Austin Texas, officially known as the live music capital of the world is famous for the eclectic and progressive lifestyle of Austin residents. So it comes as no suprise that Austin hosts not one but two tango festivals. This coming June, Austin will be holding its second Fiesta de Tango from June 4-7, 2009.

The festival boasts 75 hours of tango dancing fun with three levels of tango classes, and 6 milongas, one of them an all night one. This year’s tango instructors are going to be Diego Di Falco and Carolina Zokalski , Guillermo Merlo and Fernanda Ghi, and George Furlong and Jairelbhi Furlong all of whom are very prominent names in the tango world.

image by bethsoft.com

They are also very good at selecting the best tango music for every milonga and every lesson. So be ready to show of your tango shoes, the comme il fauts and the neotangos and whatever else you’ve got, as you learn to do the embelishments and the boleos and the fancy turns and 4 great nights of heavy duty tango dancing.

There are full festival passes ($385), three day passes ($295-$320) and day passes ($90 - $150) and separate milonga pasees available online. For more information, schedule of classes/milongas and for more detailed rates and other information check out their website.

Also, there are really cheap airfares available for austin right now (e.g. $205 for a round trip from New york to Austin), on various online air ticket booking sites. Check them out!

The Diva Tango Boutique, which has branches in Chicago, Buenos Aires and Clearwater, is participating in the 13th Miami Tango Festival with a big promise: They  will be bringing the largest collection of Comme il Faut shoese outside Buenos Aires (over 500 pair), their entire collection of Tara Shoes, men’s tango shoes, dancing sneakers, practice shoes and also clothing.

This might be the perfect opportunity to buy that illusive perfect pair of dancing shoes that you’ve been waiting for all these years. Comme Il Faut (means “As it should be”), which is my personal favorite, is one of the most reputed companies in the Tango Shoes business. The main selling point of Comme Il Faut shoes is that they are all Unique - No Comme Il Faut shoe is the same as any other.

Comme Il Faut

So, if you own a pair of these dancing shoes, you can rest assured that you will be the only one flaunting them on any dance floor anywhere in the world. Now, that’s something!

Tara tango shoes is a company with its own tango story to tell. It was started by a flat footed tango dancer in search of a elegant but equally comfortable pair of shoes. Their moto is “You shouldn’t have to suffer to feel beautiful!”.

The Women’s collection of tango shoes that will be available at the Miami Tango Fantasy can be checked out at www.diva-boutique.com. Men - you will have to just visit the store or the festival

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The United States Tango Congress, founded by Lydia Henson, is holding its 13th Annual Tango festival this memorial day weekend (May 21st to May 26th) on Miami Beach. This is the longest tango festival held anywhere outside Buenos Aires and promises to be an excellent treat for all the tango lovers. The prices are a bit high but you get 5 days packed with Tango lessons, Milongas, excellent performances from famous tangueros and brilliantly romantic evenings of tango dancing under the moonlight on the beach. The festival is going to be held in the Deauville Beach Resort on Collins Avenue. Here is the exact address:

Buy Now!

United States Tango Congress 13th Annual Tango Festival

Tango Fantasy 2009,

Deauville Beach Resort

6701 Collins Avenue,

Miami Beach

FL 33141.

Ph: 305-865-8511.

For registration, program schedules, list of tango performances, milongas etc visit www.tangofantasy.com.

Even the City of Coral Gables, which has managed to maintain its independent existence from Miami, vehemently protecting its own identity and structure from being infiltrated by outsiders, cannot protect itself from tango. Dianne Castro runs a Tango practica every Tuesday in the heart of Coral Gables, just three blocks north of the Miracle Mile at Shakra Relaxation oasis. 

I will make a more detailed post about the place with my thoughts about the kind of tango music, and the flavor of tango etc. as soon as I manage to go and experience dancing there myself, but for the time being here is the address and times and costs: 

Tango Practica “El Abrazo” with Dianne Castro

(and all of you)

Shakra Relaxation Oasis

271 Alhambra Circle, 

Coral Gables, FL  34145.

Ph: 305 - 975 - 7753.

The place is just three blocks north of Miracle mile, between Ponce De Leon Boulevard and Le Jeune Road. 

The guided practica runs from 8 PM to 10 PM and the cost is $15.

I was asked a very simple question by my father when I told him that I dance tango: “So what is tango? How do you characterize it?”. And I realized that every time I tried to formulate an answer or a definition for tango, I would come up with another form or meaning of tango that would contradict what I was about to say. You can do this thought experiment for yourself. Just think of what you believe “tango” means to you, and see if you can come up with a one or two sentence description that really captures whatever your feelings are on the subject of tango. I bet you will find this exercise entertainingly futile!

I will tell you about my thought experiment, or rather the thought explosion or thought disaster that I underwent:

My first thought was Tango is the style of dancing that originated in brothels of Argentina in the late 1800s and became popular through out the world in the early 1900s. Now, although this statement is superficially almost correct, every part of it is wrong at some level. Let’s start at the beginning: tango is “a style of dancing”. WRONG. Tango is not just a style of dancing.

tangofestivalverlin.de

Tango is also a genre of music. Okay, so tango is a style of dancing AND a genre of music associated with this style of dancing (or the other way round), right? Of course not! Tango is also a type of rhythm with this genre of music. Besides, when we refer to tango music, as a whole, we include many many things in it: tangos, milongas, tango waltzes, tango candombes … the list goes on. And while we are thinking about the music, tango music didn’t even originate in Buenos Aires only. Uruguay has also played an immensely important role in the birth and history of tango. For those of you who don’t know where Uruguay is, it’s the country sandwiched between brazil and Argentina (officially known as the Oriental Republic of Uruguay), whose capital Montevideo is perhaps as important as Buenos Aires as far as tango history is concerned. It was in Uruguay that the most famous tango of them all “La Cumparsita” was written.

As such, tango dance and tango music both are pretty young. According to Wikipedia and also this website, the earliest records of tango styles are 19th century Spain and Cuba, which is pretty recent if you compare it to waltz which has been around since the 16th century. What is considered traditional Argentine tango, is the music and dancing that evolved between 1910s to 1950s in Buenos Aires and Montevideo among the European immigrant population (mainly Italian, Spanish and French) of these cities, greatly influenced by African and Creole music. But I digress. Let’s just keep aside what is tango music… That would be a subject for another powwow. So let’s focus instead just on what is Tango dance ?

Even here, we can’t give a succinct answer. Of the top of my head, I can think of at least a bunch of things that would fall under the umbrella title of “tango dance”: the Argentine tango, Tango Canyengue, Nuevo Tango, Tango Candombe, Tango Milonga, Ballroom tango (okay may be that’s stretching the definition :). And after checking the Tango wiki, I can add: Uruguayan tango (also known as Tango Oriental) and To My Great Amazement: Finnish Tango - something I had never heard of till now. Everyday I discover something new about tango. I had no idea that Finnland had anything to do with tango.

Anyway, Wikipedia lists a bunch of more styles. Here is the list:

• * Tango Argentino
• * Tango Oriental (uruguayo)
• * Tango Canyengue
• * Tango Liso
• * Tango Salon
• * Tango Orillero
• * Tango Milonguero (Tango Apilado)
• * Tango Nuevo
• * Show Tango (also known as Fantasia)
• * Ballroom Tango
• * Finnish Tango

You can read the nuances of each of these styles by googling ‘tango’ and going to the wiki article. Well, there goes any hope of explaining to my father what tango is! As we kept talking, I ended up mentioning a lot of jargon like ganchos, boleos, close embrace, traspie, cadence and lots other things that made him even more confused. We drifted again into tango music and tango instruments, bandoneons the soul of tango and Francisco Canaro and Carlos Gardel and the revival and Por Una Cabeza from the movie “Scent of a woman”. At some point I realized that I am talking about comme il faut and neo tango shoes and I knew that I should stop. I even tried to resort to inappropriate humor (the cliched and ultra-limited “vertical expression of a horizontal desire”) but to no avail.

So I took a break… I went for a walk and a coffee. And I thought of the best tangos I’ve ever danced, and I thought about my favorite tango music, my favorite milongas and my favorite tango places and my favorite tango partners… Then I thought some more… and felt some more…

When I came back I told him this: Tango is all about communication without words. Tango is communication with your body. And it’s not a digital communication, unlike in other dances like swing or salsa (at least the way it’s danced in the US). You don’t give an “instruction” to the follower, and wait and watch while she does her bit and then give the next instruction… Tango is led continuously, every fraction of every second. Dancing tango is giving a visual, corporal form to the words and the music, giving body to “quejas de bandoneon”… It’s like making a moving painting of the melody and rhythm.

My bad: Now he is asking me what’s swing and salsa and how’s bandoneon different from an Accordion!