> Here's Gustavo & Giselle dancing their majestic version > of "Don Juan" > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s5FOjT959J0 Trini wrote: >>>"Thanks for the video, Bryan. They dance it beautifully, but to my eye, it's not quite right. As if there's a little too much work involved. Personally, I would have preferred touches of nuevo instead of swaths in their performance. However, this was a performance piece and perhaps the swaths were there mainly for his audience."<<<
Yes, it's certainly a carefully crafted performance piece, meant to express for an audience's pleasure a very particular "dancer's view" of Di Sarli's "musician/arranger's view" of Don Juan. As audience members ourselves, we are all entitled to our preferences, and need not defend or explain them, so I fully accept your opinion that there's something "not quite right", although from my perspective I disagree. Gustavo once said in a seminar that, whatever they may dance in a choreography, all the things they do COULD be "led". From my perspective, that's an interesting constraining compositional requirement that I suspect nearly all "performance/fantasia tango" choreographies can't meet. It also raises the possibility that those who CAN lead and follow these elements might choose to successfully and appropriately use them in social dancing at a milonga for their own expressive pleasure, especially since the social dancing context is so much less stressful for them than the performance context. This is what I've observed when watching Gustavo & Giselle social dancing in milongas at the Mercury Café in Denver or the Avalon milongas in Boulder. And in those milongas, they do indeed dance with the "touches" of "nuevo" you'd prefer, rather than "swaths". I mean, tango is an improvised dance, right? And some good dancers have more improvisational tools than others, especially if as a couple they have a combined total of tango experience approaching forty years. They can use these elements within their share of the floor space, they can use them successfully without disturbing the ronda. So we shouldn't be surprised when their social dancing may contain elements which are more complex and refined than those used by the average dancers around them. Their other social dance partners certainly seem to enjoy their choices, to put it mildly. Many experienced tango dancers may even see this level of mastery manifested in this way at the milonga as setting a kind of "gold standard" for improvised social tango. I mean, they're just dancing for enjoyment with each other in the moment like the rest of us, except they have the benefit of 1) a lovingly honed artistic perspective, 2) superb technique, and 3) decades of dancing in Buenos Aires milongas. (continued in Part 2) All the best, Brian Dunn Dance of the Heart www.danceoftheheart.com "Building a Better World, One Tango at a Time" _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
