Gustavo & Giselle Tango Seminar

Visit Tango Buenos Aires

Gustavo Navera & Giselle Anne tango seminar
in Buenos Aires, August 2007

I participated in the General Program Seminar given by Gustavo Naviera and Giselle Anne. The place for the seminar was Centro Región Leonesa at Humberto I, a nice locality for practicing tango dancing.

These are some personal reflections on the seminar, its contents and  pedagogy. First of all I must admit I am a great fan of this teacher couple, both as teachers and performers of exhibitions. Ever since I met them the first time in Madrid 1999, they have been my favourites in tango.

So what did we learn in the seminar?

Well, you can categorize the contents into two main groups:

 1)    A review of the most important problems of the tango dance, and its study through their specific principles. Examples of elements studied: Leading and following, the embrace, the use of the space and the positions, the musical adjustment, the turns.

2)    Study of specific choreographic ideas most frequently used. Examples of ideas: The boleos, the sacadas, the ganchos, the capturas, barridas and pasadas, the volcadas and the colgadas. Take for example the idea ”sacada”, the general technique of the “sacadas” was explained in order to understand the achievement of  a correct sacada in any of its variations.

The pedagogic of the seminar can be described shortly in this way. The seminar was built up of a detailed analysis of the technique. The teacher couple worked structurally in a certain order: First a movement or an idea of a movement was presented. Then the participators of the seminar had to try this movement to find out the variations and finding eventual difficulties. Then the movement was studied thoroughly and broken down into its small pieces. It can best be described as an academic way of analysis, where all details were scrutinized. Finally there was made a synthesis of all the components of a movement to bring up a comprehensive picture of it, and all pieces were brought into an order. Time was then appointed to practice and to get instructive criticism and corrections to be able to better perform a movement.

Furthermore, Gustavo and Giselle gave the participators of the seminar some small tasks to solve. From a general description of a movement, like mentioning the contents of a movement; for example a forward/backward step, receiving/arriving foot and the roles of the dancers, each couple of dancers had to “construct” a step that fulfilled the description. This exercise was very rewarding, since it trained the participators how to interpret the dance and its combinations of movements.

The one week seminar was visited of 36 dancers, most of them dancers from outside Argentina. The seminar was ended by a beautiful ceremony where all the participating dancers got their nice diplomas.

Jörgen Lindh