Once upon a time we didn't know how to dance milonga.
Every time milonga music played in a milonga we sat down. When we
asked our local instructor to teach us how to dance milonga, he played
milonga music during his practica and pushed us to dance "Faster!
Faster!" Needless to say, it didn't work, dancing tango steps to
milonga music made us trip over our feet.
Man Yung had
to resort to stealing the milonga steps of local tangueros. One such
gentleman flew across the dance floor whenever he danced milonga, so Man
Yung arduously copied his step....his ONE milonga box step. Even
though it was repetitive, at least it worked. Poor us!
We
don't admit defeat easily so we ordered some instructional videos from
Amazon and Bridge to the Tango and waited impatiently for weeks for our
DVDs and videos to arrive. A Juan Carlos Copes DVD arrived - it was
awful, we couldn't get anything from it. Luckily, we received the
Pepito Avellaneda video shortly afterwards - and it was really clear and
easy to learn from. We received the Manolo's video a few weeks later -
and with the material from these two amazing milonga masters, we were
set.
Of course, even though we were able to learn some
steps from videos, we lacked refinement and we were missing lots of
detail. When Martha and Manolo came to Toronto in 2006, we took 50+
hours of classes from them while they were in town. No way would we
miss out on the opportunity to build a solid foundation for our
dancing! We have been taking their classes at Camicando, Escuela
Argentina de Tango and La Salsera every year since then. We no longer
risk falling flat on our faces dancing Milonga (and Tango, and
Canyengue). We also have wonderful memories of our times together with Martha and Manolo in Toronto and Buenos Aires. We are so blessed to have Martha and Manolo as our maestros and friends.
Here are some beautiful recent performances of Canyengue, Tango and Milonga from Martha and Manolo at Salon Canning - enjoy!
(Embedding has been disabled for the milonga video, but you can see it direct on YouTube via this link:)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR3yuB9EHrs&feature=share&list=UU8UXm18pcBvvcEa-XAU2mow&index=1
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