Tag: Amersfoort

The rich taste palate of Tango

Tango music offers us a universe of atmospheres, tastes and textures. Every orchestra has its own texture and every tango touches a certain feeling. As dancers we are constantly working to translate into our dance what the music tells us. Dancers are transformers, they mediate between music and dance. In fact, dancers share the music experience with their dance partner and dance their story together in dialogue with the music. The question is how to find a way in this complex constellation and how to give the creative processes that go along with it as much space as possible. In the plentiful world of Tango music, we are not quickly running out of taste.

Imagine a tango as a beautiful dish. All your senses are addressed, you taste, you smell, you feel. The dish is prepared in a certain way with the necessary ingredients which gives it that specific taste and texture, and it is further enriched with sublime herbs. The entire cooking process leads to a result that we can then experience and enjoy. Parallels can be found in the music and how we dance to it.

This seminar is completely set up to unveil the richness and complexity in Tango music and dance. It is often said that we have to make it exciting, for ourselves and for our partner. But how? For two days we work on the taste of Tango, the aromas that rise from the kitchen of Tango, the musical herbs and the oh so necessary basic ingredients for a tasty dance. Dance as if you were preparing a delicious dish.

To give you the opportunity to work consistently and without a hurry we organize the classes on Saturday and Sunday in the form of seminars which will stretch over the whole afternoon (with breaks of course).

The weekend seminars will start with a very interactive lecture on Friday called “Orchestral playground” given by Raimund Schlie. In these two hours we will discover Tango music and its protagonists. Using videos, music, lots of information and – of course – practical exercises we will reveal the essentials of this fascinating music: who created it and how did these guys do it?

Some background.

Most of the milongas are structured in blocks of music (tandas). The DJs do their very best to weave a diverse and exciting carpet of music during the event to entice the dancers to keep dancing and inspire them with a lot of different music. The dancers on their part want to respond to that diversity by expressing the music with a different quality of movement according to the music. Our goal is to stay in the seminars as close as possible to that diverse character of the milonga.

To achieve that we are defining for four primary qualities: power, calm, vigour and light. There are of course much more qualities and facets but by isolating those basic entities we get a basic platform to work on.

Now lets assign these primary qualities with a colour: power = red, calm = blue, vigour = green and light = yellow.

The idea is to reduce every song to one of those four primary qualities. Having done that we can adjust our dance according to our quality of choice. That means that we have uncountable possibilities to vary our way of moving. That is true in the first place for our own body but it also is applicable inside the couple.

How it works.

On every seminar day we have a couple of buckets – assigned to one of the primary colours. We fill every bucket with a music (that might be a single piece or a whole tanda) and a movement. During the seminar every bucket will be used in a different way. There is no time limit which means that on some buckets will only be worked for 15 minutes whereas others take 45 minutes to be handled.

The aim is to first single out the basic quality of a song or tanda and apply it to the movement in the bucket. From there on we go to the facets, edges and overlappings of both the music and the movement which always exist.

What about food?

There are plenty of possibilities to have a dinner on Saturday & Sunday evening at one of the restaurants in the vicinity of De Danswerkplaats which all serve delicious food!

During the seminars on Saturday & Sunday we will provide you also with delicious but not too luscious snacks & drinks.