Notable Quotes
  A Huge ThankYou
  The Other Room 05/12/2001
  You know you are a Tango Junkie
  The Tao of Tango

Tango!: The Dance, the Song, the Story
The tango smacks of elegance and sophistication, but that was not always the case. The tango was born in the lesser quarters of Buenos Aires in the late nineteenth century, first danced by prostitutes and pimps, and took years to win the "battle for social acceptability." This unbridled dance is chronicled in a book that is equally unrestrained, abounding in exciting illustrations and grounded in a lively text by four authorities. In the 1880s, as we learn here, an economic boom sent Argentina zooming to the top ranks of wealthy nations, and its capital was transformed into a beautiful metropolis, but the city also played host to thousands of European immigrants whose lives were not lived in beauty. In this less-than-respectable ambience sprouted a new and very sexy dance; the "connection between the tango and the brothel is inescapable." It took the tango's transfer across the Atlantic to Paris in the years immediately prior to World War I to render it not only respectable but chic. Back to Buenos Aires it came, and in the 1930s, not only the dance but the musical form associated with it enjoyed a golden age; the authors profile the famous singers and dancers who emerged during that flamboyant era. The tango lives on, for according to the authors, "There will never be a last tango." Brad Hooper 

Le Grand Tango : The Life and Music of...
As a composer, arranger, bandoneonist, and performer, Astor Piazzolla's specialty was the music of Buenos Aires--the tango. Piazzolla, who died in 1992, was born in Argentina in 1921, spent his early years on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and returned to Argentina at age 16. Piazzolla brought to the tango influences as diverse as jazz, contemporary classicism, and Italian opera, out of which he distilled Nuevo tango (New tango). The authors chronicle his years working in New York and Europe, especially in Paris and Rome (his four grandparents were immigrants from Italy), his growth as a composer and bandoneonist, his two marriages, his relationship with his children, and his recording sessions with such artists as saxophonist Gerry Mulligan and vibraphonist Gary Burton. The authors base their book on 220 interviews with Piazzola's family, friends, and fellow musicians. With great care and fidelity, the authors define Piazzolla's place and relevance in the world of twentieth-century music. George Cohen

Tango: The Structure of the Dance
Mauricio Castro's book offers a new system to help the dancer creatively develop his/her tango using solidly established technical foundations. The instructions can be easily followed with the help of a series of two and three- dimensional diagrams especially designed by the author.
The method is explained in a clear, concise and efficient way and includes lessons for the beginner to the most advanced in tango dance theory.
This book revolutionizes all of the traditional concepts used until now in the teaching of this sensuous, passionate and complex dance form which aquires enthusiastic new followers daily, all around the world.
Tango and the Political Economy of...
What is tango? Dance, music, and lyrics of course, but also a philosophy, a strategy, a commodity, even a disease. This book explores the politics of tango, tracing tango's travels from the brothels of Buenos Aires to the cabarets of Paris and the shak dansu clubs of Tokyo. The author is an Argentinean political theorist and a dance professor at the University of California at Riverside. She uses her "tango tongue" to tell interwoven tales of sexuality, gender, race, class, and national identity. Along the way she unravels relations between machismo and colonialism, postmodernism and patriarchy, exoticism and commodification. In the end she arrives at a discourse on decolonization as intellectual "unlearning."

Tango : An Anxious Quest for Freedom
For the first time a literary work on tango dynamics attempts to dialogue about the technical and theoretical aspects of this dance, that is ¨porteña¨, and shows us to the world. Gloria and Rodolfo Dinzel have investigated for years in an endeavour to contain the driving ideas of tango, and have come up with this synthesis. If the reader happens to be a tango dancer, he or she will be able to corroborate and raise awareness as to the internal processes that take part during his dancing performances. If the reader is not a tango dancer, this book will help understand why it has been said that tango is the deepest dance in the history of human kind. It is far from the authors intention to teach any figures, sequences, or “choreographic” secrets through this book, but to fathom the depths of this wonderful dance, its history, and its expressive capacity, penetrating the anatomic attitudes and psychological postures of the individual dancer as well as of the couple, dealing in detail each topic in each different chapter. The authors disclose the techniques that, as Rodolfo Dinzel states, make the amateur and the professional dancer observant of posture, gesture, air, attitude, character... of the overall manner that constitute tango-dance as opposed to simply moving to the rhythm of tango. This new turn of the century sees tango widespread throughout the world; its figures and names, sequences and choreography are what we first and faster catch on. This is only tango’s form. But Argentineans and not-Argentineans alike know, as we step into the pleasure of this dance, how arduous to reach the appropriate manner is; as we also know that only through manner can we dance tango and inspiringly transmit its essence, each time the music plays and two dancers embrace into a tango couple. Gloria and Rodolfo Dinzel travelled all the world around dancing tango as members of the company “Tango Argentino”, putting up performances as dancers and choreographers, one of such made Mikhail Baryshnikov say that tango “is a dance of indescribable beauty, with the finesse of ballet and the fire of flamenco.” Tango, an anxious quest for freedom, first published Argentina in 1994, was translated to German and published in 1999. Gloria and Rodolfo Dinzel are also authors of The Dinzel System of Choreographic Notation, a work that covers over 3,600 tango figures, and they are presently devoted to teaching and to the study of improvisation, mechanics technique, and a theory to practice, all of these issues that await publication soon.