THE ESSENCE OF GIVING THANKS

Thanksgiving is as foreign to Argentines as tango is foreign to Americans. They are traditions that need to be learned before they are understood and adopted. For Americans Thanksgiving Day is a time to sit down together, count their blessings, and give thanks for their families and their loved ones. Families in America are a reflection of the diversity of this great nation. No two are exactly alike, but there is a common thread they each share, and the traditions and rituals of Thanksgiving have been passed from generation to generation.

Tango is not that sacred for Argentines, but for those who consider it their way of life, it is a sociocultural phenomena rich in rituals and traditions that is celebrated all year around with the extended families that are formed with those who share the same love and passion for the music, the poetry and the dance. Likewise, the rituals and traditions are passed from generation to generation. Thanksgiving has not transcended to Argentina the way tango has been inserted into the American culture. But it ever does, you can rest assured that the traditions will be respected and preserved, and no turkey will be replaced with ostrich for an alternative Thanksgiving dinner. No High Five Giving Day either.

Imagine if you can, one who makes the decision to become an American as an adult. The discovery of a tradition such as Thanksgiving Day takes time to absorb and understand, but when it does, it takes on a special meaning of its own. Blame it on worn out neurons but I have little recollection of Thanksgiving Days before 1995. This was the year Valorie and I spent our first Thanksgiving together, less than a week after she moved from New York to Sunnyvale. We were the guests of an Argentine couple in San Francisco. The turkey was cooked in brandy. Then we danced tango.

The next year I was in Los Angeles and Valorie in New York. The year after we both were in New York, and in 1998 we gave our first Thanksgiving Grand milonga with turkey and all the trimmings at the Dance Spectrum in Campbell, CA. Then in 1999 we spent Thanksgiving in a corn field outside Champaign, IL. This started a tradition that continued in New Orleans, first in the French Quarter, then Uptown and the Irish Channel. Our devotion to the spirit of the holiday has been super sized by our love of the tango and everything good that it inspires.

Valorie and I are busy preparing Thanksgiving dinner, and setting the table to share it with loved ones. We’ll remember everyone who took us into their homes and those who came to ours over the years, and be thankful for the memories. We will toast to all of you, count our blessings and give thanks for having you all in our lives.

A Thanksgiving to Remember

WOMEN WHO LISTEN DON’T CRY

Rumors and lies propagate around the world before the truth even gets out of bed.

We don’t know who started the rumor that “Alberto made women cry,” and we assume that it wasn’t that sex starved matron who can’t take no for an answer. Maybe it was the naive stubbornness of Gisela, may her soul rest in peace, who went around dishing out back handed compliments comparing our ethics when it comes to taking your money in exchange for your responsibility to listen and learn, with a penchant for making women cry. Or it could be… well never kind.

Over the years some people felt mortified hearing the repetition of the chant, “Alberto makes women cry” as a blanket excuse to justify lack of money, talent or self esteem. The ill conceived rumor has become one of the most often whispered maladies to virgin ears who are just joining the tango scene in New Orleans.

Eventually, the truth finally got out of bed and found its way into a Canadian blog.

DANCE AS LIFE
By Cafe Girl
Published by courtesy of Cafe Girl Chronicles

I used to think my dance lessons were all about timing, steps, musicality, and technique. Lately I have come to realize that that there’s more too it than that. The more I dance, the more I learn about life. According to my teachers – dance is life.

And nowhere was this more apparent than on my recent trip to New Orleans where I managed to squeeze in a two-hour tango lesson with the very elegant, “man in black” – Alberto Paz. He was gracious and patient, and I immediately felt at ease with him despite the usual stage fright I feel whenever I dance with someone for the fist time.

“There is no test,” he said. “You’re here to learn.”

Lesson #1: “Dance is like life. You have to understand that it’s not about pass/fail; it’s about getting the most out of it.”

Alberto was surprisingly complimentary at what little technique I had managed to pick up in Buenos Aires. (Ah, me of little faith.) He liked working with beginners, he explained, because there were few bad habits to correct.

Doubting myself – as usual – I told him that it was his excellent lead and clear direction that enabled me to dance well

“Catherine,” he said. “It’s a compliment so take it and just say thank you,” he said.

Lesson #2: Dance is like life. You have to give yourself a little credit.”

I decided that the next time someone paid me a compliment, I would own it.

I would say: “It’s mine. I worked for it. I deserve it.”

As the lesson progressed, the steps started to feel different – they started to feel “right.” Alberto’s small tweaks were making a big difference to my comfort level. But just to be certain, I asked, after a particular sequence of moves, “Is this right?”

He tossed the question back at me, “Does it feel right to you?”

“Yes,” I said. “I can definitely feel a difference.”

“Then, it’s right,” he said, then added: “Never ask a man his opinion. He’ll never tell you the truth. If you ask him if something looks good, he will always say yes.”

As naive as it sounds, it came as such a revelation that I actually asked Alberto if I could write that piece of wisdom down before I forgot it.

He laughed, put his arm around my shoulders, and gave them an affectionate squeeze . “But you already knew that!” he said.

Lesson #3: “Dance is like life, It’s about how you feel and not how someone else makes you feel.

Probably the hardest lesson of all was just learning to slow down. Tango, more so than any other dance, requires the dancer to be in the moment, wait, and savor each step. However, I sometimes I approach tango as something “to do” rather than something “to dance.” I want to make sure I do all of the steps whether I enjoy them or not.

As Alberto so eloquently put it as I rushed through my steps of our last tango together, “Slow down, you always have time to make a step, but once it is made you can never take it back.”

Lesson #4: “Dance is like life. Make every step count!

WHO WAS TINKERING WITH THE CLOCKS?

Ghosts, skulls and pumpkins signaled the arrival of Halloween to the city as the sun set down Saturday evening on the last day of October. Valorie came home earlier and waved her magic wand to transform the front of our home into a trick-or-treater’s magnet, then we sat on the porch to greet kids, parents and grandparents from the neighborhood.

I read somewhere that the origin of Halloween comes from the well-known Celtic celebration Samhain, that means “summer end” and marks the end of the harvests season in Ireland. For old Celts, the door that separates this world with the one beyond opens with the arrival of the Samhain, allowing the spirits to pass through. The familiar ancestors were welcomed whereas the bad spirits were driven away with masks and costumes. With the passing of time, the Celts belief  was mixed with the Christian celebration of the Day of All the Saints, and thus Halloween was born.
Anyway as the night grew older it was time for the adults to party and celebrate so we headed for the Vintage Room on Magazine where a Halloween tango party took place. We enjoyed ourselves very much, dancing to our content to pretty good music, and staying to the Cumparsita set (for the tango impaired, this song signals the end of the evening and the moment when those who want to go home together seek each other for the last dance) knowing that in the witching hours of the night we would get an extra hour to rest our bones, an event popularly known as “fall back” and consisting of turning the clocks back to 1 am when the time strikes 2 am.
That’s what I wanted to talk about… It seems that the excitement of the evening (a.k.a. early vodka tonics and late pinot noirs) set a chain of events as I entered our living room which can be described as unload your sorry rear end on the couch and do a thorough inspection of the interior of your eyelids. Sometime later I opened my eyes, or not, I turned back the clocks or not, the thing is that as some part of me seemed to be tampering with time, the hands of all the clocks kept turning counterclockwise and somebody kept yelling, “play that funky music!”

HAS IT REALLY BEEN TEN YEARS?

You can only understand what aging really means when a ten year span no longer feels the way it did for the first five decades of your life. It strikes you in the face when those you have known for ten years seem to look, with a few exceptions, the same, but the reflections in windows and mirrors insist on showing pictures of your father or mother back at you.

During the Halloween week of 1999, we came to New Orleans for the first time. Although it might seem superfluous to quantify the reasons for that visit, living in a city which recently placed 45 out 55 in order of smartest to dumbest America’s largest cities in the Daily Beast ranking, we came to New Orleans to teach the very first ever city wide Argentine tango workshop. Because that is what we have been doing full time since 1996, and still try to do.

The occasion was a succession of firsts for us. By 1999 we had three years under our soles as the only full time traveling teachers across the United States. We had been the first ones to teach and contribute to the creation of a large tango community in Anchorage, Alaska. We had taken Argentine tango to Hawaii and put into motion another group of passionate tango dancers. But coming to the Deep South was a first. It was the first time we didn’t stay at our hosts home. I remember being met at the airport by our Ecuadorian hosts, who in a very circumspect way drove us to some stranger’s house. Looking through the windows of that house into Claiborne Avenue, I had the willies thinking about the humid four days ahead before we would continue on to sunny Florida and then back to cool and dry California. It’s amazing what an aging mind remembers on demand.

The workshops were a major success with 19 couples participating of four days of hard and exciting work. It was held at the old studio on David Drive. Can I get a “who-who?”

This was also the first time that we stayed in a city beyond the prescribed amount of time needed to hold the workshops before moving on to the next stop. Sabina (far right with the classic foot extension pose that distinguishes tango dancers) had a lot to do with that. Something about cemeteries, vampires and po boys convinced us to accept her invitation to move to her home. As a matter of fact Sabina would have a major influence in the change of course our lives took over the next ninety days.

She was instrumental in inviting us to spend Halloween in New Orleans. We finally got to see a different side of New Orleans, the groomed side reserved for tourists. The visits to the French Quarter were charged with emotional recalls of childhood memories listening to traditional jazz and dixieland on a transistor radio. The architecture, the iron balconies, the narrow streets had an eerie resemblance to the rundown quarters in San Telmo before the tango craze. This city just didn’t feel American at all. It seemed to be part of a third world with people very proud of it. The artists creative juices seemed to seep from every daiquiri dispenser along Bourbon street.

She explained in detail the “natural” division of the almost non existent tango community: “Downtown people don’t have cars so they don’t go to the burbs. Suburbanites have cars but are not comfortable driving to the city, parking, and dealing with the diversity of bohemian characters found in the city.”

It was at a place called Cafe Brasil where we met a cast of characters wearing outlandish costumes, and playing unusual tango music. The hostess, who never considered greeting the contingent of workshop participants and the visiting teachers, turned out to be a nightmare and a pain in the ass to our unassuming, polite and respectful hosts. Such seemed to be the severity of the infighting that we were actually  invited to move to the city “to teach that girl what a real tango teacher looks like.” Seriously.

When we realized how mortified these kind, educated and generous people were about the downtown dingbat’s perceived threat to good tango practices, we convinced them about assuming the leadership role the community needed, to become teachers and to move on. It took many hours of private and personal coaching and tutoring, and lots of encouragement over mojitos and Thai food to overcome their reluctance to take a leap of faith.

Two months later, we received one of the most rewarding emails in our tango life. They had decided to begin teaching a small group as we suggested they do. They began a process that eventually became the root of a congenial tango community.

Then in January 2000 we called Sabina to tell her that we had made the decision to downsize, sell our Silicon Valley manor, pack the cat and the dog in the bimmer and head down South. She said come, come on down, the Love Shack is ready for you… Was that really ten years ago?  Where did all that time go? Well that’s another matter.

IT ACTUALLY DID (GET BETTER)

Today the Festival and Mundial de Tango came to an end with a great closing milonga at the Harrods building in downtown Buenos Aires. As milongas go, we expected people to attend and the live orchestra to thrill the crowd that would come to listen and those who came to dance. The dancing exploded into the street, and Calle Florida become another dance floor.

Well, there he was Anibal Gomez recreating the sounds of the Orquesta Caracteristica Feliciano Brunelli and the place was packed wall to wall. The characteristic orchestra in the 40’s and 50’s was like a Lawrence Welk-like all around orchestra that played fox trots, polkas, cumbias, valses, pasodobles, and milonga among many other popular rhythms favorites at the time. The sound of the accordion was predominant and the rhythm section was supported by guitar, bass, and drums.

But the icing on the cake was the Los Reyes del Tango Orchestra alternating sets with the Caracteristica for an incredible evening full of spontaneous dancing in every available space of the old mega store of the fifties.

A beautiful aerial view of one of the dance floors inside the Harrods building. People were dancing, people were watching, everyone was sharing a state of unadulterated enjoyment on an unforgettable hot Sunday evening in the Buenos Aires winter.

Dancing with the Anibal Gomez Orquesta Caracteristica

Dancing with Los Reyes del Tango

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IT CAN’T GET BETTER THAN THIS

It can’t get any better when being in Buenos Aires during the 2009 Tango Festival, we get the unbelievable chance to see the legendary Quinteto Pirincho playing at the milonga in Harrods. Enjoy a bit of our unforgettable experience: hear and dance with the original sound of one of the oldest tango ensembles. After we Flipped, we danced!

BEHIND THE SCENES

Summer in August is how the TV anchors call this glorious day in Buenos Aires. Having made peace with the fact that we’re no longer on the vortex of the tango competition, we’re looking forward to a full week of sightseeing, visiting friends and relatives, and dancing for the fun of dancing, which is what we enjoy the most. No heartaches when we dance tandas after tandas surrounded by other people in a real milonga environment. Yes, I could have been a contender, but the prize I won back in 1995 is still the best and most treasured.

Here is a look behind the scenes at the process we went through before stepping on the dance floor at La Trastienda.

DANCING FROM THE HEART

This is  Alberto writing.

Last night we couldn’t sleep on account of the anxiety and uncertainty we were experiencing about the outcome of our struggle to make it through both days of qualifying rounds. The truth is that one week before traveling, the good doctors at Tulane hospital wanted to look for possible artery blockages in my (Alberto) body, and were not too happy about my refusal to let them poke his veins, and his insistence on traveling anyway.

Our adventure in Buenos Aires has been full of excitement, including me getting very nervous with uncontrollable anxiety and dancing with pain in the chest. Yesterday he chewed two aspirins before our round, and after the second song he put a nitroglycerin pill under the tongue. That helped a lot, and our dance was a great deal better than the day before. We actually enjoyed it so much that our hopes were raised to a reasonable level of expectation. We were so proud of each other.

The morning started with a very pleasing surprise, we received an email that read,

Alberto and Valorie, how is everything,?

What a surprise seeing you participating in the Dance World Cup! I did not know that you were in Bs. As. nor that I’d be judging your dancing yesterday! I congratulate you for your simple, elegant and musical dancing, and for the courage it took to join 470 participating couples! It was odd having to give a score to people I love and admire. I hope you are chosen to continue

No judge knows the points the other judges score. We are constantly watched and monitored so we don’t speak with each other or even exchange looks. So I don’t know how you fared… The score range is from 5 to 9 points, but nobody gives a 9 to anybody, because if the points given by a judge are too high with respect to the others, it is discarded. So I gave you an 8 to make sure it counts and gets added to the total score.

Much luck today!

It certainly helps being noticed and recognized, but that could actually work both ways. Anyway, we got on our way to Festival headquarters with mixed emotions, already wondering how my heart would handle the added excitement of the competition, even God forbid if we’d made it to the finals. We were certainly disappointed when our names were not called among the list of 65 couples moving on to the semifinals Friday. We actually placed 150 with a total score of 6.583. But considering all we had to deal with, we are very grateful of being able to be here, to have participated in two intense journeys, and to have danced our hearts out, literally and physically as well.

We are forever grateful to our sponsors, our friends and our peanut gallery for the unconditional show of love and support.

ONE DOWN, ONE TO GO

This Monday at 3 pm the qualifying rounds of the Tango World Championship got underway to a standing room only at La Transtienda, in the heart of San Telmo. An expert panel of judges kept a close eye on those couples that next Friday will be competing on the semi-finals.

427 couples from 25 countries are taking part in these competitions. Besides the couples registered for the competition, other couples who have won the semi-finals at other international tournaments held in Australia, Chile, Japan, New Zealand, and Venezuela as well as in Argentina, classified at preliminary competitions in Comodoro Rivadavia; San Martín de los Andes, Neuquén; San Salvador de Jujuy, Jujuy; La Falda, Córdoba; Resistencia, Chaco; La Plata, Bs. As. and Vicente López, Bs. As. will be competing at this instance. Also taking part in this competition will be the winners (from the second to the fourth position) of the 7th Tango City Competition which took place in May this year.

It was an indescribable excitement to be part of the experience, and now is one down and one to go. We danced our qualifying round at La Trastienda and even thought the adrenalin was wrecking havoc in my chest, we managed to finish standing up. We did PIROPOS with Troilo, LA VIRUTA with Gobbi, and EL REY DEL COMPAS with D’Arienzo.

The place was full to capacity and the stage was hot and colorful. We did everything the rules call for, including handling several back step attacks by an Eight Count Basic Stepper hot dog dancing in front of us. We were happy to receive warm rounds of applause. We had fans in the audience and here is the video of round five,

Video courtesy of Dante Proaño

THE DANCE WORLD CUP GETS UNDERWAY

We’re getting ready for our first qualifying round this afternoon, 2:30 pm local time, at La Trastienda, Balcarce 460. Our second round will be tomorrow. Each day we will dance three tangos selected by the Association of Dancers, Teachers and Choreographers of Tango,and each day we will receive a score from the five judges. The 65 couples totalling the highest scores will move to the Semifinals, along with the 20 winning couples from the regional championships. The results will be announced Wednesday at 11 am.

Go couple 151!