Samuel Domingo Donnarumma — TangoPiter.RU or how to love tango from a website
Samuel Domingo Donnarumma — TangoPiter.RU or how to love tango from a website
Samuel Domingo Donnarumma
El Observatorio del Tango
January, 2017
Alla Anokhina is a trolleybus driver and lives with her husband Taras Ledkov in «Piter» (Saint Petersburg, Russia). She likes her job but it has special characteristics: her day begins at 03:30 AM… This is not a serious difficulty to her; she blames sometimes about her situation because all this is in the way of her true passion – Tango. Once she wrote on her page VK: «People dance… and I’m in the Internet. People go to Tango Marathons, I drive my trolleybus.»
That’s the case Alla can’t live the life of most milongueras because she can’t escape from her obligations and responsibilities. She can’t stay a day or part of the week with Tango and that’s why she is losing many opportunities to socialize, listen, watch and dance the rhythm she loves. However she is not giving up.
With the help of Taras she developed and organized the page which resume the activities of the milongas of Saint Petersburg. A lot of work for our driver!!! After some time other enthusiastic milongueros joined their small team to help with this project. The idea of the site has appeared and was realized long before Alla became a driver, and now this resource is kind of link between her and World of Tango, which allows her to be aware of every event.
I’m very interested the case of Alla because thanks to efforts of the Tangopiter’s Team has been created of one of the most interesting magazine of these type I’ve ever knew . Now there’s no the same example. When I left Piter in 2009 there were only 6 milongas, but now they have nearly 20 milongas with the particular dynamic of every of them!
The site is named as Tangopiter.ru and is written in Russian because there is no intention yet to translate it to other languages. Despite of this I have complete and constantly updating news of events in Tango world. So let me describe this site.
The Central Page contains:
1) «Блог» – the Blog «Tango-people» — Here we have all the interviews, most of them to the stars, the Teachers of every part of the world and, of course, reportages from the Master Lessons.;
2) «Поиск партнёра» – Looking for a partner for dancing — this is a new way! I’ve never could imagine that persons which are interested in a companion for a dance could do it in public. Welcome to this idea!
This is the Central Page
3) «События» – Events:
«Танго—Календарь» – Tango-calendar shows the events which are gathered by today — tomorrow — week.
«Танго—Афиша» – the same events, but with pictures.
«Танго-Карта» – Tango-map. This is geographical location of every milonga which is regulary updated. To have a better idea how it works on the city map you can see 3 traffic lights: Red – school of tango, Green – milonga, Gray – practica.
This is the Tango-map
The map is multifunctional, interactive and has many information attached. By pressing each mark we immediately can get the full information about actual and future activities like time, address, telephone number etc. For those who need more data or the search of the same by other means, can do it going directly to the different options that are offered: I invite the reader to prove what I said above. It is a totally self-sustaining graphic. Although this graphic only gives us a complete idea of all the tango activities of the city, for those who need more information or the search of the same by other means, can do it going directly to the different options that are offered:
«Сегодня в Петербурге» – Daily activities.
4) «Новости» – The news:
«Семинары и мастер—классы» – Seminars and master-classes.
«Концерты и мероприятия» – Concerts and activities.
«Спецкурсы» – Master-lessons.
«Открытые уроки» – Open lessons.
«Милонги» – Milongas.
«Фестивали и марафоны» – Festivals and marathons.
«Все новости» – All the News.
As we can see, the information is multiple and invites the reader to enter and have a complete and exhaustive presentation of each activity, artist, group, day, time, location maps and plans. We could understand when, where, at what time and how the events are going on. This is a great help for the beginners, people who doesn’t know the city. Also it allows tango- enthusiasts make up their everyday schedules.
I remember when I lived in Moscow, I lost about 40% of the milongas because I didn’t know the place of the event. In order to have a guide I had to adapt the following strategy: the day before milonga I looked for the site and went there at morning to see exactly where it was located! Because, especially in winter, it was impossible for me to go there by myself, since it was not easy for a newcomer from Buenos Aires. In general terms I missed it or I arrived late!
This type of organization is suitable for, possibly a limit of … let’s say, 40 milongas, and I don’t know how many others could be included. This job is a hard job made with love, and it, without any doubts, demands people with heat hearths like Alla’s and her team.
In Buenos Aires, where there are a great variety of sites and also places that are permanently closing or opening. For unknown reasons, there are sites which doesn’t report all the milongas, or because they don’t have information about them, because they (the milongas) have to pay a fee or because the milonga itself does not give Information to some site and give to another. There are many sites where some milongas appear and others do not. To aggravate this chaos some web sites in English decides which are the places «you have to go…». They mention the milongas chosen as the best and with that they are ruled out all the others.
Samuel: Alla, how were the beginnings?
Alla: At the beginning of this Project only my husband and I began working. TangoPiter started in September, 2015. In March, 2016 people came and helped us with our work, and now they’re making news for our Blog. In October, 2016 more members joined TangoPiter Team. All members work for free several hours a week.
This idea was very good because we could say that the Schools understood our proposal and our job, recently the Tango Schools offered to pay us for our job with free tango lessons and it worked very well.
At this moment 3 people work in the «Blog» Section and 6 more people in the content of the page. Each of the 6 volunteers dedicates to the page in average 4 hours per week. I’m very grateful to the team for their dedication. I don’t know if I could handle it all by myself because my family and my job are on the first place.
Samuel: Don’t you need any private sponsor?
Alla: The Project doesn’t have any sponsor. I don’t want someone to come and pay us and tell us what we have to do and what we don’t. I don’t want this Project to represent any Tango School . I just only want this Project to be completely independent. That means to exist, to be alive.
Samuel: Have you ever thought of translating this site into another language, in this case English?
Alla: Yes. We always think about this point, but it would be a lot of effort for us at this time. It is possible that we could have a second version of the site in English. The existence of this site is based not only on the effort of us. The membership is updating from time to time. The information about current Tango Team is here: http://tangopiter.ru/tangopiter-team.
Last words of Alla: «The team that makes up this group is not fixed. Sometimes someone leaves it and a new member enters. I am very happy that many people participate in this project because it means that it’s alive!»
Thanks Alla and Team!
Our friend Alla works in the Official Site of the Group in FB.
Or Taras in VK: https://vk.com/tangopiterru
Alla (center) and Taras
Samuel Domingo Donnarumma — this is the person who has devoted himself to deep studying of history of a tango.
Samuel has begun to dance a tango more than 20 years ago. His father was the musician playing a tango in many famous orchestras. Samuel personally communicated with the legendary singers and tango-musicians: Héctor Mauré (the tango singer), Osvaldo Pacheco (the tango singer), Héctor De Rosas (the tango singer), Juan Carlos Godoy (the tango singer), Pérez Prechi (a bandoneonist in Osvaldo Fresedo’s orchestra), José Márquez (the pianist in Osvaldo Fresedo’s orchestra), Ernesto Franco (a bandoneonist in Juan D’Arienzo’s orchestra), Ernesto Baffa (a bandoneonist in Aníbal Troilos orchestra), Horacio Cabarcos (a bass in El Trío Lavallén).
Samuel Domingo Donnarumma
El Observatorio del Tango
January, 2017