About movement and magic

When mechanics turn to magic
When I for some years ago was in Osaka I visited the Sony Showroom where my friend was working at that time. She presented for me Rolly the small, dancing loudspeaker and I fell in love! I just WANTED to have it. I started to recalculate, fiercely, my ascetic budget to get that little moving and blinking thing! It took several days until I was out of the enchantment. Take a look!

This device can play music and it has six tiny motors giving the possibility to open and rotate the lids on the sides, move forward and backward as well as to spin. Of course we do have the lights too!

How come that these totally mechanical features could create and put that spell on me?

There was music. There was movements. The enchantment was created by the way those two were interlaced! I think the team which created the software for the movements has learned quite a lot about dance too, how mechanical movements turn into dance, turn into magic. Think if we had possibility to get the information how they trained Rolly to react and could apply it to our own reactions to music. I am sure that the way of connecting movement and music which visually attracted me would give a better dance experience to my partner as well as to me!

When the walk lost the magic
In tango we need to interlace our walk, our steps with the music. Most of the time we watch people who can do it properly but every now and then it is interesting to check an example when it isn't ok. On the video below the walk is just a walk not a caminata.

You can jump directly to the walking parts, starting about 4.33 and 8.02

I have no musical education and I had earlier hard to find out this kind of differences but it is nice to return to old videos to see if my understanding has developed to right direction. Yes, hard work pays even here!


Intensive focusing, adapting facilitate magic
Tango music is static going on without paying attention to the dancers. Even when there is a live orchestra the music just plays without flexibility for the individual dancers. In this video Yoyo Ma plays a known piece but he is totally concentrated to follow the fantastic dancer, Lil Buck. His ability to focus on the dancer and change his playing accordingly is facilitating the process and creating a more fascinating performance. If I could have the same kind of focusing on music during a tanda I think my dance would be so much better!

             

             Yoyo Ma Lil Buck