New Year’s 2019: Fuel for your Fire
I never know what to do on New Years Eve. I’m skeptical about the value proposition of expensive parties. I skirt the silent sharp dagger of another year’s lack of a midnight kiss. When I do go out, I worry that I didn’t choose the right party, that I haven’t placed myself in the most […]
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 […]
Altertango and Orquesta TRYST
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 […]
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.
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: […]
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…
From Milongas to Altertango
“We have to stop using the name ‘Argentine Tango’. I know that’s what we’re doing, and we’re doing it more authentically and precisely than most people, but that name is counterproductive to the dance we want to do. It conjures an image of a culture that we don’t really want anything to do with, and that the athletic people we’d like to be dancing with, are not attracted to.”
The Tradition is Transgressive – CTF 2017
Presenting: The TangoForge Real Impro Hardcore Crew 100% Improvisation . 100% Argentine Tango Maximum Artistry . Modern Gender Concepts The Tradition is Transgressive… The Invitation The core concept of this show was to present Argentine Tango in the cultural context of a hip hop cypher. A cypher is a regular social event, like a […]
Dancing in the Berlin Hauptbahnhof
Last Wednesday 19 August I danced in the Berlin Hauptbahnhof, Europe’s biggest and most central train crossing station. It’s the highest security milonga I’ve ever been to. 500M from the German chancellor’s office, this building is in constant readiness for terror attack. It’s on the site of the former wall. The director of the annual […]
Welcome to the Moveable Milonga!
Like many people I started dancing tango because of Sally Potter’s movie, The Tango Lesson. Different things about the movie moved us, as different things bind us to tango. I wasn’t attracted to the music, passion, or romance (aspects I learned to appreciate only after many years of dancing). I was attracted to the complexity […]
