The 19th Step Development Day Three, Patterns, Shapes and Tango

"Musically, the tango is not important; its only importance is what we give it. This reflection is correct, but perhaps applies to everything."
"The tango can be debated, and we have debates over it, but it still guards, as does all that is truthful a secret"
Jorge Luis Borges, A History of Tango.

Today Marcus our mathmatician had his first ever tango lesson. Using the shape of the circle the dancers and Marcus improvised moves drawing circles on the floor inspired by tango.

Marcus drew the diagram of the dance moves he and Rose had developed. Inside the circle the 6 triangles make a hexagon, the shape of the rooms in Borges story the Library of Babel.

Borges and Tango

Borges uses tango and tango uses Borges. He grew up in a house filled with English books in a suburb called Palermo. His house was gated, iron rails separated his garden from the neighbourhood. 'I was always behind bars' he states. Home is the endless English library and Borges was the prisoner watched over by a female guard who kept him from the street. Later, when he returned from Europe he identified not with the closed interior his mother sheltered him within, but with the rough, Palermo of knife and guitar and milonga. He defamiliarised the house of English books and made a vernacular landscape for his writings in the tango community outside. An 'imaginary homeland'. Into this mythical homeplace he introduces music - a barrel-organ and a piano banging out tango tunes. For more check the 'Borges-tango' video lecture and the 'wallflower' for writing/performance on this site

Could I invite Dylan and Kate offer an introduction to the tango walk, the quadrangle floor pattern, the figure of 8, the rocking and displacements of tango?

Also some Tango imagery

We discussed using Tango clothes too here's some images of them any thoughts...?

Ideas for costumes

Here are some ideas for the type of clothes, I was imagining black and white for dancers thought black would be interesting as it would become dusty with chalk as performance progresses. Imagined Marcus in much more colour like he usually wears maybe braces?

Some thoughts about Borges, Tango......

Been reading Borges A History of Tango which is in The Total Library Non Fiction 1922-1986 came across these quotes and thoughts not sure what they have to do with 19step yet but here they are anyway

"Schopenhaur (Welt als Wille und Vorstelling I, 52) has written that music is as near to us as the world itself; without the world, without a common stock of memories summoned by language, there would be no literature, but music does not need, could exist, without the world. Music is will and passion; the old tango, as music, immediately transmits that joy of combat which Greek and German poets, long ago tried to express in words."

“We read in one of Oscar Wilde’s dialogues that music reveals a personal past which, until then, each of us was unaware of, moving us to lament misadventures we have never suffered and wrongs we did not commit.”

Was discussing with Dorothy idea of Tango as an example of passion and humanness being controlled and tamed through the structure of language, learning steps and routines and nostalgia rather than its original passion Borges describes it originally as The Fighting Tango, which now can only lament for what is lost…………..

Suppose been thinking about the differences between learning ballroom tango and argentine tango, sequences and patterns as opposed to intuition and improvisation and the relationship between mathematics, music and art……..

Dorothy keeps mentioning a primordial state…….do we make sense of this through patterns and geometry?

I keep thinking of the drawing exercise Carol led were we linked the hexagon to parts of the body with letters, which creates a dance sequence, the letters and geometry/numbers take over the body movements.... does it in Dorothy’s score?

Is Borges hexagonal library built to control all our physical and emotional needs?

“ To the left and right of the entrance way are two miniature rooms. One allows standing room for sleeping; the other, the satisfaction of faecal necessities”