My Tango Diaries

(from morguefile.com ) El duende has settled around my shoulders again, and it won't be shrugged off it seems. Almost a year ago I tried to explain to a friend what all this "duende" talk is about. A year later no easier to articulate. It's not a something , but the space between somethings . It's the emptiness that makes the non-emptiness so cherished. I wrote then how it was something I no longer sought out in tango. In the beginning of my tango journey, even before I was dancing, the duende in the music felt like some kind of romantic lure. It doesn't feel that way anymore. I don't really try to avoid it, because that's just not how it works. It comes when it comes, in the music, in a dance, in a breath. When I try to ignore it, it just loiters around until I notice it - or can't help noticing it. It's in the places, in slivers of space, where dark meets light. In contrasts and sharp edges. In that place you know suddenly quite clearly, th...

“There are two secrets to being a great tango dancer. The first is having a hole in yourself that you cannot fill, and the second is the luck to fall upon tango as the thing you try to fill it with.” Jaimes Friedgen I owe that quote above to Russell at Tangowords.wordpress.com . If you're not reading his beautiful blog - you should start now. (Image: Glowing Rose, mine)

These days it's the quiet of tango that's been on my mind. Transitions, the bridge between one moment and the next moment. The expanse of everything and nothing stretched out between one beat and the next. I've been reading a lot about Lorca's phrase El Duende lately - and el duende found in tango, the music, the dance, the life. El duende, the dark notes, the meloncholy spaces in between... The evocation, found in the pause, in the "wait" In the silence, a beat, a breath our pulses race between our fingertips. A moment more, and the bridge is crossed. And from Lorca himself: PAUSE OF THE CLOCK I sat down in a space of time. It was a backwater of silence, a white silence, a formidable ring wherein the stars collided with the twelve floating black numerals. from The selected poems of Federico García Lorca