Today is Sunday and in a few hours, the finals will have been held and the "King and Queen of non-Argentine Tango couples in Buenos Aires" will have been coronated. "Non-Argentine" as in the couple, that is--the Tango is indeed required to be Argentine.
And I will be at home in my pajamas watching a movie tonight, so someone else will have to report on it (and on the third qualifying round last night at Sunderland too); as I had predicted, I reached saturation on this event after the second round! Hence, I am a couple of days behind since this is a recap of the second day of qualifying rounds held 2 days ago (Friday) at Salon Canning. Rather than the rather dry recap of the first qualifying round that I posted a couple of days ago, I'll try to add some of my own insights and observations here. Salon Canning was filled to overflowing--I'm pretty sure it had nothing to do with the competition, since there were only 21 couples for this second qualifying round (compared to 28 at La Viruta the night before). There was a completely different set of three judges from those at the first qualifying round, none of whom I had heard of, though one I did recognize by sight. The emcee made a point of saying (as he had the night before) that they were all members of the Asociación de Maestros, Bailarines y Coreógrafos de Tango Argentino (suggesting that you couldn't be a judge if you weren't one of the 696 members but one does wonder how they were selected). Want to check who's on the list of members? See http://bailarinesdetango.org.ar/home_socios.php ... but I digress. The emcee also went through the same motions of (pretending to be) asking the crowd whether he could speak only in Spanish. It was more obvious seeing this the second time that he had already determined the answer ("yes") and was trying to make some sort of point. This entire event seemed to be full of such contradictions (not surprising considering the history but interesting to watch it anyway). On the other hand, it wasn't clear which other language he would have used or whether there were even suitable interpreters on hand--many in the audience might have benefitted from an English translation but not the contestants, who again seemed to be mostly from elsewhere in Latin America, Italy and Japan. The three pieces chosen this time were: El Once (Di Sarli) Milongueando en El 40 (Troilo) Este es El Rey (D'Arienzo) Our friend the emcee, who apparently was not much of a tangophile, mis-stated the name of the Troilo piece (I didn't catch what he said exactly but it was perhaps something like "Milonga del 40"). A murmur of disapproval went through the crowd and he hastily double-checked the name and corrected himself, trying to make some light-hearted comment about how "exigente" the tanguero crowd was! The last piece (Este es El Rey) I thought was a simply terrible choice for a Salon Style tango competition. It is an over-the-top stage performance piece (with more of a Paso Doble marching band feel than Tango IMHO), and it's practically impossible to interpret the music in ones dancing and dance anything resembling a responsible Salon Tango at the same time to this music. Maybe that was the (mischievous) point, though that might be giving too much credit ... :-). I had 0 people in my private "Excellent" list this time, 14 in the "Good" and 7 in the "Eliminate" and the judges picked 4 of the 21 (none from my "Eliminate" list this time ...) to advance to the finals. They didn't announce the countries of the contestants this time. At least two of the couples were repeat attempts from the previous night, so I guess you got three shots at the finals if you wanted or needed it. The article I would really like to see written about this event, however, is a truly factual account of how it came to be and the behind-the-scenes manoeuvering that had it take its present form. So far, everything I've seen written about it has been biased on one side or the other (fine for those stating opinions but hardly for supposedly journalistic attempts at publishing a factual story in a mainstream publication). The Argentine woman sitting in front of me (we were exchanging notes on whom we would have voted for) kind of summed it up when I asked whether she knew the history of this event. "I read some stuff about it," she replied. "This is the sort of thing that happens when egos come into Tango!" Shahrukh _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
