Argentine Tango School

Tag: philosophy

"The meaning of Tango", book by Christine Denniston

“The Meaning of Tango: the story of the Argentinean dance”, by Christine Denniston.

“The Meaning of Tango: the story of the Argentinean dance”

The Meaning of Tango- The Story of the Argentinian Dance, book cover.

by Christine Denniston.

“When I first fell in love with the Tango, I aimed to make myself as nice to dance with as possible so that good dancers would want to dance with me.”
“I was very fortunate to have encountered a group of people determined to understand how Tango was danced in Buenos Aires. To begin with, we took classes where we could and shared the little information we had. Often we found that the things different people told us about the Tango were contradictory and confusing. There was only one thing to do: go to Buenos Aires and find out how it was done.” (Quoted from the introduction)

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“the length of time a person has been dancing may give little indication of how pleasant they will be to dance with – unless their experience of learning the dance has allowed them to learn at least part of what was learned by the people who danced in the prácticas and milongas of the Golden Age.”

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Evaristo Carriego, Argentine poet. Portrait.

“A Evaristo Carriego” by Osvaldo Pugliese y su Orquesta Típica, 1969.

Evaristo Carriego, Argentine poet. Portrait.

Evaristo Carriego

Argentine poet
(May 7, 1883 – October 13, 1912)

He was an important influence on the writing of tango lyrics, and in homage, the famous instrumental tango “A Evaristo Carriego” was written by Eduardo Rovira, and recorded by Orquesta Osvaldo Pugliese in 1969.

He is buried at the Cementerio de la Chacarita in Buenos Aires.

Evaristo Carriego was a poet for the outskirts of Buenos Aires

When his family moved to Buenos Aires, he lived on 84 (today 3784) Honduras Street in the neighborhood of Palermo. From a young age, he frequented the literary coteries in Buenos Aires, where Rubén Darío and Almafuerte were important names.

He wrote for different publications of that time, like “La Protesta”, “Papel y Tinta”, “Caras y Caretas”, and others. In them, he published his poems and short stories. He published his first book of poetry, “Misas herejes”, in 1908, and his remaining poetical oeuvre was released after his death under the title “La canción del barrio”. Continue reading at www.todotango.com…

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"Rebeldía", Argentine Tango music score

“Rebeldía” by Miguel Caló y su Orquesta Típica with Raúl Iriarte in vocals, 1947 (with English translation).

“Rebeldía” by Miguel Caló y su Orquesta Típica with Raúl Iriarte in vocals, 1947 (with English translation).

Music & lyrics: Roberto Nievas Blanco / Oscar Rubens.

English translation:

With red hands squeezing my heart,
stifling a muffled cry of rancor.
Rebel like water in front of the fire,
like the sea against the rocks, today I rebel.
With your tyrant love who knows no reason,
rebellious with my own heart.
I ask you to go, to leave me,
that you walk away at once; it will be better!

I know I’ll cry later
I will never forget you.
I know that every night without your laughter, without your voice,
How much I will miss your love!
But it’s better to lose you,
than continue being a puppet
just to see you.

No, please leave me!
Today my love rebelled.

Without asking you for anything, I gave you my heart
in exchange for crumbs of your love.
I spent my heart and fortune
delivered to the madness of loving you so much.
But it was useless; I received contempt, falsehood, and humiliation in exchange for so much love.
So that’s why I’m asking you to go,
that you walk away at once, it will be better!

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We are happy to have a collaboration with the people from tangotunes.com from whom some of you may have heard, they do high-quality transfers from original tango shellacs.

It is the number 1 source for professional Tango DJs all over the world.

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    You will find two compilations at the beginning, one tango and one vals compilation in amazing quality.
    The price is 50€ each (for 32 songs each compilation) and now the good news!

If you enter the promo code 8343 when you register at this site you will get a 20% discount!

Thanks for supporting this project, you will find other useful information on the site, a great initiative.

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Marcelo dancing Argentine Tango with Mimi

To dance, to live like a dancer.

To dance, to live like a dancer.

Marcelo Solis dancing Argentine Tango with Mimi

To really dance, maybe what is needed is to live like a dancer.

I don’t mean to say that to dance, you need to dedicate yourself to dancing as a profession. What I want to say here is something that I will explain below with a comparison.
 
If I liked, for example, riding a bicycle, I would need a bicycle. This bike would be built in a bike factory. It would be ready, with its tires inflated and its chain perfectly oiled when I got on it and started pedaling.
 
The body and soul of the dancer are like that bicycle. Just as it would be really cumbersome to manufacture a bike to be able to mount it and pedal it, I could not dance with a body that has not been conditioned, trained, and prepared, that is, “manufactured” previously to be able to dance.
 
Since I could not dance with a body that is not that of a dancer, and since my body is the only one I have at my disposal from the moment I get up in the morning, I already take into account at that time that my body and my whole being have to be ready to dance when it comes to stepping on the dance floor of the milonga.
 
Of course, anyone can dance, at any time, without much preparation because, in my opinion, being a human being is already being a being that dances.

However, I think we will agree that dancing Tango requires more, much more in subtleties, skills, perception, and awareness than that minimum that is what makes us dancers just because we are human.
 
Dancing a dance like Tango is, I feel, like philosophizing about what is essential in life, in matters such as the value of life itself, that is: if it is worth living or not, and why, that is: whether or not there are reasons for that answer; if language is of any use to us here, if perhaps it is not a more appropriate response to shut up and dance.
 
Now, this silence is not a resignation, so to speak, but a celebration, since we discover that the absence of the common language, the one we use every day, does not represent any problem but could even help us in the deepest of these intimate questions in the solitude of the individual.
 
Tango, as music, as dance, as culture and philosophy of life, and as something different from all that, which includes all of it, but which generates something more significant and further, a way of existing, of living life, is something that excites us, makes us fall in love, gives us meaning, and leads us to a fullness that we always dreamed of living, that which we intuited as children that life was. Perhaps it should not be believed that with an exhaustive and methodical study of its technical aspects, training, and putting objective principles into practice, we will obtain Tango. With that, which is essential, we would only prepare a ground that might one day be fertile enough to make us dancers.

What do we dancers want?

Maybe stop being babies concerning our bodies.
 
Happiness might not be an end but a tool for a life that would find its meaning.
 
Happiness would be something akin to getting organized.
 
Why does a baby stop being a baby?
 
Possibly because she feels pressure from the environment and has to react and change, modify herself and develop responses and adaptations to those pressures. She fights, opposes, submits, adapts, or imposes herself.
 
Marketing would seem to be proposed as a philosophy of life according to which we must consume in the present and urgently everything we want now, what we have ever wanted, and what we may wish to in the future (because it may no longer be available in the market in the future.) There are no alternatives that make themselves heard clearly. The ones that exist are timid and weak, stubborn, blind and deaf, wasting vital energy in violent, undignified, ineffective explosions, or with worthless talk, calming or justifying. Such philosophy, called marketing, is presented as if it were the only one possible. So, living seems to become living within the market, something like selling your life to consume things. Even experiences seem to have been reified.
 
For example: traveling –the “experience” of the trip– has been reified. I heard someone very wise say (I don’t remember who now): “the only possible journey is the journey we make within ourselves.”
 
So perhaps we would do well to train and know our bodies and gauge the value of the spiritual consequences of that training and knowledge; we could take then that wisdom to the field of our social and intimate relationships, that is, recognize ourselves in others, get to know ourselves more in “making ourselves known.” That would make us dancers.
 
This is why I think marketing (as understood by professional marketers) cannot help me to find new students, or more dancers to come to the milongas for milonga organizers, or to promote Tango in general.
 
As I feel Tango, it is for me Friendship. How could friendship be marketed? And since it does not fit in the market, should we conclude it has no value?
My students and I are good friends because we all have a friend in common, a friend we love so much, a friend called Argentine Tango ❤️

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To dance well in Argentine Tango

To dance well in Argentine Tango

Marcelo Solis dancing Argentine Tango with Mimi in the San Francisco Bay Area

To dance well, that is to say: to DANCE, we will have to organize our lives in that direction; I will not be able to dance well if my life develops away from that goal.
Indeed, if what I long for is, for example, to make money, then my life will be oriented in that direction, in the direction of abstractions (money is an abstraction), very far from my actual body.
 

Put any project on this scale and consider how far the primary goal of that project will be from performing a good dance.

No one is forced to dance well. Truths, life projects, and desires cannot be the same for everyone.
 
I am inclined to think this way: when I reach the end of my life, what would I like to see in the wake left by that life?
 
Imagine all the possible lives we could lead. Let’s try to think and feel them, weigh them, smell them, look at their colors, and measure the scope of their luminous skyscrapers of triumphs and black abysses of awful flavors.

Perhaps we all live in different worlds, with the things and people we surround ourselves with. A life could thus develop in the direction of a choice of one’s own world in which to inhabit.
 
I think that perhaps a good way of living would develop in the direction of becoming more and more capable of directing and selecting what goes into the process of our existence.
 
In particular, as far as I am concerned, I prefer what increases the power of my physiology, makes my body more versatile, adaptable, and happy, my mind more lucid, and my spirit lighter and dancing.
 
Here is the foundational question that is answered with living itself: How to live?
That would be dancing!
Should I ask myself “what for” and/or “for whom”?
 
We could also perhaps answer ourselves: “there are immediate, urgent things to resolve; we live at a precise moment in history which conditions us, that is, it enslaves us and forces us to do things that we would not do otherwise. Let us, then, postpone our plan, our life, until we have resolved the present and responded to all the obligations implicit in its calls”.
 
In particular, my truth concerning this is that we will eternally be bound by the present. We were born like this: OBLIGATED.
 
My opinion on this is the following: it is a matter of perspective; It depends a lot on where we look at life from and where we place ourselves –physically and spiritually– to look at it.
 
Let’s listen to the tango “Me quedé mirandola” by Anibal Troilo with Alberto Marino on vocals. (I ask you… Is there another version of this song that we can dance to?)
 
Sometimes people leave the dance; that is, they abandon the dancing project because they run into a barrier they don’t dare to cross. Although they always give themselves other excuses.
 
I have abandoned many of my previous lives to lighten up enough to be able to continue dancing.
 
And do not think that you will not find doubts about yourselves and the value of dancing!
 
There are many possible worlds, many parallel realities that cannot be accessed in any “objective” way, such as the achievements of science and technology.
 
Don’t you think you should dare?
 
But this is a matter of taste.
 
When I see someone who dances, who DANCES, I see someone free. His body is no longer “ergastulum“, as the Catholic Church used to say in the Middle Ages, meaning “prison of the spirit”, a spirit that must wait until death to be released.

When I see someone DANCING, I see his soul already free in life, no longer waiting, postponing, procrastinating life to perhaps one day meet that fundamental question not only unanswered but never asked.

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