Theme: Music

Colombia’s Broken Body: El Colegio del Cuerpo: The College of the Body

We Colombians are constantly asking ourselves what we can do for this torn and martyred country from the vantage point of our work activities. Anguished, intimidated and powerless, we see how the language of weapons and death has become entrenched in our society. Every day, more and more Colombians become resigned to the idea that only total warfare, dragging us down to the abyss, will allow us to find a solution. …

Read More

Dancehall Democracy: Social Space as Social Agency

“¿De dónde es usted?”, I asked the best Latin dancer I had ever followed around a dance floor. It was several summers ago in “centrally isolated,” as the locals say, Ithaca, New York, where a friendly gay club went Latin on Wednesday nights. Once a week we broke up the bucolic boredom that helps to make Cornell University so intellectually restless. “Sorry I don’t speak Spanish,” said my partner. “Where are you from, then?” I …

Read More

El Tango en el Aula: Mi experiencia en Rochester, New York

Cuando era adolescente, el tango no me llamaba mucho la atención. Me parecía ser un tipo de música excesivamente melodramático, y que además gustaba sólo a los “viejos”. Como sucede con tantos argentinos criados en el exterior, el tango fue entrando en mi vida por una puerta chica, a intervalos regulares, con cada viaje a Córdoba, pasando, cómo no, por Buenos Aires. Un poco en la calle, otro poco por TV, y el resto …

Read More

How Sweet as Long as It Lasted: Contributions to a Critique of Tango

English + Español
Tango is once again occupying a fundamental place in the world’s cultural offerings. The interest goes back a couple of decades when Astor Piazolla’s music drew interpreters of classical music and jazz. In Argentina, tango now has a privileged position in the tourist market, where from time to time it goes hand in hand with such attractions as the bife de chorizo, the star of Argentine barbecue. This outburst …

Read More

All Tangled Up in Tango

Entanglements are hard to explain. My life probably started with a tango, playing along in the radio close to my mother and my first screaming efforts to breathe. Radio was so important in people’s lives then, and tango meant a lot to my father. He sang it in the shower, whistled it on his way to work and made the house stand still in the night when he would sit at the piano and deliver a performance worthy of a place on the stage of …

Read More
Subscribe
to the
Newsletter