The Greatest Maestro of Tango in The World - by Terry Clark

Coming to
New York City

21^st  to 29^th
November 2009

 

New Special G&G Tango Seminar
Workshops Practicas Milongas Shows Images exhibition Tango Fashion Show	Concerts Lectures Tango-Video Tango-Rolling Tango-Technique and more...
Featuring also:
Federico Naveira & Inés Muzzopappa	Fernando Sánchez & Ariadna Naveira
Travis Neel	The Eternal Tango Orchestra

More information, Prices & Registration at:

www.tango-art.org         /         info@tango-art.org

Schedule of the Event

Day

Session Descriptions

The Cochabamba Practica is a guided practica for students to come and practice the material and themes learning in previous sessions. The practica leaders are highly skilled dancers who have trained extensively with Gustavo y Giselle Anne. You may bring your filmed material or material from previous workshops. We highly encourage you to change partners in order to properly develop mastery of the subject material. We have found that practicing the material in the hours after the class greatly increase retention and provides students with an opportunity to reflect and resolve issues.
The Cochabamba practice was started on advice given to me by Gustavo Naveira. I lamented to Gustavo that I felt stymied in New York. The milongas often start too late for my early morning work schedule, both milongas and practicas are often too crowded, and there didn't seem to be a forum for advanced dancers. Gustavo grabbed his car keys, I grabbed a bottle of wine, and off to Cochabamba we went. Gustavo begin to explain chaos theory, tango, and learning. Many of the world's top dancers came out of the Cochabamba practica. It gave them a place to experiment, to cooperate, and to grow. Central to the theme of tango is chaos theory - if you want to dance really well you must be able to act and react and train your brain to do so as well. The old lead - follow techniques, which closely resemble Spike TVs' wrestling, are not going to work. Both leader and follower become active partners in the movement. I know, what a concept - partners. It's not a step, it's not lead with hands, a follower is not pushed, pulled, or tossed around the floor. It is the presentation of a movement that propels the leader to present the idea and the follower to act on the idea.
Cochabamba Practica started in March 2008 and has two formats. The first format, on Mondays, is focused on methodically training dancers. There is one hour of Tango-Rolling followed by one hour of tango exercises designed to produce muscle memory, improve balance and form, learn musicality, and explore advanced lead and follow techniques. The second format is modeled on Gustavo’s original Cochabamba (discussed in the prior paragraph).

• Leading and following focusing on sensitivity towards the partner;
• The embrace with respect to distances, posture, sides, etc;
• The use of the space and the positions including action, reaction, and directions;
• Musical adjustment for rhythm, phrasing, “tras-pie”, musicality;
• The displacement of “walks” in a straight line, the code and systems of walking;
• The turns as they relate to the axis, senses of turning, structure

These elements can be considered the necessary base for a tango to be reasonably danced and under control. In this seminar, we will analyze how are these elements operate not only during the usual “walking” but during the execution of specific figures as well.
The second group includes specific choreographic ideas that are most frequently used and include:

• Boleos
• Sacadas
• Ganchos
• Capturas, Barridas and Pasadas
• Volcadas
• Colgadas

These “ideas” and the great variety of figures that can be created from them will be studied in this seminar, digging deep into the specific technical principles that each idea presents. In other words, if we take for example the idea ”sacada”, we will study the general technique of the “sacadas” in order to correctly execute or dance a sacada in any of its variations.  One of the characteristics of this Seminar is its careful and detailed analysis of the technique in order to achieve two things: quality in the execution and the value of the movement. We firmly believe that, true to each individual’s capacity, the better you can achieve these principles the more you will enjoy it.

Carlos Vizzotto photo