Football, acting, tango – learning to think on your feet

Tango teacher Laurent de Chanterac’s Tale

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Some learning experiences are easy, others not. At times our efforts are rewarded, at others frustrated. Just how much hard work are we prepared to invest in order to succeed?

Here is the testimony from Laurent de Chanterac. He presents himself as a tango teacher of more than 20 years’ standing, while pointing out in the very next breath all other things he has also done along the way, insisting there is always the permanent possibility of a change yet to come. In this conversation, he looks back at his own learning path and the ways in which physical activity has fuelled his thinking and self-expression. His testimony reminds us that, in the course of a lifetime, while we can often find ourselves wondering which direction to take, sometimes all we need to do is repond to life’s discreet invitations to try the unexpected.

Scoring goals and managing marks

Laurent de Chanterac likes to talk about learning. But does he like like learning?

LDC – That depends on the person I have to deal with. As a kid, at the age of 3, my feet were always kicking a ball. My dad played football and I grew up surrounded by other players, so I naturally spent hours kicking a ball around. It was learning of a sort, but required absolutely no effort. That was just the way it was. I was knee-high to a grasshopper when life passed me a football, and I spent hour after hour practising on my own at putting the ball in the back of the net, trying to hit the posts, that sort of thing.

With a father and two uncles who play the game while also looking after youth teams, football is not really a choice for Laurent at all. Football chooses him. The names in the newspaper article in La Dépêche du Midi, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the US Brens football club based near Gaillac, SW France, are living proof of the de Chanterac family passion for the game over several generations.

LDC – With the arrival of football, for the first time, life led me to unexpected places.

Accepting this first discreet invitation to try something new, he finds his niche as an attacking player.

LDC – I was what you’d call creative. And defenders didn’t like that. I was never aggressive, but when I started getting knocks, I learnt to nutmeg – kick the ball between my opponent’s legs. I have to admit that it was pure provocation, but I had to find a way to fight back when defences started roughing things up.

He grows up in a family who certainly believe in education. His mother teaches Spanish, his father is an agricultural engineer who decides to go into farming full time, and his grandmother is a retired Literature teacher.

LDC – There was a foootball pitch 10 metres from my house. So after school, I’m out there on the pitch. I’m not a hardworking pupil. I’m the best footballer in the school so I have no problem with the way others see me. Good pupil, bad pupil ? It’s all the same to me. I get by on what I know.

But how can someone who never works always know enough to get by ?

LDC – Looking back, I’d say it was thanks to a process of assimilation. I’d go to class every day, obviously waiting for breaktime so I could play football ! You’d have to do a bit of classwork to get your marks, so I did a bit. But there was a rogue in me, and I was a bit of a cheat. To be honest, back then, I had a substitute rough workbook where I copied things from my lessons so I could use them during tests. And, somehow, I managed to never get caught.

His cheat sheets help him to get acceptable marks. That way, he maintains a pupil profile just above the required 10/20 average, without attracting any special attention, and while making sure nobody catches him cheating – because his mother also teaches Spanish in Gaillac at the same school.

A few inspiring teachers

LDC – In spite of all this, I did meet some inspiring teachers. When that happened, I didn’t cheat, I set to work. You see, it’s all about encounters. In fact, I respond according to what’s on offer. I say that because, when you’re at school, teachers often only ever want you to learn things by heart, to ingurgitate something for future restitution. I really can’t see the point of regurgitating stuff like that. For me, it’s a waste of time.

In among the rare examples of memorable encounters comes that of a History and Geography teacher.

LDC – When I was 11, I had a great History and Geography teacher ! Funny me saying that, because he would ask us to do lots of learning by heart. I remember him showing us a summary of World History in the form of a tree. Looking at it, I said to myself : OK, so prehistoric times are there… In 476, it’s the fall of the Roman Empire … I can still remember those things today. I worked in his class, never cheated, because it was all about understanding the world. I was interested, so I memorised.

Because, contrary to appearances, Laurent actually likes memorising.

LDC – I’m a diesel engine when it comes to memorisation. In fact, I read something over and over and memorise it by impregnation. As we’ll see shortly, I have also worked as an actor. In the acting profession, memorising is different again, because it requires giving non-fixedness to whatever you memorise to be able to say it later.

When trying to remember historical facts for restitution, impregnation works fine. But an actor, who takes on a text to be performed on stage, needs to add a certain flexibility to the memorisation process which Laurent calls non-fixedness.

LDC – By non-fixedness, I mean that, on stage, things are different every night. So you are going learn a text, but not with a definitive way of performing it and a definitive tone. A text for performance is made up of various sounds, various rhythms. Oralising such a text is a physical act, so there has to be room for mobility.

The actor’s freedom when performing the mastered elements of a text adds interest to effort in the learning process. In later life, Laurent says that he used this aspect of memorisation as he accompanied his adopted son who had to learn French on arrival from Columbia.

LDC – I taught him La Fontaine’s Fables – The Fox and the Crow, for example. I wanted him to understand that, to say the first two words in the French original, Maître Corbeau …, the way you verbalize each phoneme, each syllable of each word, can be modified depending on your intention. Your body needs to resonate with the texture of what you say, because that’s the channel you use to render the words in performance. This approach transforms learning into a corporeal process. So we used to say these fables out loud to each other while gathering nuts in the country, or shout them at each other, or say them like words in ordinary conversation. All these ways involved different intentions.

Returning to his own education, he remembers a moment when he himself perceived the intentions stated by his Maths teacher as he began his first year at High School in Albi.

LDC – It was hard to cheat in a Maths class ! So my results had stagnated somewhere between 5 and 7/20 all through middle school. But at high school I met up with a Maths teacher who was different right from the first class. He goes and writes something on the board, then turns round and asks us : What’s the difference between negative and positive infinity ? And the lesson begins. I am 15 or 16 years old and, for the first time in my life, I understand the difference between negative and positive infinity. The teacher writes an x with some numbers and explains that the x corresponds to a curve … and so on.

This teacher seems to have not only things to say, but also a way of saying them in a specific tone which engages the attention of Laurent, a young mathematician whose efforts have been frustrated until now. It’s an invitation he can’t turn down.

LDC – And I developed a passion for Maths ! I went from an average of 7 to 14/20. Because he had a way of talking, a way of making the abstract concrete.

He only just manages to graduate from High School with a Baccalaureate majoring in Literature and Maths. Is this choice a nod to his grandmother, the Literature techer ? Or proof of fidelity to the teacher who opened up negative and positive infinity ? His diploma in hand, Laurent enrols for a Psychology degree at the University of Toulouse.

Theatre and only theatre

LDC – There I am in Toulouse, and I enrol in Psychology because I don’t know what else to study. I go to the first lecture, then the second. I do a whole week of lectures, and then stop.

It only takes that long for him to decide that the lecture programme he’s supposed to attend in an amphitheatre, along with 100 or more co-students, is a meaningless activity. This gives him quite a bit of free time, and a casual invitation finds him going along with a friend who’s taking drama classes. And something happens. As usual, it is the human encounter with a teacher which is the trigger : Vinko Viskic, a teacher of Croatian origin, gives him a passion for theatre. And by the end of the year, attending drama classes has become his main activity. How can he tell his parents ? By telling them he’d prefer to enrol as a Philosophy student !

LDC – I’m financially dependant on my parents, so I don’t say anything on the subject of drama classes. I just tell them that I’m not at all happy on the Psychology course, that I think I’m going to switch to Philosophy. But then this switch leads to an encounter with an inspirational Philosophy tutor! I complete my second year in Philosophy, passing all the exams for the course with this amazing tutor, but not the others, because I only attend his classes.

When Laurent finally tells his parents the whole truth about his poor results at the end of the following year, he also announces a serious change of direction. He wants to act, to study theatre and, as he’s leaving the academic path they chose for him, he intends to finance it by getting a job and taking full responsibility for himself.

LDC – I sold newspapers … But, mostly, I worked for two years as a warehouseman. It was a real education. I packed boxes and prepared orders for Éditions Milan, the Toulouse-based publishers. I learnt a lot but, as always, in a way that was completely out of step. I knew – and that was a great advantage – that I was only doing the job to fund my training to become an actor. Meanwhile, my serious footballing days were over because I’d found myself with a nasty angle injury. I’d continued playing alongside my university stuff and drama classes.

This injury puts paid to any hopes of making the big time as a footballer, but playing the game has already become too serious for his liking. He prefers to keep soccer as a past-time, the playful game he still enjoys today.

He carries on working at the warehouse, refusing to accept the coveted long-term contract he’s offered in order to maintain the freedom of successive short-term contracts. His decision is made : his real job is acting.

LDC –  I learn my parts with the guys in my team as my foils. Some of them have done time in prison. That makes work an ideal place to test the rôle of the drug dealer in the opening scene of the play In the Solitude Of Cotton Fields by Bernard-Marie Koltès. For example, I would turn round, lean towards a colleague, stare him straight in the eye and say : If you’re here at this hour and in this place it’s because you want something you don’t have. I can supply you with this thing you want, because I have been here since long before you came and will remain long after you’ve gone … The rôle I was working on resonated perfectly with the environment in which I found myself. And I would act and try out my technique at every opportunity. It was a learning process, but the game of acting had become an integral part of my life. I see things differently now but, when you’re a young actor, life and theatre are one and the same thing.

This can lead to extreme situations.

LDC – We did go over the top. A friend and I were in a play with a scene where I had to hold a gun to his head. To work on the scene, we’d get in our cars and, when we were stopped at a red light, we did mock hold-ups. Another example ? Telling a girl you’ve just met, with all the seriousness in the world : I want to spend the rest of my life with you ! And it’s all acting. And it works. I mean, the other person actually believes you. Because the acting is totally sincere.

How do you get back to reality after moments like those ?

LDC – It’s all part of the experimentation of growing up and learning your trade as an actor. Sometimes you find yourself going off in directions you can’t control, so there comes a time when you have to stop and think. I realized that, for my mental health, I needed to set absolute limits between the stage and everyday life. What made me change was the onset of maturity and my encounters with various stage directors.

Initially, Laurent’s vision of acting comes from watching American movies. More specifically, from admiring actors trained in the tradition of the famous Actors Studio, where playing a character meant being able to connect with the character’s inner experiences. But not everybody is Brando, De Niro or Pacino, capable of searching within themselves for the rough edges which they will then be able to use on stage, as Laurent puts it, and then going back to their daily lives. He decides to go to Paris and follow a course at the Atelier Blanche Salant in order to try to define his own vision of what an actor can be.

Once he gets a foothold in the profession, while working with director Solange Oswald, Laurent learns to separate the two spaces in his life.

LDC – Paradoxically, it was when I was carrying out a research task given to us by Solange Oswald, who asked us to become the character we were going to play from the moment we woke up in the morning until the evening of the same day, that I got my first glimpse of the place where you leave a character outside yourself.

As time passes, he points out, an actor learns to play Romeo without falling in love with his partner. He finds he is able to embody a bloodthirsty character like Richard III¹, while being able to take up the character on stage, and then leave him there et the end of the play.

LDC – You need to grasp that the stage is one thing, and life is another. Otherwise you end up not listening to other people. Because it’s not fair if you act when you are in front of somebody in real life. The place for acting is on stage. I was in a serious relationship with Christine Caminade, two actors together, and we were working with other actors. Little by little, we realized that we needed stability, we needed to set limits between our lives together and our work on stage.

Laurent’s learning process continues. In the world of theatre, as in so many fields, in order to develop, you need to meet new people.

LDC – I was lucky to be able to meet Yoshi Oida, the Japanese actor revealed by Peter Brook. I saw him in Brook’s production of L’homme qui (The Man Who), an extrordinary play, and had an opportunity to work with him. It was a revelation, something clicked, and he helped me to find my own way of acting.

When Yoshi Oida acts, everything is physical.

LDC – Let’s imagine you have to play an old man. You are supposed to walk across the stage as a old man. In his book, An Actor Adrift, Oida tells the story of the time he saw an actor in Japan take on the persona of an old woman in a remarkable stage performance. Very moved by what he saw, Oida went afterwards to ask the actor about his preparation for the rôle, expecting to hear tell of an emotionally based approach. The actor told him : The character is an elderly woman, so my steps have to be shorter than usual. Roughly seventy per cent of normal length. As I walk, that is all I think about. According to Oida, it is the empty space of the actor’s performance that opens up the range of possible interpretations. During a play, it’s what the actor does physically that is the sorce of emotion . When you take up the challenge of the great plays and tragedies, it’s the combination of the physical and the textual that enable you as an actor to transcend yourself, and it’s the spectator who feels the emotion.

Through his work in theatre, Laurent learnt the value of effort and developed a new relationship with his own body. Learning was the result of hard work. It was only once he had become an established actor that he crossed paths with tango.

The journey towards tango

Even though he presents himself today as a teacher of tango, gaining access to the world of dance was by no means straightforward for Laurent. It is his partner, Christine Caminade, who is the first to step into tango. Finding herself in a hiatus between stage projects, she sees a couple dancing to the music of Astor Piazzolla at La Maison du Tango in Toulouse. She takes up tango classes, meets the dancer Plume Fontaine, and they decide to learn together.

LDC – Tango for me ? It’s a complete unknown. I have no experience of dance whatsoever. But physicality is not unfamiliar to me because I have worked with Yoshi Oida, and anyway theatre is something enormously physical. So Christine starts tango with Plume, and I’m left as a spectator of sorts, rather like when an actor watches other actors in action. They go off together to Paris on a course with Rodolfo Dinzel – a month-long dance seminar – and by a strange coincidence, the same month, I also happen to have a training course in Paris working on the place of the Qi energy element in musical and stage choreography with Sheau-Fon Lin, a dancer from the Beijing Opera.

The culmination of the Dinzel tango seminar is a stage performance to be given and the Auditorium des Halles in Paris. Then something dramatic happens : 5 days before the show, one of the actor-dancers is no longer available. There is a speaking part to be covered, preferably by an actor. Laurent accepts the invitation.

LDC – What I didn’t know was that I was also required to dance.

So there he is : an actor and … dancer in a tango show. During the performance, he performs his steps, surrounded by the dancers, speaks his part, uncomfortable as can be. The audience seem oblivious to the replacement and feedback is positive, but Laurent remains sceptical. By way of thanks, Rodolfo Dinzel offers him a free place at another workshop he is giving in Paris.

LDC – So I go to the workshop. I feel quite lost. But, wow, what an interesting experience ! I feel a sense of freedom and savour the encounter with Rodolfo Dinzel who sees tango as a way of life and a philosophy.²

Following this, Christine decides to return to Buenos Aires with Plume Fontaine to explore tango even deeper, Laurent remembers he was free from acting engagements at the time and tags along, taking dance classes of his own – learning the walk, the various turns – investing himself totally in the study of tango technique.

LDC – It was a very physical experience. I did that over a period of 3 years without really knowing why. In parallel, I took lessons with Christine and Plume as my teachers. I followed them everywhere. Then, in September 1999, Plume met Dorella, the woman of his dreams, in Italy, and Christine said : I no longer have a partner. Can you help me ? Looking back, I can see now why I had been working so hard to learn tango for no apparent reason. It was as if I had foreseen that, one day, I would be working with her. Life had chosen to lead me towards this dance and, out of love of Christine, I said yes.

The earnestness with which he has been following Christine down the tango path suddenly takes on a new meaning. Laurent accepts the invitation to be her partner, but they decide to pack their dancing shoes for one more stay in Buenos Aires in order to train together as a couple and try to establish their own tango. On their return, together they found their professional home-base, A Media Luz, which is still up and running today.

LDC – For 7 years, I mixed tango and acting but, little by little, the tango took over from the acting. When friends came to see me in plays they would say : How’s the tango going ? And I’d say : Yeah, yeah … So I did both for a while. Then I did a bit more tango. Finally, tango was all there was. My last acting performance dates back to 2007. Over more than 20 years, Christine and I have given a lot of lessons and workshops. We could tell you stories about what it’s like working together, living tango together, being in each other’s arms 24/7. We could tell you all about fusion. Today, our whole teaching approach is the result of all that : learning what it’s like to find a place of your own. Because, the more comfortable you feel in your own space, the more present you are for your partner ; and if you encroach too much on your partner’s space, you get pulled in by them and you lose yourself.

And so the pupil, who was always so demanding as to the quality of his teachers, is now himself a teacher with a passion for passing things on to others. When teaching, is he able to draw on his own struggles with learning ?

LDC – Yes. I haven’t forgotten where I’ve come from, my path into tango. It’s been a long journey, because I had never danced before this. That counts, because I’ve seen magnificent dancers who were disappointing teachers : when you ask them how to do some figure or another, they can’t tell you because, for them, it’s obvious. Everything I’ve built in tango has come from my own learning experience. Although football was something that came to me – and moments of inspiration were natural – acting was different, something which was the result of work. And tango ? With all its gracefulness, tango really didn’t come easily. So yes, I’m still teaching tango. For the moment.

1. Richard III is the leading topic in another post on this blog. ↩︎
2. For proof of this, take a look at Gloria and Rodolfo Dinzel‘s book TANGO : an anxious quest for freedom ↩︎