People and Places - Tango | Текст песни

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• Tango

Amber: Hello! Today, we meet Christine Denniston who’s been to Argentina to learn
about one of the world’s most passionate dances, the Tango.
So find a partner and get your dancing shoes on because we’ll be having a
Tango lesson later in the programme! But first, we find out what makes the
Argentine Tango so special.
The dance began in the 19th century among the poor people in Buenos Aires,
and, as we’ll hear, it developed into the city’s ‘mass culture’ during the
1930s, ’40s and ’50s - it was ‘enormously popular’ at this time; it was the
entertainment of ‘the masses’. (The masses are the ordinary people who form
the largest group in a society.)
Christine calls this period ‘The Golden Age’. (This is a beautiful expression to
describe a period of time when a particular art was very successful. For
example, we can talk about ‘the golden age of cinema’.) We’ll listen a couple
of times to Christine describing the Argentine Tango. The first time, try to
catch the three things she says go together with ‘the dance’ to make Argentine
Tango so special.
Christine Dennison
We tend to think of Tango as just the dance, but in Argentina it’s much bigger than that. As
well as the dance, there’s the music (which is a very rich and complex tradition, really as
broad as Jazz), and also a lot of emphasis on the poetry of the lyrics and on the art of singing
Tango, and The Golden Age is the period when the music had gone through a transition where
it had become much more sophisticated and complex. At the same time, the dancing had become enormously popular, so it was really the mass culture of Buenos Aires specifically
(which is the largest city in Argentina), and singers within bands were singing for dancers as
an instrument within the orchestra rather than as soloists.
Amber: So Christine says Argentine Tango is not made up of just the dance, it’s also
the music, ‘the poetry of the lyrics’ – the beautiful and emotional words of the
songs – and ‘the art of singing’ – the skill of the singers.
Listen again and try to catch how the singers would sing when people were
Tango dancing in The Golden Age.
Christine Dennison
We tend to think of Tango as just the dance, but in Argentina it’s much bigger than that. As
well as the dance, there’s the music (which is a very rich and complex tradition, really as
broad as Jazz), and also a lot of emphasis on the poetry of the lyrics and on the art of singing
Tango, and The Golden Age is the period when the music had gone through a transition where
it had become much more sophisticated and complex. At the same time, the dancing had
become enormously popular, so it was really the mass culture of Buenos Aires specifically
(which is the largest city in Argentina), and singers within bands were singing for dancers as
an instrument within the orchestra rather than as soloists.
Amber: So the Tango dancers were the most important people in the room! Even the
singers would sing as if they were part of the band or the orchestra, rather than
as ‘soloists’. A soloist in a musical performance is someone who is given a
chance to perform on their own and so is given special attention.
Next, as promised, we have an Argentine Tango lesson! Christine will show us
how the dance should be done.
As you’ll hear, it’s a ‘couple dance’, a dance for two people. As you listen, try
to work out what position the two dancers should always be in. Here’s a tip –
she says it’s really like ‘a hug’, an embrace!
Christine Dennison and JenniMurray
The most important thing to remember about Tango is that it’s not a dance that happens on
the level of the feet, it’s a dance that happens on the level of the hearts...

Группа Learning English. Продолжение текста здесь:
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/learningenglish/people_and_places/pdfs/people_071211_tango.pdf