3571  A valuable learning from Gavito

Date: Sat, 2 Jul 2005 16:24:24 EDT
From: Pilofl@AOL.COM
Subject: A valuable learning from Gavito

Dear Friends,

I submit this message as an expression of respect to Carlos Gavito,
acknowledging an invitation to share some of our experiences with him.

Back in 1996, “Forever Tango” came to Philadelphia and my wife and I
decided to invite our teenage children to watch as a way to expose them to
another artistic dance form coming from Latin America. As it would be
expected for first-time spectators, we were all mesmerized and marveled by the
exceedingly physically demanding choreographies of the dancing couples…
experiencing a similar feeling of awe as when one watches a high-caliber world
class acrobatics show. However, it was at the moment that that mature dancer
and his gorgeous partner walked into the stage that my wife and I look at
each other’s eyes and nodded our heads agreeing that we have found a very
enticing thing for
both of us to do together… we looked at the program and we learned that
their names were Carlos Gavito and Marcela Duran… without knowing it, we had
already connected with enticing man.

Several years later, and a few miles of Tango walking in many venues across
the US, we came to learn that one late Saturday night, while my wife and I
were dancing at the old Sandra Cameron Studio in NYC, Carlos Gavito showed
up and upon entering the large room he inquired with some of his friends
about our dancing style. His friends wanted to play a joke on him and challenged
to guess from which BsAs ‘barrio’ we were coming from… he looked at us
with more attention and argued that our style could not be clearly attributed
to a single neighborhood, he seriously argued that he could perceive specific
dominant influences from specific ‘barrios’… but his friends pressed on
him to decide in favor of a specific ’barrio’… he selected one, and his
friends told him that he was wrong, but that they also agreed with him about
the difficulty of his guess, given our style, even for a milonguero of his
stature and deep knowledge of Tango… he conceded and guessed again to be told he
was wrong again… after the third guess his friends erupted in laughs to
tell him that we were not from BsAs.

I share this rather private story in the hopes that it may shed some
additional light about the way Gavito experienced his social Tango… I sense
that for him Tango dancers brought to the dancing floor not only their
personalities and the learnings from their masters, but also brought their full
personal histories including their ‘barrios’… while he was guessing, his
connection with us extended far beyond the confines of the venue and the
specific moment. I see my simple story in that context, and will always be
thankful to him for this valuable learning.

En mi corazon, Gavito, te has quedado,
Juan Carlos
Wilmington, DE, USA