The Deep Listening Project - Visualising Music
The Deep Listening Project by Tango UK is an aid for tango dancers to help facilitate a better understanding of and connection to music.
It has been produced during the 2020 period of enforced shutdown of social dancing and is the culmination of 20 years of tango dancing, 10 years experience of focussed teaching of tango musicality at Tango UK, Bramshaw. It has also been a source of personal distraction and enjoyment for me in the absence of social dancing..
Students of Argentine tango spend their formative years focussed on dance physicality and somatics. Students and teachers alike concentrate on the complex technique of moves and steps. In my experience, this is done at the cost of developing an understanding of the singular source of inspiration for our movement - the music.
When we dance, we are engaged in many levels of complex processes. The process of crafting our own movement; the process of listening to the music and the process of collaborating both previous complexities with our partner. The process of listening and therefore understanding and interpreting tango music is left in the shadows.
As a life-long musician who both dances and teaches Argentine tango, the Deep Listening Project is designed to help dancers work on the complexity of listening to the music. I want to help dancers make the music the central focus of their dance so that all their moves, all their collaboration with their partner is inspired and energised by the changing soundscape of the music.
As tango dancers, we can aspire to be artists who listen, interpret and express this beautiful music in movement. Our art is transient - we leave no permanent record of our art as we move through time and in space. And yet it is possible to connect so deeply with the music and with our partner that sometimes we can transcend ourselves beyond this earthly plane to experience a tango bliss. But in my experience, this was only possible when I was able to make the music the only leader in the room and I was dancing with a partner with the same musical focus.
I hope this encourages you to listen a little more deeply.
This video uses extracts from the 1982 recording of "Por Una Cabeza" by The Tango Project, (William, Schimmel, Michael Sahl and Stan Kurtis). No claim of ownership or performance rights are made, and the music is used an educational example for study purposes only.