"More edge, passion and yes even some drama..."

"Tango passion" PxHere

Back here I said I wanted to address another point that came out this discussion on Tanda of the Week.

Antti, the owner of that blog said:

There's nothing wrong with the occasional special selection and the Donatos and Lomutos etc. But many DJ's go so far into centering their set around the likes of Canaro, Donato, Rodriguez and some Guardia Vieja that the set feels out of balance and the occasional Troilo will not save the set for me. And it is not just that I don't get to hear my favorites but also the fact that the general mood and dynamics of the songs from these orchestras is so different that I feel like a lot of the passion that should be in the music is missing and instead all we're getting is at it's best nice and comfortable music for snuggling. I do want a lot more from my tango music. More edge, passion and yes even some drama. And yeah uptempo valses and milongas too. And then... I'm ready to snuggle also.

I found this idea bizarre  - and interesting.  Why would somebody talk about snuggling and cuddling in the milonga?  I don't feel that.  What is it like to dance tango?  Well, at the very least, for me it has nothing do with cuddling.

Many DJs play the orchestras he refers to (with some disparagement), in balance with the stronger pieces in say Troilo, D'Arienzo, Biagi, De Angelis, Tanturi because they feel dancers like a balance.  Guardia Vieja apart, there's a lot going on I think in good tracks of the orchestras he mentioned and in others which, at a guess he might have mentioned - OTV, Carabelli, Quinteto Don Pancho, (though by Quinteto Pirincho the magic, apart from in vals, has gone for me).   I might not want to hear all of those orchestras in one night, and only one tanda of those I do hear.  But I don't dance these orchestras, or any, because I want to cuddle.  I remember reading somebody writing about their own "snuggly embrace" in a lip-licking way. Yuck.  If we want to cuddle, we stay with our nearest and dearest on the sofa or in bed - if anything it's about not moving.  We cuddle our lovers and our children, not people we dance with, not even - usually - our friends.  We hug our friends. We embrace our dance partners. I think these are all different.  The embrace when you dance tango isn't sexual or about vertical cuddling, but it is intimate.

There is a very fundamental difference between an embrace and a connection in dance with a stranger (or friend) and a cuddle.  I don't know that I can think of the similarities beyond body contact.  You can't even say when you cuddle another that they have your full attention as I find is the case in dancing tango.  You might be snuggled with your significant other watching TV!  You can cuddle a baby to sleep while having a conversation with someone else - in fact I found that tends to work well!

I don't dance to cuddle and I don't know that I know personally anyone that does, at least in public. Occasionally a woman will find herself, frozen like a rabbit in headlights in the embrace of a guy for whom dance is clearly the last thing on his mind but the milonga is such a public environment I think that kind of thing is relatively uncommon, at least in the UK and the reputation of such people goes around so quickly that their life-span in the milonga is probably going to be short.

I did once hear dancing in a milonga to Lomuto's Las cuarenta described memorably as "unendurable huddle-shuffle".  It's a perfectly good track, but a lot depends on how these pieces are danced.  Watch any dancing crowd.  Does the energy, the tone of somebody's dance change at all, with the track?  If the sound were turned off, could you tell the differences between tracks in the way they are danced? Could you make a guess at the kind of music - by descriptor, not necessarily by name?

All the music by the different orchestras have different feelings about them.  Some are playful, some sad, some dramatic, some fevered, some soft, some light, some strong, some sweet, some dignified.  Antti said it himself:

"A lot of the music [of orchestras such as Lomuto, Rodriguez, Donato ] is cute, funny, nice, quirky, lovely, soft, smooth, simplified, strange etc.... but not much more."

Well, goodness, I think that's quite a lot!  But put that with the feelings from the line before and how much more feeling can there be? But that's why I believe good trad sets are balanced - for that spectrum of music and musical feeling, depending too, on the crowd and other variables like time of day and the type of event.

Upon challenge Antti did say "The words "snuggly" or "cuddly" don't propably cover very well what I tried to describe " so on the strength of that I am going to try hard not to mention that word again. But I bring it up, not just for this but because I have noticed lately, in some quarters a general dressing-down of the idea of connection in tango dance in favour of, well, I'm not quite sure what - show I think.

I for one, like a range of feeling in music.  The reason I like a whole range of orchestras and a range of music because different music gives different feelings.

Often it's just hard to say what the feeling is besides "I really want to dance this" or "I really want to dance this, but only with him or her". I can't say what kind of feeling I have when I hear D'Arienzo's Mandria.  I just know I have a certain kind of feeling and I want to dance it.  How very much depends on the feeling my partner has.  When we dance locally we may know who will have or not, a similar feeling to us about certain music.  I know who likes Canaro, who Fresedo, who Biagi, who Lomuto vals, who is better at vals than all else and the guys who can dance milonga.  It's not surprising that we want to dance music with the people who love it and feel it distinctively.  A girl invited me to dance Di Sarli in the guy's role and I did, though I would not have invited anyone to it because that kind of Di Sarli isn't my thing.  You always know you're faking a dance when you find yourself going through the motions, when it feels like work, when you are moving yourself through the music rather then the music moving you.  I didn't feel I danced it that well.  Afterwards, we danced Troilo-Fiorentino, which I liked a lot and, no surprise, she said it was completely different.

Maybe the feeling is different for everyone, but that doesn't matter, because you don't need to say or to analyse whether your feeling is like someone elses, because somehow you find an accommodation and you dance the music and the feelings you get from it. You communicate with your body, what you feel to another person and that is where this magical accommodation and response and movement  happens in ways I for sure can't explain.  The embrace is the way we communicate that feeling well. Good connection is when your bodies somehow fit and feel the same music, the same way.

When we read a novel, or even hear another person's story -  we  see another perspective.  At the cinema, depending on the degree to which one can suspend disbelief, it lets us inhabit another story, try on different personae.  The words and images bring the actions, experiences and the feelings of the characters closer, allowing us to empathise or recoil from them.

Dancing different music  lets us enter different feelings, temporarily .  More, in fact, than reading a novel because in that medium you are the "fly on the wall" to the thoughts and action of others.  In dance you actually inhabit this feeling for a time. This feeling comes naturally and then, with luck - and the cortina - it clears and you can dance another.

Incidentally - here's Oscar Hector Malagrino dancing beautifully in a way suitable for social dancing with Haydée Esther Malagrino to I think a good Di Sarli, that's fairly soft, although it has energy.  He is dancing with his sister but it's hardly what I'd call cuddling, or anything remotely like it.

A DJ's "audience", "Tanda of the Week" and censorship

Martha Graham

Back here I said I wanted to respond to something that came up in a post on Tanda of the Week.  The owner of that tango music blog, DJ Antti Suniala said 

"the music has to be in relation to the audience as well".  I agree with this - with one crucial difference:  I don't think a DJ has an "audience".  A milonga isn't a show though on occasion I have seen DJs act or talk that way, or try to whip up a crowd with stamping, clapping, head-banging, air-punching, all sorts of odd things. That hubris can be fatal, I think.  A DJ plays for, is at the service of, dancers - always.  "Audience" implies something else. 

Unless Antti's idea of the DJ's role is profoundly different to mine, this mention of a DJ's audience I guess is a slip of the pen.  I have never heard Antti DJ, to my knowledge we've never met and we've never corresponded. I've read his blog for somewhere between 6 months and a year which is enough to at least get a feel for how things are there.  To date, he strikes me as one of the good guys.

Tanda of the Week is evidently not merely a personal showcase, not just a DJ setting out his stall for bookings, not least because the site is a mix of tandas put together by Antti and submitted to him by guest DJs.  So I think it's a resource, a tool, something useful, something you can learn from.  This is the main reason I also think it is great when DJs are open and share their sets publicly or privately.  TOTW is also about discussing music and DJing and that is what is great about it, what makes it really alive.  We don't always agree on music but that's kind of the point.  Where is the real interest in discussing things with people who already share your ideas?  The pleasure of discussion is in learning something new, in contrast, in persuasion, in seeing another's point of view, in understanding how they think and what they value, the finding out where you agree and disagree and why.

Tanda of the Week is well known.  In the secret lives of many DJs I suspect it is a well-used resource yet compared to the amount I imagine it is read it is commented upon comparatively little.    Antti posts his own tandas regularly, knowing that they differ in style, one from another, knowing that they could well be and in fact regularly are commented upon and have metaphorical tomatoes thrown at them, knowing his taste will be questioned and the good tandas often ignored -  yet he keeps doing it, cheerfully, with good humour.  The tandas, the cortinas and the comments are resources that can be used by new and existing DJs. I think this blog enriches the musical life of the contemporary tango scene.

I like that Antti uses this own name.  It is a good precedent.  It's less rare, for obvious reasons for a DJ to use a pseudonym online.  But of the few bloggers - and people who comment - who challenge or question, to different degrees, the status quo most seem afraid to speak out under their own name:  TangoCommuter, TangoAirO (defunct and removed), RandomTangoBloke (sadly defunct), and most obviously TangoVoice whose clam-like silence on their identity is proportionate to the degree to which s/he is, is, I think an advocate of the traditional, Buenos Aires way of doing things.  There are excellent reasons for this, not least the risk of ostracism and fear of a backlash in their local communities.  This is not on the same scale as the risks faced by some apostates or critics of religion and yet a social death in their local tango scene is enough to put off many from speaking freely - or at least publicly - especially if they already have roles as DJs, organisers or even teachers. But what actually does it say about these tango "communities" where there is evidently a sense that there can be no diversity in opinion, let alone practice, without repercussion?  Diversity is healthy.  Monopolies are not and breed a herd-like mentality and fear.  How many milongas are there round your way locally? How many compared to the number of teachers?  What kind of music is played?  How many different DJs are there locally? Does one group run all your milongas or is there healthy diversity? How diverse are things, generally, near you? I have found diversity by dancing in five or six different towns and cities within an hour of me but more local diversity is better.  

One of the best things for me about Tanda of the Week, is that it is open, uncensored.  That alone says much.  As far as I know, and as far as I have heard to date unlike many Antti does not censor comments where he does not agree with the view.  That freedom to speak your mind implies a degree of trust that, in a society which values freedom of speech, I have found to be surprisingly (to my mind) rare among bloggers.  It was Martha Graham¹ (pictured) who said "Censorship is the height of vanity" and I agree.  And of fear.  People who censor are essentially fearful, trying to cling on to something - usually their sense of a form of power, status or money.  When challenged on this, moderators or administrators almost universally adopt a libertarian line, saying this forum is a sort of private club where our own rules apply and if you don't like it, you can go elsewhere or we can kick you out. But censorship by definition happens (usually) before people get to see it, before that group  gets to decide collectively on whether something is OK or not.  It prevents discussion about whether it's ok.  I think that's what I object to. Some people are happy to abnegate that responsibility, but I care more about the people who aren't.  Open societies just like open forums discuss together what is acceptable and what is not. That's how we live together.  It's also how we develop diversity and toleration.  The rapper Jay-Z in his book, Decoded said we change people through conversation, not through censorship.

Sometimes censorship is more insidious - an edited history is provided. So things happen, things are said, and then quietly deleted, history is rewritten. It reminds me of China's history books - it happened, but only like this, only as we tell  you, or only as far as you remember and we know how how unreliable memory is.  Except memory can be surprisingly persistent and objectionable when things are suppressed.

TangoAirO sometimes looked at things from a questioning angle.  S/he took his site offline earlier this year - not left for posterity to learn from, and yet if ever a blogger was didactic this one was - but removed so the author could move onto the more important things in life.  I can't help but wonder if that was teaching.  For me discussion about ideas is at the very heart of life.

So while discussion remains not ad hominem but about ideas and opinion then I think no censorship is very valuable.  Actually, even personal attacks, unless severely disruptive, or revealing of privacy, personal or confidential information are worth leaving in place - as indicative of the person that made them.  I understand when comments are moderated maybe to avoid spam or perhaps with the idea that someone should be spared another's vitriol but I do not comment upon blogs like Melina's Two Cents (dormant), and TangoCommuter's that allow comments yet filter them in god-like fashion depending on the degree to which they disagree with the blog owner.  If only part of a comment is published it is for me a form of dishonesty and the kind of manipulation of which the media is often accused.  Mostly this filtering smacks of fear which sits uneasily with someone writing publicly.  It feels like grandstanding yet having hoods at the back to chuck out the dissenters.  Besides, I find the public back-slapping - rife on social media - between people who share uncontroversial ideas uninteresting at best, slightly sinister at worst. 

Someone said to me recently, "We can't rely on what our friends say about us...they love us unconditionally. What our foes say is the more accurate benchmark."  I don't know about accurate, because enemies are also prone to propaganda. But still, I asked,
"So what do your enemies say?"
"I have no enemies, When you expect the best out of people, nine times out of ten that's what you get."

That, I think is what is happening in Tanda of the Week.  Antti expects it to work, for the most part expects healthy debate and ideas (since his "never criticize" comment, this under review) and gets it, I think.

Antti argues, believe me. But he will sometimes be persuaded by or make a concession to a point.  I have found that in life to be a rare trait between individuals, let alone in public.  It suggests honesty, open-mindedness and a willingness to change one's mind.  There is more often strength than weakness in that.

The point about a DJ's "audience" was the first I wanted to respond to.  The other will be next time.

¹Martha Graham "the Picasso of dance" was an influential twentieth century modern dancer and choreographer whose work, rooted in America, crossed artistic boundaries. She said, "A dance reveals the spirit of the country in which it takes root. No sooner does it fail to do this than it loses its integrity and significance".

Photograph by Cris Alexander, courtesy of Martha Graham Dance Company.