An Open Letter

Silvia Ceriani has published a translation of one of Tete Rusconi's Open Letters to tangueros everywhere and always. Also a wonderful description of Regin milonga in the 1990s: from its description as 'on the first floor of Riobamba and Corrientes' we recognise it as what is now El Beso: no longer broken green neon I think, but green curtains.

There are several of these open letters covering much the same ground. They reveal how earnest Tete was about tango, however much he might joke. About tango music, '...this very impassioned music gives us life, energy, pleasure'. As to the dance, he sees danger: '...we are losing it by not respecting it'. Tango is not a business; 'Tango is a part of our lives, part of our grandparents, parents, mothers, brothers and friends. It’s our life'. It's good to remember how the older generation see it, even if we can't match their passion.

Nur Du and Viktor

I've been looking forward to Nur Du since late last summer when I managed to book just before it sold out.

Pina Bausch met Tete in Plaza Doriego one Sunday afternoon in 1994, when he would dance with anyone, and she suddenly found herself dancing Argentine tango. She decided to include tango in Nur Du, and invited Tete and his new teaching partner Silvia to Germany in 1995 to teach her company. When the piece was performed at the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris, Pina danced with Tete on stage.

There's actually only one tango in Nur Du. No doubt she could have watched social tango for five minutes and remembered enough to teach her cast, but she respected the dance and invited them to teach it. Dancers are 'movement junkies' as someone said, and the experience of tango isn't quite like any other dance, so it extends the vocabulary, so to speak. & no doubt she knew the stage tango, 'tango fantasia', pioneered as a stage show by Copes to such acclaim in Europe in the 1980s, and it must have pleased her to show social tango, 'real world tango'.

Nur Du is made up of moments, the longest perhaps no more than a few minutes. A succession of moments, poignant, funny, absurd, breathtaking. In subdued light, a woman dances to a sorrowful blues, then the lights come up and she wanders around desperately seeking for the exit as another woman recalls the routines she used to perform in high school as a cheerleader. The two overlap, comment on each other. Perhaps then (I can't remember the sequence) a man and a woman stand on a chair (lots of chairs in Pina Bausch), he holds her carefully by the hair, she steps forwards off the chair, suspended by her hair, and is lowered gently to the ground. Perhaps that was followed by a sequence I remembered from the film: a man, desperate on the floor, and when his friend returns he flings himself half way across the stage into his arms. There is no plot, no story-line. So how did something so fragmentary hold together? There seems to be a very clear control of time, a sculpting of time (Tarkovsky's phrase), and of emotion too. You suddenly notice there's been no laughter for a while. There are moments of intense activity, then subdued intense passages. The perception of time is manipulated.

But most of all I thought that the fragments are held together by the dancers themselves. Pina Bausch said she was not interested in how dancers moved but by what moved them. You can imagine many very accomplished dancers being turned away in favour of those that Pina found truly interesting, and she made work out of their creativity, anxieties, fears, probably their dreams and nightmares. (Picasso is supposed to have said: 'Many people painted apples. But what is interesting about Cezanne's apples is Cezanne's anxieties'.) Her method was to seek out what was interesting in her dancers, so essentially they are not performing roles dictated by the choreographer, ('Romeo', 'The Sleeping Beauty', 'the Black Swan'), they are given the opportunity to be themselves, and at the curtain call you look on them as people you have met that evening, remarkable people you were very privileged to spend three hours with.

Nur Du had a number of dance sequences. I saw another of her long pieces, Viktor, a few evenings earlier. It's also fragmentary and episodic, with less dance in any conventional sense: Viktor is the only contemporary piece I've seen in which the women wear heels, the men shoes, throughout. It's quite a dark piece, it seems to highlight the way men tend to treat women. It also has wonderfully absurd and comic moments: an auction of live dogs, for instance. Two live sheep are led on stage at one point, and the first part ends with a real on-stage mess: earth, sawdust, broken biscuit and a slice of veal, probably more. (The veal? The dancer in the film who puts veal into her ballet shoes: that's a sequence from Viktor.) For the most part the dancers aren't dancing in a conventional sense, they are 'performers'. 

There's more obvious dance in Nur Du; the tango (Mariposita) memorably warm and familiar, but other sequences, two men staggering around all over the stage holding a heavy table with one hand and a glass in the other, laughing and shouting: it's not dance as you know it, but it demands the strength and co-ordination of dancers to do it. Her performers are frequently put to the extreme, but that's the nature of dance. In one instant, out of nowhere, a man walks on stage with a chair and stands by the seat. Then in one extraordinary sideways leap, he's over the seat, clears the back of the chair, and is standing at the back of the chair. Blink and you miss it. I still can hardly believe I saw it. A quick point, something that wakens, energises, your perception. 

Two performances, two standing ovations. 

There's an interesting piece on Pina's work here. It's from the company's website, which also includes a link to the LONDONblog, a day-by-day account of the visit, in English and with photos.   

P.S.  WARNING: this performance includes smoking. (Notice outside Barbican auditorium.) 

Es una pasión...

This might not be very fair... but I clicked on a video and this is what opened: I hadn't watched it in a while. For a few moments I thought it was the same music that Osvaldo and Enriqueta were dancing to, but it's Bajo de un cielo de estrellas, and a different orquesta (Miguel Calo): the two pieces are very similar, both in melody and feel. But the dance is worlds away: reminds me what's lost. Tete and Silvia at their very best, absolutely on fire with a favourite piece of music, and it's so good to remember them together like this. Tete, totally intent on the dance, and without that irritating arm-flapping or the very unconvincing change of roles (he always looked as if he was leading anyway), dancing here as if nothing else existed except each other and the music and the dance. (Forget the floor once in a while!) 'Sin miedo', be fearless, was his advice: go for it! Silvia, in brief glimpses (the video quality isn't great) looks as if she's laughing with joy. The conviction and energy, the sheer life force of it, the physicality of it, and at the same time the control and attention to the music, like almost nothing else and reminding me why I found tango so compelling, why I wanted to visit Buenos Aires in the first place. It blows almost everything else away, certainly the narcissistic elaboration of a lot of contemporary tango, always conscious how pretty its feet are... Not many dancers are so extrovert in their wholehearted passion for dance and music, and it's so good to be reminded.

It's often struck me that I've never heard Argentines describe tango as an addiction: when asked how they see tango they nearly always say it's a passion, '...es una pasión!' Videos like this give us an idea what 'una pasión' can mean...

Monday

I'm not taking part in the milongueando, but got invited to the showing of a film by French film maker Odile Fillon, called Tete and Silvia: milongueros, which opened the milongueando, as a tribute to Tete. There are several films about Tete, but this stands out because it shows Tete as a lively living person as well as a great tanguero. He did all the bad things one should be too polite to do; making comments to all the women in classes, calling out to attract attention at milongas ('Over here: look over here!'), making comments to dancers as they passed by, sometimes cheerfully breaking all the codigos in order to get a dance. 'I fall in love with all the women and want to dance with them all: is there something wrong with that?'

It was quite an emotional showing because the human being came over very strongly. There were many in the audience who'd known him, and I think the rest were sad they'd never met him. There's a great sequence of class at Maipu 444, with a lot of good advice like, 'Hold your head high when you turn, so you don't get dizzy'.

Not on general release yet (and sadly never will be!) but I'll post if it becomes available.