Jack Dylan writes ---> this is ... my opinion [only] on his dancing; Chicho might well be a great teacher and choreographer.
I found him a middling teacher (of course he MIGHT have improved since 2003/4). A lady friend took one class and said never again. His focus, she said, was just on the men's part and totally ignored women's. I think he's a brilliant choreographer, but obviously his stuff is not to everyone's taste. And his choreography depends on his partner. His current one seems a bit limited, but that might be because she does not assert herself. What he did with Eugenia Parilla I loved, but I suspect she pushed to get in neat stuff that showcased her, as in the following video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EyZq6sOLI0g _______________________________________________________ I'm a fan of nuevo tango and have taken a lot of classes in it, but some people have greatly exagerated its importance today and in the future. I think it ultimately will have a definite but only a small part in the continued evolution of tango. The most important contribution to tango that Naveira and Salas provided is a way to look at traditional tango less as complex steps and more as simple movements which could be combined in different ways. But they aren't the only ones who contributed to this movement toward deconstruction (destruction + reconstruction). Some people in this and other tango forums have identified a nuevo style of dancing and listed aspects of it. Among those is a distant embrace which gives more freedom for the dancers to do fancy stuff. But this is true for most show dance routines, and was around long before Naveira and Salas started their deconstruction efforts. Most of the traveling teachers I and many other learned from in the early 90s were professional dancers from shows such as "Forever Tango" and "Tango por Dos" who taught this embrace. For that matter, a number of social dance teachers from Argentina teach a distant embrace. One couple I took classes from in the early 90s, for instance, spoke contempuously of the "belly bumper" (their words) embrace, associating it with vulgar street dancers. Some of the "steps" associated with tango nuevo also have been around for a long time before its advent. The volcada, for instance, is just a fashionably newer name for the extreme lean, which has been around for a long time as part of several traditional show and social figures such as the carousel. Other movements associated with nuevo are natural extensions of traditional figures. The colgada, for instance, is what you get when you do a parada where the woman does a half back-ocho before she's stopped. But the man leads her to continue her spin beyond 180 degrees to 270, 360, or even several complete turns. (Larry briskly brushes his hands together and mutters dismissively "So much for nuevo.") Larry de Los Angeles http://shapechangers.wordpress.com ____________________________________________________________ Paying too much for your business phone system? Click here to compare systems from top companies. http://thirdpartyoffers.juno.com/TGL2131/fc/PnY6rbwT01yK9ZMSoctrIzW5xpfet0NgERTW2haWCvoepdBXHimSe/ _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list Tango-L@mit.edu http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l