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Greg -> RE: What Dvds to buy for dance?? (Mar. 2 2006 22:42:08)
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Iarone,
I had (and have!) the same problem. I started playing for a flamenco dance teacher in London a few months ago, having studied flamenco guitar for about 5 years, but only for solo guitar. I went straight into stuff like alegrias with advanced dancers, and found myself able to do parts, e.g. escobillas and silencios, but stumped on other stuff, like simply what to do with chord sequences. Also for most palos you have to follow the dancers, rather than them follow you, so you have to learn a lot about how the dancers work and get your own playing into strict compas.
What I have done for the past few months is only attend the beginners classes, and have concentrated on keeping compas and not trying anything clever. That way I learn with the dancers and it's not such a problem if I muck up. When learning basic steps, I even join in with the class, not necessarily because I expect to become a good dancer (the guitar bit is enough!), but by enacting the steps and practising the counting it helps me understand how to accompany them. Also you have to learn the choreography (which can vary according to the particular dancer). At the moment I'm only doing Tientos which is all sumptuous seductive stuff with a speeding up at the end to a Tangos finish with lots of zapateado. Also doing some soleares.
Like you I hanker for something that breaks down the dance and explains the guitarring, a nice Lady Bird book for flamenco guitarrists who are not necessarily beginners in flamenco but certainly are to the dance. All the coplas can come later, but what I want is an understanding of how the dance works and how the guitar player accompanies, in a format that says "play basic compas here for n number of 12-beat, 8-beat sequences or whatever, using these chords" and things like "at this point the dancers do a llamada and you stop playing and listen to them stamp out the compas for the next phase of the dance, the next phase being..." and so on.
I bought an instructional DVD recently - "Learn to play Flamenco Guitar" by Aaron Gilmartin. In the past couple of weeks I have watched the Tangos lesson, and that was really good. He broke down the whole lesson and explained all steps of the playing, including the rasgueo techniques. I'm advanced enough to be able to play the rasgueos he demonstrated, but he explains very well how to fit it all together within the compas, and vary it to create interest, tension, and different moods. This is the sort of stuff I look for to build on, before going into interesting coplas (I can do a lot of those anyway, but what good if I can't fit them to the dance). Anyway, I held back on the other 3 lessons on the DVD, which are Alegrias, Soleares and Tangos, until tonight when I watched the Alegrias. Here I was disappointed, because he didn't really work through (or mention) the basic compas of Alegrias, which is really fundamental, and instead chose to focus on the Alegrias intro which to my estimation was too complicated for a beginner's piece, using more complex and varying use of beat and off-beat, and not helping me wanting simply to accompany dancers! Then he jumped past explanation of the Alegrias rhythm part again to go into the next copla. Even though the first lesson was maybe a bit too glib for a beginner, at least he explained some basic technique and the material of the lesson was manageable. By the second lesson it felt like he had lost patience, wanted to explain one or two things and then finish (maybe because he was told there was not enough space on the DVD?). I have yet to watch the second DVD - on Soleares and Bulerias, but hope it will be more helpful.
There is another series out there - Palo a Palo - that is supposed to break down different dances and explain them from a dance, singer and guitarrist perspective. I haven't bought it, but I am tempted.
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