Once upon a time...

First tango workshops in Prague (2001 and 2002), Dinzel's notation in vertical shape.

Solitude

Sometimes, after finishing a tanda you keep standing with your partner on the dancefloor, embracing desperately each other, funking to split, you stay together three seconds longer than anybody else. Then you turn away and you feel cold and loneliness. Sometimes, once a year. Or twice.

Paso básico

All dances I know have some kind of "a basic step", a short sequence of three or four steps done first forward by leader and then forward by follower during next bar. These steps are usually symmetrical. English waltz, samba, salsa, rumba, Viennese waltz, polka, swing, jive... But not tango.

Basic step of tango (Paso básico or better Paso básico con salida atrás) looks very complicated, sofisticated and it's almost never danced in its "pure" form at milongas although teached in many tango schools. The question is why paso básico seems to be so important when being nearly useless for dancing. What is the reason? A historical context?

With the first step the leader can hit the couple behind because he can't see them. Doing the second one the couple crosses line of dancing of couples beside. This risky part is called salida. Steps 3, 4 and 5 (with cruce) are caminata; this is the most widely used part of basic step. Personally I prefer a little different version of caminata, walking with the same (R-R, L-L) foot but some people can like it as it is.

The last three steps are resolución. They are the strangest ones. Leader has to place his left foot in between folower's legs and in the end the couple is faced to the center of the dancefloor, it means in the worst position for following the line of dance. OMG why? It's so disorienting for inexperienced couples - they probably will crisscross all the dancefloor and drive others to despair.

I think this basic step was "invented" in two phases. At the beginning there were some common movements or short sequences of steps, stuck together but danced on different trajectory or with different directions at least. Afterwards a kind of standardization was applied to it - steps were transformed to linear form and became quite good exercise for practising some fundamental dancing principles (dissociation, cross, walking on right/left side).

Every tango guru has his own version of paso básico which is usable also for dancing at milonga, a version which is corresponding with his dance style. If not, he probably hasn't realized yet that paso básico performed as described above is just an EXERCISE.

Fish and chips

Plenty of smokers are always standing in front of airport automatic doors. The first ones are just addicted to nicotine. The second ones are just afraid of flying. But now the third group of people appeared: the people who fear that their airlines will go bankrupt even before taking off. I was the smart one - I bought bloody expensive plane ticket, no low-cost crap, so I saved about 10,000 of my air sacks from powerful tar attack.

There was River Tango festival in London last weekend. Four milongas, some workshops, ticket raffle, phrenetic electrotango lovers, gin and tonic, dance shows, live orchestra, old friend, straight gin, double straight gin, that girl from Spain, holes on the dancefloor, broken glass, night buses, coked-up babes, psychedelic trance party underneath a railway viaduct, as usually... You know...

The first milonga was the best one. I came early because I was looking forward to it. It took place in The Dome, located somewhere out of my map, but close to the city center enough so everyone could use the underground to get there. But only there; there was no way back. All night I was looking for a girl, my blind date and partner for classes. Believe it or not being at milonga from 9pm we chanced to meet at quarter past 1am in the bar. We danced two tandas, mostly just walking caminata and it was really good.

The second and the third milonga were in Ballroom Hall. Nice place but I have to say they are taking safety seriously those islanders: to leave your coat in cloakroom was mandatory, they checked your shoe bag and there was at least a dozen of bodyguards downstairs. May be they supposed tangueros to be hooligans. And they were rigth! That night I felt like a punching bag. There was horrible mess on the dancefloor, couples were not following line of dance, some of them came only to show all-they-know. All they know but unfortunatelly not all they can do.

On the other hand, when those tango rats left home, it was very pleasant to dance with partners who decided to stay, with tango afficionadas. If you found them... The ballroom hall looked a little like a place for a satanic mass, a little like a part of documentary film about releasing passangers from kidnapped plane: there was a dark blue light clambering up the wall behind DJ mix pult and a 5000W pink/violet light in every corner. These lights were enough to prevent crashes on the dancefloor but totally useless for searching or even catching sight of possible dance partner. You had to circulate around and around the dancefloor and hunt the fortune. How thrilling!

The last milonga was placed in the studio where all classes were run. It was half a milonga de barrio, half a good-bye party. I danced with some few girls, mostly with locals. With pretty ones. Very tired after classes with Sebastian and Mariana, very tired after 4 nights long tangoing, I was looking only for an embrace of beautiful woman, for a hug - with no ambition to do any sophisticated footwork we were walking around. The circle was closed.

A nightmare called electrotango

I have some discs with electrotango in my music collection, a dozen I guess. I play them from time to time, I dust them and some of those songs became my favourite ones. With one exception: I don't like them being played at milonga.

Listening master pieces of Di Sarli, D'Arienzo, Pugliese or even Salgán everything's clear. Their music has a structure, melody, changing rhythm, breaks, solos, culmination points and pathetic words. I can follow it very easily, I have no chance to make a wrong decision because the music itself drags me over the dancefloor, stops me when necessary and spits me out completely sucked in the end of song.

Electrotango doesn't. I'm able to identify the rhythm, mood and whatever. But nothing more. I'm completely lost, I would like to interprete the music but no invention comes to my mind. Just to practice the "nuevo" steps - all these volcadas, colgadas, soltadas and empanadas - I found very unsatisfying. So I listen the music again and again, walking to the factory and walking home and I'm away trying to discover an essence of electrotango. May be there is only too little hammond that I love :-) "If you look for perfection in taking a purl, I have nothing to throw in." (V. Vancura: Summer of Caprice)

"Tango is like a shagging when walking." (T. Buchsteiner: Tango solo)

Recently I opened my heart to my friend Hurricane, how difficult is to write for my blog something with worldwide impact. "It's much more difficult to write something with worldwide impact in Czech language" he rejoined. It was before he started to publish that pornographic serial story. Well, I'm not sure he is going right way...

All people who dance tango agree together that it's definitelly extraondinary dance. There are tens, hundreds and thousands articles and stories on Internet, how tango changed someone's life, how someone got lost his weight with tango, how someone found what he was missing in his life with tango. According to today's fashion gender trends they write about leader-follower relationship, about asexual roles in dancing couple, about communication between (and among) dancers, about tango philosophy, about zen-tango and similar twaddle.

And then, looking at the dancefloor you use to see couples mostly consisting of a man and a woman, the man is more or less leading the woman and she is dancing what she is thinking he would like her to do. Man's role is more dominant and inductive, he more likely determines what and how the couple will dance (in global scale of tango), the woman - on the other side - accepts his leading, submitting volunteer to it and within her personal time-and-space framework she supports man's tango intention with dancing elements oriented either to public or to her partner.

The true is that the first possibility can be very boring for him.

Sometimes it seems to me as though people are nearly afraid to confess that the most attractive thing about tango is "pure" physical closeness of a male or female stranger. Such a closeness that the other person automatically enters into your personal intime bubble. Such a closeness that you can feel other's heartbeat. Such a closeness that you are only one centimeter from three months long troubles with your wife. You are so close and more you hug your partner as it would be the last time in you life.

Abrazo is a soul of tango (talking about dance). Without it only body exercises would remain.

Tango in the sky

Once a year all faithful tangueros come to a small airport in central Bohemia to celebrate surviving Alchemy Festival. True men and true women who like all three dimensions of our World put on their shoulders a parachute (quitters put on a guy with parachute) and just jump out from the airplane. I did it a couple years ago too.

Later on when sunset is coming, they ride all possible flying machines to catch last rays of Sun and solemnize their end-season rituals. After landing they join Bacchanalia, eating grilled meat, drinking famous dark and strong beer and finally dancing tango in hangar among airplanes. Good Joe who has a portable dance floor came early at the morning to fix it for us. He loves parachuting and he loves tango and it was his idea to connect these two worlds.

Unfortunatelly Spanish immigration officers got definitely mad; they just sent back hundreds of travellers born in Latin America. They didn´t allow them to come to EU although they didn´t need visa or invitation letter. An Argentinean singer who was invited to take a part in a music festival of Prague (and our milonga as well) is back in South America now. Well, you can´t piss up the wind, as we say.

Last night of April we celebrate Coven in Czechia, burning big fires on hillocks to avoid landing of witches. Being mostly ateists we are pagans a little too. However milonga in hangar indicates that not all witches were burnt at the time.