This report covers the two days of Wednesday-Thursday, Aug 24-25. On Wednesday the Stage Tango qualifying rounds started, and lasted for 2 days, from 11 am to about 9 pm each day (about 20 hours total!). Unlike the salon Tango, the Stage Tango performances are choreographed to music selected by the dancers, and so only one couple can dance at a time. I saw maybe a total of 10 couples over the 2 days and in retrospect wished I had had time to see more of it.
I'm somewhat jaded perhaps, when it comes to seeing Tango performances, as there are so many, even from well-known dancers, that just leave me cold or, even worse, bored, owing mostly to the lack of connection and emotion, acrobatics for acrobatics' sake, and the absence of true excellence (really good Stage Tango demands a level of technical excellence that few seem to achieve, though of course many achieve the level needed for a typical tourist Tango show or for a demo at a milonga). But I have to say that 90% of those I saw during these preliminary rounds were interesting at least, often exciting, and some downright remarkable. The vast majority of participants seemed to be from somewhere in South American, many Argentines of course (but not just from Buenos Aires), Colombians as one might expect, but also Paraguayans, Chileans, etc., etc. I think for most of these people it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, for which they really worked a lot, put everything into it, from the costumes to the music selection and of course the dancing and choreography. And that enthusiasm and "positive nervousness" came across in the performance, and you could tell that they were putting heart and soul into it. For attendees who chose to watch these rounds, it was like seeing a 20-hour marathon of among the best stage Tango that exists today, all brought together under one roof, and all for free. Wow! (Of course many of these will end up teaching these stage Tango moves as social Tango and add to the havoc on milonga floors around the world, but let's dwell on the positive--and there was a lot of it--and not burst the balloon quite yet, OK? :-) ) On Thursday night I was there at the end when they announced the 36 Stage dancing couple who had progressed to the semi-finals. Lots of screaming, excitement, waving of country flags, etc., ... Note that the semi-finals on Saturday and the finals on Tuesday need advance tickets to attend (which I don't have :-( ), but they should be broadcast live on TV in Argentina. With that general overview of the Stage Tango qualifying rounds, I'll continue to my usual review of the musical performances that I watched. Wed, 6 pm: "MYTHS & TRUTHS ABOUT TANGO DANCING" I caught the tail end of Laura Falcoff's verbal presentation on this subject (I came early for the following performance). She was explaining to the audience the cabeceo, line of dance, appropriate behaviour, the "códigos" of the milonga, etc., all of which have been discussed in great detail over the years on Tango-L. There was even a couple giving amusing demonstrations of all of this. The interesting part of this for me was to see who the intended (and actual) audience was. It was not foreigners being taught how they are supposed to behave at milongas (I'd guess 5% of the crowd at best was non-Argentine), neither was it Tango dancers from Argentina (who would know most of this anyway, even though they often don't follow it). The audience was comprised of "regular" (that is to say non-Tango-dancing) Argentines, most of whom seemed to know little or nothing of these códigos! Wed, 7 pm: ORQUESTA MIGUEL ÁNGEL BERTERO This orchestra comprises mostly strings (lots of violins, violas, cellos, 1 bass) + piano + 1 bandoneón. Mr. Bertero, the orchestra leader, who plays lead violinist up front, has impressive credentials. However, with all due respect to these credentials (which I do not have the musical authority to question), this was one of the few orchestras that I did not really enjoy. The performances were formal and almost lack-luster and the performers seemed to lack energy. The arrangements sounded too sanitized, like 101 Strings or Mantovani playing Tango, or at best the Boston Pops (for whom Mr. Bertero has indeed performed). And in fact the Tangos whose melodies I did not know I would not even have recognized as Tangos, owing to their sanitized "stringy" arrangements. If the poignant "Niebla de Riachuelo" by Osvaldo Fresedo/Roberto Ray is one of your all-time favourite tangos (as it is mine), then hearing a bright Boston-pops style big-orchestra version of it just leaves one cold. And their rendition of "Romance del Barrio" really was much more suited to dancing a Viennese Waltz than a Tango Vals. It was all good music, but it just didn't feel "Tango" to me, as did almost all of the other music I heard at the festival, whether danceable or otherwise, modern or classics, performed by the very old or the very young. Wed, 8:30 pm: TANGO Y TURF This was another of the precious moments of the festival that words cannot adequately describe. Juan Carlos Godoy was born on 21 August 1922 if you believe the interview at todotango.com (see http://www.todotango.com/english/biblioteca/cronicas/entrevista_jcgodoy.asp ). That would mean that he would have completed his 89th birthday just a few days before his performance yesterday. Mr. Godoy, along with three guitarists "old enough to be his kids" (again, no bandoneón), sang about 10 songs non-stop, standing, with no sign of fatigue or anything less than total enthusiasm, and with such feeling that it brought tears to your eyes. He is and always has been a self-confessed-and-proud-of-it racing addict, and the Tangos he sung were all about horses, racing and related topics (the most well-known of which would be Por Una Cabeza). Most were light-hearted but in a couple of rather dark Tangos that he sung (especially one that had to do with a stallion that was stabbed and a blood-covered knife brought to the woman who had betrayed him with the claim that it was the blood of her lover--something like that anyway, I didn't quite follow all the lyrics), he conveyed the feeling of darkness and dread so thoroughly in his singing and his expressions that the whole audience fell deathly silent and chills literally ran down your spine. What a performer! Aside: Watching this historical performance, and since I happened to be sitting next to where an official videocamera was recording (as all the performances were being), I got to wondering, "What's going to happen with these hundreds of hours of valuable video recordings being taken here?" The ideal would be for some light editing to be done, and then for them to be classified, labelled, and stored, preferably on the Internet. But somehow I seriously doubt this will happen and I think it will be very hard for anyone to track most of these again, even though they may actually still exist somewhere in the governmental equivalent of a shoebox. I sincerely hope I am wrong in this, but I would not bet high odds on this happening (racing metaphor coincidental). Thu, 7 pm: CONCIERTOS ATORRANTES: QUASIMODO TRIO This is a young music trio comprising bandoneón, bass and piano. Their style is kind of a fusion between jazz and tango and in fact was very much that. Instead of "neither here nor there," as some fusions end up being, there were distinctive elements of both styles in their pieces. Enjoyable. Thu, 8:30 pm: ORQUESTA TÍPICA CONCIERTOS ATORRANTES Larger version of the above trio, with those musicians plus 8 or so more to make up a full Tango orchestra. As one might expect with a larger orchestra, though, it was less jazzy and more Tango. Also very enjoyable. Conciertos Atorrantes is actually part of a series of young musicians who are carrying on (and extending) the Tango tradition. They have a cycle of performances every Saturday at midnight at the Sanata bar. Check it out at www.sanatabar.com (yet another Tango bar-type venue unknown to the "Tango tourist" and to most Tango dancers, even locals, but very much part of the contemporary Tango scene). They even have their own annual Tango festival (focussing on the music) late-September/early-October in Plaza Almagro, as they announced at the show, and they seem to have already confirmed many well-known contemporary Tango orchestras in Buenos Aires--mostly, they are NOT those that would be known on the milonga circuit. (They seem to be better musicians than marketeers, though--it's not much more than a month away and there is no mention of it online anywhere that I could find, other than vague references to last year's festival!) Shahrukh _______________________________________________ Tango-L mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.mit.edu/mailman/listinfo/tango-l
