Another Improvisation: Interview with pianist Dietmar Schlabertz
“At first when I started to do it like this. I only wanted to have time between to open the new piece. With time the improvisation grows, having its own character. It’s no longer an opening only. Now the improvisational part is only a little shorter than the piece after it.”
Why Learn All of Tango
Most Revels tell me they are terribly bored on the dance floor because each Mark seems to repeat a small number of sequences. Although the set of sequences varies among the Marks, “he has a nice embrace and good technique, but after two songs I know exactly what he’s going to do.” Our rapture with […]
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.
Ignorantia juris non excusat
Repetitive marks disrespect the genre and our community. We need to respect our inheritance by keeping it alive. And we need to grow our community by challenging our partners to concentrate and to increase their knowledge and skills.
ForgeTube: Improvisation from the Elements
All the variations of any movement FREE
1-2 minute videos
Improvise from the Elements
Real Improvisation
No matter how much you think you hate Nuevo Tango, you are the recipient of its gift to the world: the possibility to understand Argentine Tango by its most fundamental elements, Everything we love about traditional tango is better if you dance from the elements: better experience of connection with more intense concentration, more perfect embrace, richer musicality, and a safer ronda.
The evil sequence
These days in Berlin 50% of Marks do this sequence within 5 seconds that my eye lands on them. (I spent a couple of weeks sitting with my stopwatch in the milonga checking my perceptions.) Another 35% do it under 30 seconds. That leaves just 15% of the dancers in the milonga who are not doing this sequence ad nauseum… Not very many of the 15% are advanced dancers who are doing something else. When you look at the dance floor at any milonga, you see this sequence constantly, in dancers of all levels except rank beginners.
Improvisation
We can dance the same songs every night for years because of the possibility to discover new relations between movement and music. We can do this because each dance is unique, because we create it anew each time. Argentine Tango improvisation must be authentic and spontaneous or tango becomes rote and dead. Either partner can kill it: The Mark through routine and the Revel through automatisms.
Is tango art? Entry I
Part 1: 29 October, 2012 This is a question I’ve asked myself repeatedly. I think mostly my view has been that it’s not, but that it could be. Note that I have no training in dance as a fine art, and I don’t know the relevant concepts and terminology, so my criteria are drawn from […]
88 keys…
I made a rough estimate of the number of discrete tango moves. There are 25 movements in the tango lexicon, each with various numbers of variations (there are 48 sacadas, and far more ganchos).
Different dynamics of motion would correspond to the chords.