Focused Saturday practice sessions at the Odd Fellows Lodge

Juan Bruno

(4 — 5 PM, donation optional)

Juan Bruno (c. 1924 — 2004) was a truly extraordinary dancer who seems to be unknown to almost everyone nowadays, perhaps partly because there ia only one good videos of him on YouTube. However, there is an extensive instructional video in Daniel Trenner’s Tango Archive.

To me, there are two amazing aspects to his dancing:

  • The sequences. He preferred to dance orillero style, and had a variety of steps and sequences that is to me quite amazing. The style is quite alien to today’s normal tango, but I find it considerably more interesting.

  • The timing of his steps. I believe it is a commonplace that the old masters do not appear to be dancing on the beat. Nowhere is this more apparent to me than in Juan Bruno’s dancing. To me it looks like he is carefully deciding when to take each step, and I find the result magical.

In this seminar, I propose to work through the 48 sequences in the instructional video, probably at the rate of 2 or 3 a week. I have 'transcribed' the steps so can provide some instruction and should be able to play excerpts from the video though a projector. I can work on the steps for each week so as to be able to present them, but have not mastered most of them, so this will be a collaborative project. I strongly suggest that anyone who is interested sign up for access to the tango archive and study the video between sessions. The archive is a very rich resource of both instructional videos and videos from milongas, performances, and classes in the 1990s and beyond.