Dancing Tango! Sometimes wonderful, usually addictive and often frustrating. Despite all the workshops you take, improvements come slowly, ‘slip back’ is high and ‘crises’ are all too frequent.

A visit to Buenos Aires can certainly help, especially with the ‘feeling’. However, the BsAs tango world is certainly not without its own peculiar difficulties. Choosing teachers and organising your classes are high among them, closely followed by the difficulty of making sense of it all and of getting enough practice to be able to incorporate in your dance whatever you have managed to learn.

DNI is a studio organised by Pablo and Dana, ably assisted by a group of friends. It’s something totally new in the BsAs tango world - an organisation that aims to enable you to learn to dance tango as well as you can – or want to - whether your interest is in teaching, performance, or just dancing socially. And let’s not forget – none of the teachers at DNI do – that at its root tango is a social dance to be enjoyed, despite its very porteño capacity for complexity.

The teaching itself is consistent and extremely well organised. All of the teachers believe in and follow the same way of dancing tango. The tecnica (or as DNI would prefer, ‘Tango Conceptual Technology’) is very impressive and becoming more so as time goes on. And what you are taught, which is tecnica and fundamentals not steps or style, is the same in every class – although the level of detail will vary.

One of the difficulties of tango classes is that if you can’t do the movement on your own, you certainly can’t with a partner. In fact, sometimes you can’t grasp what the teacher is doing, even with a careful lead in, because the movement is totally unfamiliar. And that is why the classes in DNI are split into two halves: a twenty minute warm-up and movement practice, where you learn and practice the necessary movements, and a more conventional class of just over an hour. Not totally conventional though, you dance as if you were in the milonga, in the line of dance and there is a lot of emphasis on the use of space, and closing and opening the embrace.

Every week there is a theme, set in the advanced class, which appears in all of the other classes – and even the steps used to illustrate whatever is being taught are closely related. This means you spend much less time trying to set the structure of the step and more on the real lesson. It also neatly solves the problem of practice: that most people need two to four hours of practice to absorb the teaching of a one hour class. It’s a wonderfully effective way of to incorporate a lesson, as well as making the difficulty of scheduling a lot less agonising. And of course the familiar faces you keep on seeing promote an agreeable feeling of community.

This feeling makes up a large part of the ‘onda’ of DNI. You are conscious of it everywhere: in the ‘ “yoga for dancers” class, sitting on terrace eating lunch or taking mate before the Saturday class, taking a class, or discussing which milongas you will go to. (There is a useful list of recommended milongas.)

And if you feel that you need new clothes or shoes for classes, or to go to the milonga there is the very interesting selection in DNI shop.

To find out more about DNI, visit their website at www.estudiodnitango.com.ar

Related Items:

1. Is Tango alive and well and waiting for you in Buenos Aires?

Related Links:

1. Estudio DNI Tango
2. TangoTang, the Hong Kong Tango Club

Last update: 16-01-2007 09:49

Published in : Blogs, Travel