyond the milonga (for performances and alternative social dancing events) Collaborations with musicians, striving for profound improvisational experiences. Promoting tango to the people I want to be dancing with in 15 years: yogis, ninjas, retired professional dancers, and athletes

What not to say on Swedish television I’ve had media training. I knew to write my talking points (on the train). Staying on your Talking Points Then, I broke the most important rule. Don’t say anything other than your talking points –even if it means ignoring the question and repeating yourself– because if you do, that’s what they’ll use. And that’s exactly [...]

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