Is tango macho? Dark sides in Argentine tangos. Is dancing the opposite of sex ? TangoDance: One body, two people. Dance, games people play. Man, woman, men, women, femme, homme, gender. Tangoing Argentijnse Tangosite evita - E Vita. Machos, Macha, Milonguero, Tanguero, Milonguera, danse, dans, danser, art.

Is tango macho ?

Tango is a very complicated dance, it tries to have two embracing bodies accomplish figures.
In tango, two minds, not one, achieve fluid movement, so that each leg and each hand fits into what the other legs and hands are doing in order for the two to function as a single body. One body, two people and moreover, the opposite sex...

So, two beings as different as a man and a woman, who often have never before met, embrace one another and dance to the rhythm of the music, creating a beautiful dance.
To be able to dance tangos the dancers must complement one another, they must cooperate with one another. If they compete, if they fail to collaborate, it is impossible for them to dance, or at least to dance well.
Thus, tango begins with an agreement between the dancers that the man will lead. The two dancers coordinate and cooperate with each other without losing their difference. Each dancer achieves something different. And therein lies each one's position in the dance. What defines each position is its technique and the task it perfoms, which are both necessary for the dance to happen.

However, tango is a game like chess, in which each piece moves according to standardized rules. A rook, for example, moves at right angles, while a bishop moves diagonally. But both pieces, and all the others, are necessary for the game to be played... and leading is not the same as winning !

Similarly, to dance tango argentino and to enjoy doing so, each dancer has to try to follow the rules pertaining to his or her position in the dance. Thus, I am privileging the structure of the dance in this analysis, and not the passions and emotions that circulate in that structure. I believe that the passions and emotions are a consequence, an effect of the game.

Playing the game well is a passion. Eric Berne, speaking of stimulus-hunger, says that the most favoured forms of stimuli are those provided by physical intimacy, ...and what is a close embrace ? No, we only do it for the technique !

So, a good female milonga dancer knows how to let herself be led. She accepts the invitation of a tanguero who dances well and she enjoys dancing with him. Thanks to his sensitivity, his presence, and his confidence, she can display her own style. If a woman lets a man express himself, and the man lets the woman express herself, then they will both find in tango an opportunity to be creative.

The dark side coexists in the lightest pieces

Nearly all live performances today desperately try to be replicas (of fine recordings). And a fine recording by the current standard means something that is relatively sympathetic, but flawless, smooth, and straightforward, that does not breach any confidences, has no real conceits, no dark sides, vulgarities, or metaphors -- everything that makes art interesting. It isn't really fun to go to a performance where you are assured that it is going to be flawless. Perfection, as Schoenberg pointed out, is not a category of making music. Performances have to have some danger. Baudelaire: "In everything beautiful there is something strange." Performances must have things that are surprising and dark.

Ludwig Van Beethoven's driving music and its association with dark fate has fascinated listeners for centuries. In Beethoven's music, things are set up and then when you're not looking, here comes a left hook. He trips you with his judo technique. It may be conspicuous or it may be very covert, but the surprises are the tissue of the music, and without them the music would be stationary, ordinary. Surprises are built into the texture, but in such a way that they seem absolutely necessary. Beethoven acknowledged his own dark side. "Next to love, the best things in life are surprises", he said. While Beethoven's earlier pieces being light entertainment are no more challenging then the pop music of today for its audiences. By the time we get to the five movements of "String Quartet No 15 in A minor, Op.132 ", the increased complexity of the music becomes obvious. We've travelled the equivalent distance of moving from cheap sentimentality to the real emotion of Sylvia Plath's intensity.

Plato said, "There are no serious things without laughable things." Dark and funny, mischievous and burlesque -- all of those qualities are there in Beethoven. It's the vast range and variety of characters in the music that makes him another Shakespeare. The first movement of Op. 90 is immensely dark. The "Appassionata" is tormented, grieving, and desolate. In Liszt, love and diabolism make a natural dichotomy. While Don Juan is an erotic force, Liszt seizes on his innate diabolism as a source of inspiration, recalling that it is for blasphemy that Don Juan is dragged to Hell by the ghost of the man he slew in a duel of honor and outrage. There are examples all over -- and in the tissue and grain of the music, even the happy music. But then, Mozart has a very dark side, too. And the dark side coexists in the lightest pieces.

Daddy
by: Sylvia Plath

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time--
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two--
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

eros_thanatos, ,oblivion,adios, amor, regreso,tristeza, separacion

Criticizing "Daddy" - Sylvia Plath Poems

The title of "Daddy" means relationship between father and girl. Plath wrote this poem when she divorced her husband, so there are three people - Plath, her father and her husband in this poem. For example, in the ninth stanza 'If I've killed one man, I've killed two' means her father and her husband. This poem may mean relationship between woman and man or the weak and the strong.
In the second stanza 'Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time-', her father forsook her by his death. In this poem 'God, Luftwaffe, black man and devil' mean her father. He was very big and very strong in her mind. She could not escape FROM him. She hated him, but she loved him. In the seventh stanza 'At twenty I tried to die and get back, back, back to you' SHOW me it. She was very shocked by his death. It is may be that she wrote this poem to get over her sorrow and anger or release FROM him.
A conclusion, she tried to kill her father and her husband to release FROM strong them in her mind. But in sixth stanza 'Every woman adores a Fascist' mean that she loves them. I think she wants to be strong like them. In final stanza 'I'm through'means two things. One meaning is finishing revenge against her father's death. Another meaning is death of Plath. She needed her death to release FROM them.
Women...

Reference books:
Noriko Nagata, "Derangement in a mirror"
Chouzou Tokunaga, "Sylvia Plath Poems"

Sylvia Plath once said about this poem:

The speaker in this poem is a daughter who has an Electra complex. Her father died while she believed him as the God. Her circumstances are complicated. This is because her father is a member of Nazi and surely her mother has Jewish blood in her vein.
I don’t know how I can receive her explanation, but I think it is all right to take her biographic fact in consideration to some extent in interpreting this poem.
The poem begins with a series of metaphors about Plath’s father. They are, for example, shoe -statue - foot -root - , which means her love to him like the God, but gradually the metaphors comes to mean her hate to him like the Satan. They are, for example, a brute,a devil. Near the end, a new metaphor comes out. It is about her husband, Ted Hughes, for instance vampire.

What on earth does this mean?

Sylvia - The Movie
Director: Christine Jeffs
Cast: Gwyneth Paltrow, Daniel Craig, Jared Harris, Blythe Danner, Amira Casar, Lucy Davenport, Michael Gambon, Eliza Wade

"Dying is an art," are the first words uttered in Christine Jeffs’ biopic Sylvia, but it’s tough to say that the film agrees. At least to the degree that Jeffs finds art in Sylvia Plath’s death, she finds tragedy and waste. The film strikes an even-handed tone that, while still respecting the legend that Plath (Gwyneth Paltrow) would posthumously become, refuses to glorify the author’s suffering. After all, to glorify her as a Nietschen artist that needed to suffer to create, it would need to let us get closer to than it ever does. Everything in this sometimes inscrutable movie resists pigeonholing. Even the opening credits, which place white titles a classy font on a black background, slowly and subtly pull away from us as we read them. When the camera finally moves back toward the action, and slowly zooms closer to Sylvia, we see her reading a poem by her future husband, Ted Hughes (Daniel Craig). This makes sense, since for the first half of Sylvia, at least, it’s Hughes observation of his wife that helps us get closer to her.
Hughes and Plath share a tumultuous romance that begins predictably, if in a manner more highbrow than usual. During their brief courtship, these literary minds prattle off poetry at a rapid pace and voraciously quote Chaucer and Romeo and Juliet (the death scene, of course) at one another. It’s not long, however, before cracks in their relationship begin to show. Sylvia becomes increasingly suspicious of her womanising husband. More troubling still, is Ted’s rising awareness of his wife’s mental instability.
The film details the dynamics of both their attraction to and repulsion from one another with an unusual degree of sensitivity. Never does it feel like Plath’s condition is being exploited to create headier drama. There’s a well-staged scene where Plath’s mother (played by Paltrow’s real life mother Blythe Danner) tells Hughes to "Be good to her, always". That statement sounds like nothing less than a warning, yet the film thankfully doesn’t posit that Hughes’ poor treatment of his wife is the main catalyst in her self-destruction.

symboliek_magie_paardansen_mystiek_samenspel

Still much is unknown about the Universe. Dark matter and dark energy compose about 95% of it, shining stars and planets are only a little part of the the atmosphere. The relationship between dark and luminous is a clustering one. Clustering of luminous matters like galaxies, corresponds to dark matter clustering. Clothing in tango is mostly black, combined with serious faces and the sad organ-like sound of the bandoneon does make the atmosphere mystic. Black evokes dignity, power and even threat. Black is the symbol of authority and its severity is often used in a persuasion strategy to portray a seriousness. Dark clothing has the practical benefit that transpiration marks are less visible. The darkness of the black dressed tanguero illuminates the woman's movements. It shines even more if she is in red. As the blood of every living thing is red, it's symbolism is bounded to it.