Bajofondo / electrotango

I just heard that Bajofondo is playing Central Park Summerstage tonight! I think it’s free. Awesome. Actually i’ve never seen a central park summerstage show (based on a suspicion that it would involve too much waiting-in-lines) nor have i seen Bajofondo play live but anyway, I have a few of their cd’s and I like their music. It’s more or less electro-tango, i think it’s really easy for anybody to enjoy.

Buenos Aires is s totally saturated in tango music and culture, it was weird moving here and knowing nothing about tango. At least half the time people hear my american accent they ask me “oh, did you come here to study tango?” At first all the tango everything (cds, stage shows, street performers, tango schools, tango shoes, tango apparel, tango murals, tango vacations, tango museums, etcetcetc!) struck me as touristy and schlocky but now I am totally filled with awe and respect for this intense tango culture and tradition that’s all around Buenos Aires all the time. And I’ve realized how much I love accordions.

During the military dictatorship in the 1970′s, tango dancing was outlawed (like most other types of public gathering). So tango culture became less popular and started to die out. It became an old-peoples’ culture, just a throwback to old times… but now there’s a whole new interest in tango, tons of young people are learning to dance and in addition to the milongas filled with old people dancing tango, there are now other milongas filled with young people dancing tango. I love going to a place where you can see everyone, young and old, twenty-five-year-old hipsters and ninety-year-old guys with suits and neatly greased hair, crowded together and gliding around the same dance floor. And although you can pay US$300 for a big tango dinner show, you can also go to the community center in any neighborhood and pay $2 to dance cheek-to-cheek with the local senior citizens, if you know how.
Anyway, i’m obviously neither expert nor purist when it comes to tango music; I totally love all of this electro-tango music: Bajofondo, and Gotan Project, Carlos Libedinsky, Tanghetto, ummm, i think there’s more but i can’t remember, i’ll check my ipod and post more later…

tango terror

On Thursday my friend Lili convinced me to go out to La Viruta for some tango dancing. Everyone here is obsessed with Tango! At La Viruta, for $8 pesos, they have group lessons for all levels from beginner to expert, and then after the lessons, an open milonga for everyone to dance. I don’t dance very much, like back in New York I would usually wait until it’s late at night and everyone is really drunk and nobody’s watching, before I head onto the dance floor. The thing is that everyone loves dancing, and people always want you to dance and have fun, and everyone loves dance parties, and people feel sad if you don’t join in and have fun dancing with them, and sometimes I do have lots of fun dancing if I can get over myself. I always thought about maybe taking dance lessons someday, like if I took some beginner lessons of some kind, it would help me feel less shy. So I said yes, I will go to La Viruta with Lili and take a tango lesson! But I was feeling super terrified for the entire week beforehand, and I was feeling even more terrified when I got there and joined the flock of beginner students. They taught us a few basic steps (in Spanish so I’m not exactly sure what they were saying), and then had us practice with different partners. I danced with four or five different men, and I stepped on all of their toes, and we crashed into other couples many times, and I spent the whole lesson struggling against strong urges to run and hide in the bathroom with a stiff capirinha. But I actually had fun for a few minutes, and I felt very proud of myself for doing something very scary to me. It made me think about how many things used to be really scary to me (like olives, amusement parks, riding in boats, talking to strangers, driving a car, asking someone out on a date, speaking a foreign language, etc), and most of them turned out to be really fun and awesome and made my life so much richer. This just makes me look forward to when I am an old lady and I will have tried everything under the sun and I will no longer be afraid of ANYTHING AT ALL!