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Neo logic

We were responsible for “the neo”. We didn’t know what that meant… Here are the latest collected tidbits on this confusing term, with no conclusions whatsoever.

the Walking Dance

Parkour becomes an act of beauty. It avoids not only the routine of spatial organization and predetermined routes, but also reinterprets going somewhere as a creative and pleasure-seeking process.

The keto diet improves the health of our mitochondria, which enables our brains to function smoothly. What is it? While maintaining a high level of vegetables and a moderate amount of protein, it eliminates grains, beans, and tubers and replaces them with lots and lots of fat, of all kinds.

Bodybuilding

He’s not surprised that it’s possible to sculpt your own body, but I am. While it’s a good idea to try to love your body as it is, it’s very empowering to realize you can also change the parts you don’t like.

too much crazy

Some of them scramble to explain that they really really really do mean it as a compliment.

Life on Spec

“On spec” is an abbreviation of “on speculation”. It’s a business term referring to production in hope of success. Artists are afraid to demand too much, or settle for too little, so we silently collaborate in the “contract of hope”.

Trilogy of Rage

The “therapy” of art may serve others, but it must first be the antidote for the artist. It is the gesture made necessary by the shape and material of the artist’s own experience as crucible.

Back Sacadas in Lesson 10: What I’m learning from teaching tango in 30 days

Today is day 11 of a stunt, to teach tango to a stuntman in 30 days. Stunt-work requires precision. Each day’s lesson is exactly 15 minutes (with a timer).

From the gift of Cochabamba to the genius of El Pulpo

The dancers of the Cochabamba Group and El Pulpo are misunderstood as innovators, people who distorted and departed from tango. Genius is to find something new inside of what we think we already know.

Liberté

This graphic has been on our home page for six years. For several of those years I have been aware that our students rarely, if ever, use the word ‘creativity’. They use the word ‘freedom’. The gap between those two words is a crucial failure to understand our own biographies and to articulate what it means to be artists.

A kilo of symphonies

“Señor Piazzolla” she replied, “won’t you play for me?”

Despair and Imagination

I was overwhelmed with despair, surely multi-valent. I was inconsolable, untouchable, reactive, helpless. I watched joy pass but could not reach to touch it.

Risk

But would I accept the right invitations if I felt cautious of everyone? Would I be able to relax my body, to trust and enjoy while also maintaining vigilance?

Territorialism

I always invite my students to share their confusion when teachers are telling them different things. Likewise I now feel a responsibility to explain why teachers are almost always covertly hostile to one another.

First world problems

I discover there are far more than two aesthetics for a voleo and they are all for me. I wonder what else about tango did I defer to others’ guardrails? Are there more joys and pleasure that I never claimed?

by the Sword

I am here to pick grapes. I continue to train every day, alone, but not to that music. I dance alone to the teenagers’ band practice, a medley of American pop songs.

Showing off?

Showing off is an accusation leveled at people perceived to be doing either “stage” tango or “nuevo” tango in contexts where only “social” or “traditional” tango is authorized. The vilification rests on a concept entirely external to tango: that showing off is shameful.

To evolve or not?

In the era of Fundamentalism, modernism is in decline. Although we can ill-afford it, the modernists are now drawing battle-lines.

Fabián Salas, interviewed by Keith Elshaw 2001

So we went out and we started dancing, and looking for what we didn’t know … we were looking for: how many voleos were possible in Tango dancing; how many different ganchos there are; things like that. To come to a total knowledge of what’s available.

Gustavo Naveira, interviewed by Brian Dunn 2005-8

“Gustavo, what are we going to do with this!? This is such an amazing way of making art, we must do something really great with this, something HUGE!!!” –Chicho

Andrew Chiw interviews Vio 2020

We talk about intentions, the development of TangoForge pedagogy, online tango education, marketing for the tango industry, and possible uses of Blockchain.

Making Tango Your Own

–Auch auf DE– Mario and Andrea were competitive ballroom dancers for some years. Eventually they tired of the rigid priorities and circumstances of competition. They resolved to continue dancing in a way that was more sustainable and directed by their own values. Finding traditional milongas uptight and unsatisfying, they renovated part of their house to make a dancing room and built their own community.

The Good Girl

As I’m sure you are, I’m spending a lot of time thinking about – well, everything.
My life, decisions I made, mostly the bad ones.
Wine, the difference between Barbera and Ruché.
Tango: was it all a dream?

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.

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.

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”.

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.

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.

Your and Our Power is ready to be used

So whatever sense of powerlessness was afflicting people was in fact inaccurate. For how long have we been mis-assessing our power? For how long have we had everything we need to repair the world? For how long have we been living in danger and deprivation that could have been defeated by courageous collective action?

Crisis Sunrise

The path I chose was at that time the least comfortable, the most unknown, the scariest. The next few hours, in which I implemented my decision, were drenched in fear. What had I done? But I knew that my fear was part of the fractal unfurling across our planet, identical in its most mundane and momentous iterations. The Distance has been an aperture to many changes. Some intentional, some incidental. Some little, some big.

Positive Addiction?

Addictions are harmful in various ways, but never 100% harmful. In other words, most addictions involve some dimension(s) that are normal, reasonable, and healthy – such as having a sense of belonging to a community, creating a sense of identity, and having profound and intense experiences. Behavioral addictions usually involve an experience of personal development, building skills and expertise.The fact that tango has healthful and meaningful aspects, including a rich social life, engagement with cultural heritage, skills-building, and artistic expression does not obviate dangerous addiction.

NeoTango Rage 2020

NeoTango is beautiful, but it only exists because we have been made to feel unwelcome in Tango. I do not accept being excluded and I certainly do not revel in it. Because we have been thrown out, a whole bunch of people like Ron Fenton, DJ Elio, Thanos Kasidis, Tanguerilla, Andreas Lange, Sonja Armisen and so many others have volunteered so much time, energy, and financial risk to create a whole separate scene of neotango so that we feel comfortable to dance. I do not accept exile.

Distance: What have you learned about tango by not dancing?

In this Distance from milongas, I dance alone with the ocean. What are you doing and how are you feeling about tango, with the perspective of some Distance? I created a workbook to help us think about this.

Tips for teaching your first tango class

I believe that many dancers will return from the Distance with a renewed care for our community and a desire to rebuild it with great love. I believe many people will be inspired as never before to share the gift of tango, feeling now perhaps more than ever before the preciousness of gathering, and embracing. Indeed my student Josh is already preparing a class for his community, a clean and sober gym. We had a conversation about how to think about teaching, and this post contains my notes:

An unethical industry?

The purpose of the codigos is to protect egos from rejection. But what goes missing when that is the only system we have? What indeed is social, and what social dimensions of tango require care? Let us consider what we can do about that when we return.

How to work at home

I’ve worked at home for 20 years. For folks who are new to it and for those unable to work who are and are abruptly faced with the rather uncomfortable opportunity to move forward on your dream projects, here are 15 tools for Discipline, Self-Awareness, Improvisation, and effective Contemplation.

Relief

I need to tell you that I am feeling tremendous relief about having a break from tango.

Retreat is an aperture

Indeed interruption is part of the history of tango. During the dictatorship, tango became a family and home practice. It’s really not all about milongas. Let us welcome this pause as part of the dance, a needed disruption of rhythm, part of a more complex one.

Tango is not a place for aggression

The video proclaimed “if you dare to move your legs (or to enjoy the movement of your lady’s legs) you deserve to be restrained and to suffer.” And it had the intended effect which was to intimidate even the best dancers in the Wellington community from executing certain movements.

Why I will never call myself ‘nuevo’

My foes are absolutely certain that I am one of those nuevo dancers, toes grazing my shoulders, back turned to my partner, dancing to ambient music in strange shoes. Actually it’s beyond nuevo, it’s not even tango anymore. My fans, who yearn for self-expression and are often berated for that, cluster around hoping that I will protect and expand the territory of freedom.

WARRIOR

These are the folks I want to be dancing with in 5 years. You too? If so, please help me to get this film out globally to these tribes.

Retrospective: The First Post

Selecting a few posts to reprint in Until Forever, I re-read my first blog post ever. It was a bit startling to realize that most of the things that concern me about tango today are things I realized from the very beginning. It’s a little embarrassing to realize that I continued despite knowing what I […]

What is Neotango?

Many different words are used to describe post-Golden Age tango: nuevo, electro, neo, alternative, contemporary, con-tango, fusion … Some people even use the term ‘non-tango’. The term ‘neotango’ is becoming more common in Europe, and its meaning is becoming more interesting. As I’ve learned more, I feel that it would help us to have some clarity and consensus where possible about these terms,

What is Fusion? Interview with Bo Wang of Angel City Fusion

For many people the music played at the various social dance schools is a bit strange. When they find Fusion, they are dancing to contemporary pop music and they say “Oh, this is the thing. This is the kind of music I want to dance to.”

DIY Orquesta Típica: Interview with Korey Ireland about the Community Tango Orquesta movement

In the music of the 30s and 40s, the advantage of an Orquesta Típica is that relatively simple things sound full and exciting. The idea of the Community Tango Orquesta is to create music in a way that fits the expectation of dancers in a milonga, and create it without the need to make money on it.

Alarm

Some readers have responded to recent posts with alarm. They perceive a darkness. That’s because I decided to take a serious look at tango. While I was calibrating my dusty social science equipment, people kept dropping by to to me about their pain. I am the one who is alarmed. I found a lot of […]

No means no

Like women who would like to be able to say “no” or “not now” with just a gesture –twisting the torso away– and have that well-perceived by amorous dates, Marks would like to be able to say “no” with their eyes and body language, and not have to deal with a verbal or otherwise unavoidable request.

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