2299  Even more tango in the NYTimes today!

Date: Wed, 3 Mar 2004 07:43:50 -0700
From: Brian Dunn <brian@DANCEOFTHEHEART.COM>
Subject: Even more tango in the NYTimes today!

In what seems to be an avalanche of NYTimes tango coverage, here's a nicely
written article about two recent USA tango events:

Critic's Notebook: Passion for Tango, West Coast and East

March 3, 2004
By BERNARD HOLLAND

The dance, which recently took hold on both coasts, has come
a long way from its Argentinian roots.

https://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/03/arts/dance/03TANG.html?ex79324823&ei=1&
en=af7ed2dbf8085b5a

Date: Sun, 20 Nov 2005 11:21:48 -0700
From: Brian Dunn <brian@DANCEOFTHEHEART.COM>
Subject: Tango in the NYTimes today

Dear tangueras y tangueros,

The following is a quotation from a travel article published in the New York
Times this morning, in the Travel section, entitled "Boogie Noches", about
night life in Buenos Aires. Among many interesting points, the author had
this to say about the contemporary Buenos Aires tango scene:

"Cooler by far than the kids we'd seen milling around and making out on
Wednesday night were the middle-class people of every age and description
gathered, on Friday, at La Viruta. This milonga-tango club is held several
times a week in a dim room, not unlike a department-store basement, in the
shabby-chic neighborhood Palermo Viejo. The coolness of everyone was not
apparent until the music struck up and people began to dance.

We'd been told that the tango was no longer really a living art. Clearly
these young and old tangoers, sober or a little drunk, well and not so well
dressed, hadn't heard the news. Catherine and I...sat at a crumb-dusted
table and watched with fascination, turning into something like joy, as an
obese elderly man with drooping eyelids, a Roman profile and surprisingly
nimble feet took in his arms a hot young thing in tall heels and a fishnet
blouse. This pair was joined by a handsome and skilled couple in their 50's,
his denim shirt half-unbuttoned, her tiny skirt hiked almost to the point of
indecency.

We watched as the couples executed their steps and swivels, their dramatic
twirls and pregnant pauses, pressed tight and upright against one another,
with nothing much in common besides a look of almost somber concentration. I
particularly liked the young woman with the liquid hips, in her flowered
dress, and that sly-looking older man with his sober dark suit and
rockabilly pompadour. But the milonga seemed above all a democratic
affirmation, both casual and intense, of the beauty of each and all of its
participants. Really, it was like nothing we Americans have ever seen in our
own country. Walt Whitman, you would have thought, was their national poet,
not ours."

Abrazos,
Brian Dunn
Dance of the Heart
Boulder, Colorado USA
www.danceoftheheart.com