TRANSCRIPT ~ EPISODE 32

EPISODE 32: Moving memories, with Jake Spatz

Producer/Host: Liz Sabatiuk | Music: "Milonguero Viejo," written by Carlos Di Sarli and arranged and recorded by Pablo Estigarribia; excerpts of “Tinta Roja” - by Sebastián Piana with lyrics by Cátulo Castillo, arranged and recorded by La Chicana - and “Niebla del Riachuelo” by Juan Carlos Cobián with lyrics by Enrique Cadícamo, arranged and recorded by Orquesta Típica Misteriosa Buenos Aires | Image Credit: Yulia Kriskovets (Jake is pictured with his partner, Dasha)

JAKE:
There are ways to speak about these creative activities that seem very obscure because they have to be very obscure, because we, we don't actually understand them, and to me that's that's just being honest about it. I don't want to say we've got it all figured out, you know, this helps your enzymes digest the banana. Like, I don't believe any of that stuff about these mental activities, these, these, uh, creative activities. And I don't know if it's healthy for you. Maybe it's unhealthy what we're doing and we're doing it anyway. That could very much be the truth. I wouldn't stop. [LAUGHING] I've continued plenty of unhealthy things before, but, you know, I think that we, we have to stop finding secondary reasons to do these things. These are primary things in life. Um, for me anyway, it's- I don't need tango to be good for my body. I don't need tango to be good for my inter-social skills. I don't need tango to be good for something else. I need tango to be good for tango.

[MUSIC]

LIZ ID INTRO:
I'm Liz Sabatiuk and this is Humans of Tango, where we explore what tango has to teach through the experiences of those who dance it.

LIZ SCRIPT:
When I moved to Washington, DC, after starting my tango journey in Montevideo, Uruguay, Jake Spatz was the tango human who first connected me with the DC tango community. Jake was already establishing himself as a teacher, organizer, and performer, while I was mourning the loss of my very first tango community back in Montevideo. Jake invited me to practice with him and assist his classes, a collaboration we sustained for about six years. I remember learning a lot in those years, but I didn't remember learning the quirky story of how Jake started dancing in Brooklyn, New York.

JAKE:
I was doing interviews for this biography and I had an interview one afternoon that finished a little earlier than I'd planned, so I went to my friend's bar that was in my neighborhood a few blocks away. You know, I just sat down and had a beer, kind of went over my notes, and then eventually I look up, you know, like, some time had gone by. I asked the bartender, I go "hey, why aren't any of my friends here? Like, "where's everybody today?" And she goes, "oh, you silly, it's Wednesday. Tonight's tango night. None of your friends are coming." And I go "oh man I'm here on the wrong night." And she goes "and here's the beer you just ordered." And I'm like "aw man, now I'm stuck here. I can't even get up and leave." [LAUGHING]

LIZ: Stuck with the tango.

JAKE: Yeah, and it was this tiny little bar and so the little lesson goes on behind me. It's just a couple people. Uh, so then after an hour, like, the quote-unquote milonga starts. The story really begins in this moment. I'm sitting there at the bar, still going over my notes, and there's, you know, these two girls standing at the bar and they've each got a drink and they're kind of, like, nursing their drinks but not really there for that. They're waiting to dance with the teacher, who's dancing with somebody else. And that's the only people there to dance. And, you know, the rest of this small bar is virtually empty, because again it's tango night. No one's there.

I feel bad for these two women who are standing there waiting and so I, I look up- and my friend ran the bar - I, I knew everybody there pretty well - I said "somebody teach me how to dance a little bit so I can help out," right? And so as I say that, this guy walks in the door and my friend Jed, who, it was her bar, she goes "okay, Jake, this guy" - I think his name was Derek - she goes "Derek here is learning...how to follow so he'll teach you how to lead." I said "great" - I hop up to the stool walk over and this guy very generously works with me for, like, almost an hour. To give context here, I have, at this point in my life, an aversion to dance. Um, I hated dancing. I'd been thrown into it at different times in my life and always had a bad time, and so I would do things like this. Um, I mean I was doing this to help out if I could, but usually I would be in situations with dancing and I would dance out of spite, right, because I knew I was gonna dislike it, I always disliked it, but it was just, you know, I had not really done tango and so this was basically like a way to cross it off the list and say "yeah, this one also I don't like."

Um, anyway, so this guy's working with me and he's telling me to step to the side, and I step to the side. He goes "no, no, no, really to the side" and I go "oh, like I'm on a chess board?" He goes "yeah." I say, "like, side, like, through my ear? He goes "yeah." And so I did this step straight to the side, like, razor sharp to the side, and, and in that moment I was like "oh my God, that felt really good." I danced that night from, you know, this- the, the whole dance started around nine, and so this guy worked with me for about an hour. So I danced that night from 10 until 2 in the morning - um, four hours basically straight.

LIZ: Wow.

JAKE: So I sat down at two o'clock and there's my beer that I never finished. So I took a sip, and I was like "okay, I guess I'm doing tango now." [LAUGHING]

A friend of mine from that bar was a guy named Albert Garcon, who's a- he was a piano player. And so, you know, word gets around in a small bar and I think a couple weeks later I'm there and he goes "Jake, I heard that you started dancing tango." And I said "yeah, I think so." And he goes, "that's great! I'm gonna come in and I'm gonna play the piano over there for you guys when you're dancing." I'm like, "cool" - I don't know what's going on.

LIZ: Oh my god, you had live music from your first month?

JAKE: Yeah, well it turns out he grew up with tango music because his grandfather was friends with, uh, Gardel and one of Gardel's guitarists-

[LIZ ASIDE] as in the legendary tango singer, Carlos Gardel

JAKE: -so he had it, like, in his blood. And he came in the first time with a stack of sheet music, like, you know, loose, and he stuck it on the piano and we used to just buy bottles of beer and put the bottles on the piano and he would play like 45-minute sets.

And so my early tango, um, years this- like, my first two years was basically dancing in this tiny little bar where we could fit - if there were the right three couples, we could fit three couples on the floor because we could kind of, like, fold around each other. So that's how I started, was in a really tiny space with no rules and somebody playing the piano that was sometimes in tune.

LIZ: Wow.

JAKE: Thing is that that entire place- I went back to it maybe 10 years ago, maybe a little more, uh, with Dasha. We were visiting New York for some special event and we were staying in Brooklyn.

[LIZ ASIDE] "Dasha" refers to Dasha Khripkova, Jake's partner in life and tango, who you'll hear more about later.

JAKE: And so we're driving home and I said "oh, you know what, I know these roads. Like, why don't we take a detour? Let's go have a drink at this place." And so we went to the old bar that- back then when I was dancing there and I used to run, uh, poetry readings there too, it was called Artland Bar and I knew my friend had sold it, like, years before we we went there. And so we went in there and now it was like a whiskey bar or something. It was, like, completely remodeled. And we're sitting there at the at the corner of the bar and Dasha is like "why are you looking at the room so much?" I'm like "because this is where I started dancing and I- it's even smaller than I remember." I was trying to actually see, like, where the walls were to see if anything had, like, moved or if the bar had been put further out in the room. And nothing had really changed that much. It's just it was really small. So yeah, it was quite, uh, surprising.

The thing is I looked up that whole area several years ago now on Google Maps or something. The whole street is gone. The building's gone. Everything around it is gone. The whole block was, like, torn down and rebuilt. The neighborhood has some weird name now that it didn't ever have. It was Williamsburg before, it was just the crappy part. And, um, yeah, it's- the whole thing is gone. So it's like, that happens in some of the songs, you know? Uh, where's my old neighborhood? It's like, yeah, I've lived that.

LIZ: Can you name, like, a song that really resonates with that experience that comes to mind?

[MUSIC ("Tinta Roja") BEGINS SOFTLY]
Paredón,
tinta roja en el gris del ayer…
Tu emoción de ladrillo feliz
sobre mi callejón
con un borrón
pintó la esquina…
Y al botón
que en el ancho de la noche
puso el filo de la ronda
como un broche…
Y aquel buzón carmín,
y aquel fondín
donde lloraba el tano
su rubio amor lejano
que mojaba con bon vin.

JAKE: Yeah, the probably classic one is, like, "Tinta Roja." Um it starts off very, you know, impressionistically. Basically anything that's red is, like, in the lyrics. And the, the red I think he has in mind is this kind of, like, maroon color. Like, it's actually the ink that I use because it was the ink that was sold in the pharmacies back then that a lot of people used for journaling. This guy- it's basically sepia, is what we call it now, right? And it's the color of these old mail boxes that were there and, you know, the color of the brick wall and stuff like that. And so this color is, like, all over the because why is it it's like the whole verse is sepia toned basically. Um, and then it hits the chorus and the chorus is basically, where's my old neighborhood? You know, who took it away?

[MUSIC CONTINUES]
¿Dónde estará mi arrabal?
¿Quién se robó mi niñez?
¿En qué rincón, luna mía,
volcás como entonces
tu clara alegría?
Veredas que yo pisé,
malevos que ya no son,
bajo tu cielo de raso
trasnocha un pedazo
de mi corazón.

And that's a big part of, uh, the, you know, the experience of the early 20th century, with a lot of urbanization. You know, cities expanding and kind of going over the- what was suburbs or what was outskirts before and then the suburbs themselves developing into what we call them- you know, suburbs now. You know, they used to have dirt roads, now they have, uh, subway stops and stuff like that. So that whole process is really something that I think is captured in the lyrics.

You know, we're almost so used to it now that it's hard to realize that that's a, that's a kind of unique thing in this era. It's not that things never happened before, but it's that around the time of the, you know, the big immigration waves into the americas, right, 1880 to 1920 is, like, kind of that big period that's also the period when a lot of people were moving from the countryside into the cities. And so there was a lot of development in the cities. There was a lot of change.

[MUSIC]

JAKE:
One thing that really bugs me about tango in a way nowadays is that with social media becoming such a presence - even if you're trying to avoid it like I am - most of the time-

LIZ: Yup.

JAKE: -you still have exposure to it. And when you have exposure to it, it's kind of easy to recognize the general tone of it, the general tenor of it. Which is that it's a lot of marketing, it's a lot of positivity, a lot of up, happy, come do- it's hype, right? To put it in one syllable. To me, the whole thing about tango as an activity and as an experience, as a, as a world, is that it was always not just a, you know, a small subculture but it was very much a counterculture. It was a way to not do the other things. And it's not that you're always making that statement when you do it, but it was part of it.

You know, especially in the, in the revival era - which has now gone on longer than the original golden age, I never tire of pointing out - it's very much been that. It's a, you know, a minority culture as it were right. So there's something about it that has that kind of edge. And, uh, to me that's something that I, I really embrace. Because, um, if I enjoyed mainstream culture, if I enjoyed all these, uh, other things that are out there to do, I wouldn't be doing tango. But the thing is I don't enjoy those things. And so I, when they come in and they, they kind of, you know, start to capture part of the tango world too-

LIZ: Mainstream culture in this case being Instagram, basically?

JAKE: It's, it's not so much that. It's the, it's the message of it, right? Because it's all "come," you know, "have a great time at this thing" and it's like "no, I'm doing tango!" [LAUGHS]

LIZ: Like the consumption- turning, turning- the commodification right? Like, social media forces you to commodify tango culture, basically?

JAKE: Yeah. Well it's not only social media and that's the thing that I was thinking about. When I started, uh, working as a teacher, as a, as an organizer - and I was helping out a lot of people. I basically worked with almost everybody in DC I think, at one point or another - tango had a different, um, it had a different feeling, a different atmosphere because it was smaller. And a lot of us at the same time made an effort to grow the community. And it grew because there were a lot of us doing it at the same time. And everyone kind of did it and you know had a, had a different, uh, contribution to the pot. But- and it was really beautiful to see it grow, but at the same time it started to become more of a kind of consumerism. You know, before the community grew, there was much more a sense of a kind of cooperative culture. At a certain point the tone shifted - and a lot of people noticed this, because I talked to a lot of people at the time about - it this is going back, you know, 15 years ago or so - and people started to to talk about how tango was, you know, we didn't have people that were dancers anymore; they were consumers. And there was an attitude of "I came and paid my ticket and I'm coming to do this and get this out of it and go home." And that was kind of a a jarring thing to see that that was the attitude and that was the prevailing attitude.

Uh, and I guess it's just part of, you know, community growth too. It's something that we all more or less rolled with, because you have to. After all, what you're inviting is people to come in. But they come in and they bring something in that we weren't expecting. So there was almost a, a different effort to kind of make sure that we could keep things authentic - at least what we thought was authentic.

You know, one of the things that appeals to me in tango that we've already discussed is this aspect of nostalgia because part of being dissatisfied with the culture at large is remembering that it wasn't that way before, which we've just been talking about in different ways. But that's a big part of the experience.

I think that in order to learn to dance tango - it's not even dancing. To- in order to learn to be a tango dancer is what I mean, you have to lose something in tango. You have to learn enough that you have something to forget and you have to forget it. And then when you remember it again, when it comes back to you as a memory, then you really have learned it. Everybody I know that has been dancing a while has quit a few times, come back a few times, right? Come and go... You have to have part of that process so that there's something buried in it for you, for you to come back to. And I think that that's what maybe other activities require too, but because it's actually part of what we're dancing to when the songs come on, it seems to be a little bit more present as part of the, the tango experience.

It's kind of like you cross the line into the dance floor - I used to say this at Eastern Market all the time 'cause there's that black border around the floor and I said you cross that line and you enter this world now. So the baggage from the other world doesn't come across that line. It's becoming the other, in a way. It's living on the flip side of the record. And, uh, I think to me all these things matter because that's actually what you're choosing to do as an activity. We're using music from before, customs from before. No matter, you know, how you do it, it's still something that doesn't fit into everyday life. Sometimes I think about being on the dance floor and you're in the embrace there and you're basically in a kind of temporary makeshift shelter from the rest of the world.

Maybe this is a recurring theme in, you know, what I'm talking about, right, is like us versus the world. But I feel like that is definitely part of, you know, the intimacy and the closeness of the embrace in tango is very much about that. It's finding something that's a, that's a little bit of home in the storm. So that chaos of the outer world, right, that's being shut out or is being momentarily, uh, controlled is also part of the dance.

For me this was also something that happened very early because I started dancing, like I said, in June, 2001, and a few months later there was September 11th, 2001. So the world, in- you know, I was in Brooklyn and- came crashing down, um, around us. And so, you know, to go and make sure everyone was okay, you know, if you could find everyone - to make sure, you know, see who's still alive - was a thing that you did at that time.

And for the months afterward it was really a feeling of like living in a bomb shelter in a way. And, you know, people would, would get together to see the news broadcasts to see what crazy things were going to happen with the political situation, things like that. You got together to dance after that and it was literally that feeling of your, you know, you're embracing together - it's a moment of of sanity almost, or a moment of safety, against a world that was that was truly unknown, that was truly chaotic. So for me that's something that stuck with me in tango as an experience and this kind of feeling that it's, in a way, a consolation or a kind of escape, but not in the fantasy way, right? And hype is selling you the fantasy. I think that tango is actually trying to allow you to find the reality.

There are all these images in the tango lyrics that are kind of harrowing in a way. Like, you know, there's this one song - I'm trying to remember exactly which one it is because I was there's two songs I was confused about. It's basically like the image of the harbor in the fog - I guess it's "Niebla del Riachuelo"-

[MUSIC ("Niebla del Riachuelo") BEGINS SOFTLY]
Turbio fondeadero donde van a recalar
barcos que en el muelle para siempre han de quedar…
Sombras que se alargan en la noche del dolor;
náufragos del mundo que han perdido el corazón…
Puentes y cordajes donde el viento viene a aullar,
barcos carboneros que jamás han de zarpar…

JAKE: that's describing, you know, the ships that are, like, that are basically retired, you know? The old hulks there and they're floating and they're, they're moored forever. They're not going to sail anymore. This image is kind of haunting because that's your harbor, right? That's your haven, um, is a graveyard.

[MUSIC CONTINUES]
Torvo cementerio de las naves que al morir,
sueñan sin embargo que hacia el mar han de partir…

¡Niebla del Riachuelo!…
Amarrado al recuerdo
yo sigo esperando…
¡Niebla del Riachuelo!…
De ese amor, para siempre,
me vas alejando…
Nunca más volvió,
nunca más la vi,
nunca más su voz nombró mi nombre junto a mí…
esa misma voz que dijo: "¡Adiós!".

JAKE: First of all it doesn't need to be anything more, right? It doesn't need to be an allegory. But it serves as an allegory too for the kind of, uh, the dreams and the- maybe the aspirations and things that haven't worked out. That's something that you can talk about in, in tango. There- that's what that melancholy allows you to admit and to authenticate in a way that you can't do in mainstream culture in the same way. You definitely can't do it on social media, right? Because you seem like you're crazy, or like you need therapy. But you don't always need therapy; sometimes all we need is honesty. What I'm saying is it's not necessarily an illness that needs treatment. Sometimes it's just very healthy to be able to to say that things didn't work. Um, in fact, I think the sickness is to need to always say that things are going well.

I had more ambitions, uh, as a dancer in the sense of as a performer in the past and I don't know if I was really cut out for it, but I learned to kind of refocus on things that I knew and I was seeing, getting feedback from the world that I was, I was cut out for. Which was like organizing and, more than running events in a business sense, it was more of, like, steering the ship in a community, right? One among, among many. Um, but doing that I think was something that I I learned to commit to more. And I had a lot of, I think, backup from Dasha to do that as well. When you recognize that somebody really believes in you and that somebody shares your vision, right - because you know commitment and love is not just like you're looking at each other; it's like you're, you're standing by each other and looking down the same road, and you're going to travel that road together. And, you know, traveling on one road, two people involves some, some collisions in the, you know, this part of the head. That's unavoidable, and like I said it's productive. That's course correction. And, you know, many of us anyway are at this stage of life now where we have young ones crawling around. And for us we look forward very much to bringing up Greta-

[LIZ ASIDE] that's Dasha and Jake's daughter

JAKE: -in the tango world and, and hopefully her taking to tango. You know, for me tango is is something that is very naturally a family activity, because I think of tango as an act- as a real family. That's its authenticity in a way. That's why it bothers me when things get too much about hype, or too much about consumerism. And I know everyone wants to succeed. Everyone- you do want to hype up some stuff because you want to share it. But I feel like sometimes the tone that's more of a warmth and a real invitation has to be predicated on everyone feeling like they belong to it rather than trying to sell somebody the ticket to go somewhere, or the ticket to, to, to have a certain status. When you belong you don't need the status.

And I think that's sometimes why to bring in one other element for a moment, 'cause it does matter, there is a snobbery and a clique-ishness in tango as in a lot of activities. But I think it, it's emergent in a way from the experience itself, because that is a way of belonging too. It's just a way of belonging that overgrows a little bit and it becomes something that shuts out other people so they don't belong, right? And I sometimes think that it, it really does, does come from a kind of insecurity. And I have seen some people melt their armor, that was snobbish, right, that was more forbidding, and actually become the one that's welcoming new people in, whereas before they used to be the one that was pushing people away. And I think that that transformation happens when that person feels secure enough - they feel like they belong enough in the tango - that they can actually let down their guard. They don't have to be, uh, top-shelf only, right? Because what does that mean at the end of the day, right? If you only dance with these people it means that your, your status is dependent on those people, not on you, right? That's what you're getting; it's not- when you turn it around, it becomes what you're giving. All of that disappears.

[MUSIC]

LIZ SCRIPT:
At the time of recording I haven't seen Jake and Dasha in person since before the COVID-19 pandemic first I moved with my family to spain then they moved to Philadelphia I asked Jake about that transition and what their tango lives are like these days.

JAKE:
I enjoy living here in Philadelphia more than I enjoyed living in DC, but I dearly miss the tango community that I helped to build and that Dasha really helped me to build. I mean when we started really working together, like, really as, as the hosts - plural - at Eastern Market-

[LIZ ASIDE] Eastern Market was the location and name of the popular DC milonga, founded by Bill Griffiths, where Jake started as house teacher and became the main organizer in 2013.

JAKE: -that was a big movement forward for us personally, because we were really working together on something and, and we were both really invested in making that work. You know, our lives rotated around, um, Thursday nights. So to not have that anymore - or rather, it's not only not having it, it's feeling that it was taken away. Because in some senses, you know, that's what the pandemic was for a lot of people. Uh, not just us, but for practically everybody, right? It felt like the big rug pull.

But I think for us moving here we, you know, we started to do tango kind of right away. You know, it's a much smaller community. I still feel kind of like we're in community-builder mode in a way. Um, although it's not the same thing anymore, because there's not 20 years of momentum behind tango as an enterprise. I know places specifically in in DC that I could, I could point to as examples, but I know plenty of places elsewhere too where there was an event there because there had been an event there for a long time.

LIZ: So the connections were made, the prices had been agreed to... Like, there was all of that history that that made things smoother.

JAKE: Yeah, it's not even that the terms were static; it's that the habit was there. The habit had, had built up a momentum. To the degree that, you know, you go out on a Saturday night and you want to stay out till one, two in the morning, like, one of the universals post-Covid is that everyone wants to go home earlier. And, uh, I'm an insomniac - I'm up until four in the morning anyway - and I want to go home earlier, you know? It's like, I know it's real if I'm the one going "I think it's too late" if it's midnight. You know, the thing is that the, the habit of being out dancing that late is just- the, you know, the, the, the shoreline washed away.

And also there was a sense when- you know, before we moved, uh, when, when things started to open up again, I remember talking to some, some friends of mine in DC, and I said, I don't know, you know, the thing is - this might not, this might not be right - but I feel like if we return and reopen everything just as it was, we fail, because we've already done it. We were forced to stop it and that's closure whether you like it or not. And to refuse to accept that and to just want to go back to me feels like, um, it's the ultimate way to like not accept the truth, you know? To not take the hit that was unavoidable. What could we do next was where I started to think about things. I made some big plans - they didn't pan out, but I started to think about things in different ways. I wanted to brainstorm and see if could I come up with anything that was different, anything that was better. And I'm still thinking that way.

I have a, you know, a whole class, uh, model or I guess learning model that I'm, I'm looking forward to rolling out, that's trying something I haven't done before. It's more of an open concept, like dojo style, uh, approach to things. Which is kind of what I've always wanted to do in a way with tango, is not have this structure that puts an expectation on all parties involved that maybe doesn't belong there. But maybe, you know, have people come in and know what drills to work on. They know what they need to do and you're there to guide them. And, and then there's a more organized part, and then it's back to more training. Rather than what I kind of pejoratively call "the babysitting model." By "babysitting model" I mean that- the sense that people show up and you do everything for them. Uh, I've talked about this with Andres actually, years ago. I remember talking about almost the same words from Mariana Galassi and, uh, with Cecilia Gonzalez.

[LIZ ASIDE] Andres Amarilla, Mariana Galassi, and Cecilia Gonzalez are Argentine tango teachers and performers who have collaborated with and influenced Jake over the years and who you can learn more about in the show notes.

JAKE: If you wanted tango, you had to figure out how to get it as a student was something that, that motivated you and made you, you know- it developed your eye, it developed your memory, it developed your ability to take apart and put back together what you were learning. And so when you went from teacher to teacher to teacher, you had to do that all the time. You also had to synthesize what you were doing. That's the word Mariana Galassi used that stuck with me to say, well, I learned this thing from that person and this thing from that person but they're both gonna have to converge in me. So you have to have that creative approach as a dancer and as any kind of artist.

There was something that came up two years ago. I don't remember if this was, like, a tango professional speaking in a way as though, like, they invented everything they know, or if this was a more casual statement of somebody saying like, "oh, you know, I figured this out." Um, but I just realized, you know, I don't, I don't want to think that way myself. I want to make sure I don't think that way myself. So I opened my notebook and I started writing just a list of all the people that I've, uh, learned from - all the influences I've had. That's what it was - somebody said "I don't have any influences" and I'm like "yeah, of course you don't."

LIZ: Wow [LAUGHS]

JAKE: Um, yeah. Like, what a, what a ridiculous thing to say. Um, to say you're not copying someone, okay, that's a virtue. To say you have no influences means, like, what planet do you live on, you know? So I, I wrote down a list of all that my influences, that's what it was. And I thought originally that it was gonna be, like, just the core list. And the more I wrote, the- I went- filled two pages, you know, in long hand, in single space, and I was really feeling good as I was doing all of that because it was, for me, about paying tribute - even in my notebook where no one else is gonna ever see it - to a lot of people. And I put down specific things, you know? I mean you're in there; we worked together for a long time. And I feel like any time that I have an experience where I really learn something with another person, to me that's very meaningful. Remembering the person is remembering the learning too.

I think that the phrases in the dance, right, the lines in the dance, the poetry of the dance, are a register of memory. It's, it's not only a thing you can learn to do and a recipe that you can follow, but it's also a recording of other people who've done it. And when I was writing those names down in my notebook an- you know with a little - framing it in a way of putting there what the experience really was or what I think it was - it was very similar to just to putting together dance figures, you know, one after another. It's like, yeah, this is a figure, this is a figure...

Post-Covid, one thing that I have done with Cecilia a few times is that we've included in- not only in our, in our classes, but sometimes, like, if we're performing together a moment here a moment there, tributes to dancers that have passed away that were meaningful to one of us or usually to both of us. And sometimes it's just little thing- little things we remember, but, you know, the, the dance has become for me a record, in a way that's not just metaphorical. I realized it's actually how we learn. It's how we remember things.

And I started using this in my classes this past semester at UPenn for the tango club. I would teach, like, a forward ocho and then I would construct a figure with a forward ocho and sometimes it would actually be kind of a- something I liked, that I wouldn't teach ordinarily. But I ended up with this whole collection of, like, you know, eight-count or 16-count figures that became a memory of what I taught that semester. And to me that is a thing for me in tango that's a little bit new. You know, it's a little bit more like composing. Uh, and it's not really related to performance. It's really just dancing, right? But dancing with a different awareness of how you're doing it and of, actually, that it is a way of collecting experience and kind of preserving experience.

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LIZ SCRIPT:
Here's to paying tribute and keeping it real and to making havens in the storm together.

Thank you, Jake. And thanks to Pablo Estigarribia who's recording of "Milonguero Viejo," composed by Carlos Di Sarli in tribute to Osvaldo Fresedo accompanies this episode. Thanks also to La Chicana for the recording of "Tinta Roja," by Sebastián Piana with lyrics by Cátulo Castillo, and to Orquesta Típica Misteriosa Buenos Aires for the recording of "Niebla del Riachuelo," by Juan Carlos Cobián with lyrics by Enrique Cadícamo.

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