Tango America

Nothing beats spending the whole day at home doing the things you like and wanted to do the whole week - playing computer games, editing photos, even going for a swim, and I am so glad I took today so slowly before I dive headfirst into the rush that is the week-before-Chinese-New-Year.

In Buenos Aires, I went to watch a tango show at this place called Tango Porteno (details of location and stuff can be found on the website itself) and I must say I enjoyed watching tango more than samba. I guess it's personal preference but tango seemed a lot more smooth and elegant.



Dinner was great actually - according to the menu I had:

1) San Telmo
Yo soy de San Telmo – Tango – 1943 – Arturo Galucci.
Traditional Argentine turnovers filled with knife-cut Angus beef, egg and green olives

2)Parque Patricios
Parque Patricios – Tango – 1940 – Oscar Arona.
Grilled Angus baby with a side of rustic potatoes and warm cherry tomatoes sautéed with olive oil and fresh
herbs.

and this for dessert!



3) Tango Porteño
Los cien barrios porteños – Vals – 1946 – Carlos A. Petit/ Rodolfo Sciammarella.
Assortment of traditional Porteño desserts…
Flan with caramel homemade craft, cheese and sweet trilogy, caramel ice cream on crispy cocoa and orange

The portions were a bit large for me especially with the free flow of red wine and carbonated water, but after slowly and patiently going through the yummy food I finished it all haha.

Besides dinner, there was also a live orchestra and singers once in a while in between the dances to allow the dancers to prepare for the next act.



(Whoops a lot of head movement while she was hitting the high note, so it ended up like this D:)

The dance itself was characterised by a lot of kicking and movement across the stage, and there was this different kind of intensity to it that the dancers sometimes didn't smile at all and looked like they were in an extreme state of focus, or that they were totally immersing themselves in the dance.















I just had to catch him while he was blinking haha oh well.

These were the photos that I managed to expose "properly" there and then, but there was this other group of underexposed photos that I came back with because there was so much less available light there. It was either a lot of motion blur (with longer exposure times) or underexposure, so I picked what I felt was the lesser evil and see what I could do with it at home.

In the end, I had to resort to boosting the exposure by quite a fair bit, and the high ISO also added a fair amount of grain to the photo. They remind me of those arthouse photos and I really like how it looks a bit like film, so I'm hoping you'd like it too!











The next dancer is the only one who performed without a partner for the entire duration of the show - she wore a coat on the right side and played two characters, which was incredibly hard! She was dancing with herself and did an impressive job of it, like groping herself with her right hand, pushing her right hand away with her left and pretending to be surprised...







The last two pictures feature Juan Carlos Copes with his daughter Johana. When I was watching the show, I only knew he was famous, but not this level of famous...

The weekend is coming to an end, till then!