Wonderful, wonderful StPetersburg!!!

First I have to say SPASIBA BOLSHOI!!! Again we had such a great time as guests of Maxim and Gala in their tango school Caminito in StPetersburg. Thank you for inviting us and taking such good care of us!!! And thank you Sasha for the formidable themes for the classes, Igor for letting us sleep among the Russian classics and antique philosophers, Alisa for the excellent translations in and outside the classes, Luba for the cakes and beauty, Volodja for driving us safely through the crazy traffic, and Vala for photos and being our raccoon. And thank you students for working so hard and with concentration!!! And next time I hope I can speak a bit more Russian... I have books now!!! Da svidanija, spakoinoi notshi!

COPENHAGEN TANGO FESTIVAL
For once, first time in a long long time, we decided to go to a festival just for fun. And my god it was worth it! When working with tango it is too easy to slip into working mode or just stay at home during the week-end when ever that is possible. No obligations, all you have to do is rememeber to eat and drink. Sleeping optional. Except that sleeping during a tango festival is luxury one seldom has a chance and therefore we tried that, too. It was weird... but definetily wonderful!
We met alot of old friends from the time when none of us were teachers yet. By coincidence for many of us this was the first festival in a long time we were able to attend without working there. We definetily have to do that more. All of us.
After all, that is why we do tango. Love for the art of tango music and dance. It is better to do it instead of talking about it...

Workshop in beautiful StPetersburg 25.-27.5.2012

And the amazing and beautiful program of the weekend!!! Thank you Maxim, Gala and Sasha, we are happy to return to your beautiful city and school!

“ Pasi & Maria Elisabet Lauren are at the Studio of Argentine tango ‘Caminito’ on May 25, 26 and 27!

They last visited us in March 2010, they performed classes and shows, danced ungrudgingly

at local milongas of ‘Tangomania’ studio and ‘AT’ club. And we also were happy to meet them at fests that took place in Tampere and Helsinki.

Pasi & Maria Elisabet Lauren – experts in Argentine tango, as well as organizers of International Argentine Tango Festivals and performers of tango show numbers, well-known throughout Europe and the USA, are coming in St. Petersburg again!

Schedule and topics:

We’ve decided to cover some successive topics in order the participants could get the most useful ideas of how Argentine tango functions.

25 May, Friday:

19.00 - 20.20 – How to use the space while dancing, the space within a pair. Ideas, exercises and practical modes.

20.30 - 21.50 – Three minutes: what one tango and one tanda are about? Ideas, exercises and practical modes.

26 May, Saturday:

17.00 - 18.20 – Slowdown and speeding-up of the motion. Doublings and pauses.

18.30 - 19.50 – Variations with rhythm. Observation the phrase of dance: in separate phrases. Rhetorical investigation of melody and its expression (articulation) while dancing.

27 May, Sunday:

13.00 - 14.20 – Male, female and pair technical skills. Developmental exercises and practical modes.

Daniela y Raimund

Our friends from Berlin have arrived!!! Luckily they came already yesterday and not today through this snow storm! Well, Daniela is happy about the pretty snow, because in Berlin they did not have any this year. So all is good.

DyR have a tango school Mala Junta in Berlin. They have several teachers, they teach several styles and they have a popular milonga on Wednesday and Sunday.

AND here in Finland they will teach on Tuesday 3.4. in Teerenpeli 19h-20h and Raimund will dj at the milonga. They will teach the advanced group at HelaTango. They are also available for private classes! Contact Maria at maria AT pasiymaria DOT net.

Welcome Sabine!

Tomorrow is a big day for our tango friend Sabine: she will see the beauty of our city Tampere and will be embraced by our lovely world famous tango scene! Sabine comes from Erfurt, Germany, where she teaches and runs a tango association. Her big thing is the yearly TangoLehrerTreffen, a weekend workshop for tango teachers, where teachers who teach locally or internationally can meet and learn from each other. It happened just this last weekend; we want to hear the news!

On Tuesday night Sabine will teach at Teerenpeli at 19h and she will also dj at the milonga!

During the week she will participate in our private classes as an extra teacher!

On Saturday PyM and Sabine will teach in Kuopio: technique for hombres, mujeres and parejas!

And for Sunday night we head for the milonga Piritta in Helsinki!

What a week! Join the fun! Make her feel welcome!

Inspiration and some practical things

What a great and inspiring weekend we had in Helsinki at the Tango Festival Frostbite! Just a quick note on things that inspired me, and gave me lots if things to work on in my social dance and teaching.

1) Dancing tango slowly, and phrasing the dance. An old idea, of course, been thinking about this for years, but expressing it in the dancing maybe less. In teaching we have been working a lot with the rhythm these last years, and it has worked very well with the popularity of old rhythmical tango music. The rhythmical dancing that we see now in the milongas is a big change compared to what social dancing was maybe 5-10 years ago, when you really could not see the connection between the music and the dance. But nowadays I think it is quite easy to get new dancers to hear the basic rhythm in the tango music and play with that. So maybe we and the community in Finland are ready to move on to the next level in musical dancing! Thank you Sebastian Arce for reminding us!

2) Leader facing outside as a default mode in social dancing. I noticed that in the classes most teachers at the festival did their sequences so that the leader started facing the outside of the dance floor, so that the open side of the embrace pointed towards the line of the dance, and not the leader facing the line of the dance. Then the couple might turn and face other directions, but return again to this default mode. This enables both dancers to take a larger variety of steps: for example a small back step for the leader towards the center, which would be like a normal side step when facing the line of the dance, and the follower has maybe less walking backward to do. We tried this at the Monday class at Spiral, and it seemed to work fine with the experienced dancers at least. I think it created more variety in the dance, and the line of dance really stayed calm and the circle big. I have not tried this yet as a leader (Maria), but I think we'll experiment this!

3) My new love: MILONGA!!!!!

Frost flowers

Thank you Frostbite Team and all the festival participants for this amazing weekend!!! All the tango moments we shared were made possible by your talent, presence and hard work!

There was space for great joy and sorrow, happiness and hysteria... moments of being very very very tired, and moments of having too much energy when you are not supposed to have any...

Kaija was with us in our hearts. Looking forward to next year's festival! Let's keep on dancing!!!