stage - pista audience
huge - small space
circular - linear choreo
comparison playlist
The tango performers have a quite many hidden
skills, which we in audience maybe do not pay attention to. When the tango
choreography is created it needs to look good in very different environments
and I suppose the performers hardly know about the conditions for the coming
season.
One challenge for the choreography is how the
audience is seated. An ordinary stage performance places the audience on one
side so you do all the interesting movements in that direction. It is different for the pista where the
enjoying eyes are all around the performing couple. It means that the
interesting details must be planned carefully and they must be visibly to all
directions so all in the audience can catch them. The following short glimpse
shows how Pajaro and Maria Belen are solving that challenge geniusly! They
present the airy movements to the audience on both sides .
(video at 0.33)
Another skill needed is the ability to fit the
choreography to different venues. Did you noticed how large the pista is in the
video above and how Pajaro/Maria Belen
are dancing on the whole floor from
quite near the scene to the other end of the pista. I had the possibility to
see this performance live and they were really filling up the space preparing
for us a high class visual entertainment.
The same choreo on a smaller pista and please,
pay attention how they are able to keep the same high energy level in spite of
the changed options!
It must be challenging to redo/maintain the whole
choreography for two so different floors as these Russian and Finnish ones
are. The Pajaro/Maria choreography had a
more circular type of form and it gives you better options. You can always go
around the number of steps you need! The
second example, danced below by Pablo and Dana, has o more linear form with
some round going sections every now and then. Spontaneously I think it must be
more difficult to adapt, but they still managed it and did well!
We start with the huge pista
Pablo and Dana in Tylösand
and a smaller version
What are these couples doing when they adapt to a new size of
the pista?
To get an idea about the options these dancers have I wanted to compare the
performances and try to spot the
differences. I opened two browser windows besides each others so I could stop one and watch the same section
on the other one. My untrained eye had hard time to find any differences even
when I knew that there must be some.
I noticed though that Pajaro and Maria Belen are dancing in a visibly
different way for a part of the song. The small dance is going more around at
the same space and the larger one uses a lot more of the pista. It requires a
good portion of concentration and experience to modify the dance to this extent
during a performance.
The small starts around 2.20 : https://youtu.be/eEeNdwyg9to?t=141
The large starts around 2.26 : https://youtu.be/trWXgh00uNQ?t=146
I did the same for the Pablo/Dana songs but I did
not find spots which shows the different solutions for these two
alternatives. the other hand, as usual
when I invest some extra time on something, I make a lot of bonus observations!
Here it was the joy of how fantastic and humorous their dancing was. I still
think of this milonga as Pablo/Dana milonga!
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