A Evaristo Carriego by Jean Fajean
There are more dancers who perform the Pugliese version of A Evaristo Carriego than flat tyres and lost keys in the all world. This is said by an old blues about stale lovestories, but it may be used also for these division of labour's supporters: they show their due choreographic agitation while the audience yawns. A Evaristo Carriego is a tango that makes everybody come to an understanding, even the apilado porters with the nuevo brutes. Actually, anytime a chance of beauty leans out of our dancefloors, these guys react with a hard, or at least unconfortable, ugliness. This way, they pretend to save the style. But how can this paradox go unnoticed: in all the milongas on earth the Pugliese's tanda is the easiest way to clear the floor; nonetheless, the cleared ones spring to attention again at the piano's arpeggio as if a colonel or a guest had come in. What automatism are they at the mercy of?

Saving private Verón by El Moplo
At last, there is someone who balances accounts with Parnassus and gives Julio Bocca and Gideon Kremer the same wash out they give to tango. By the same means: "a combination of arrogance and ignorance", as the Times said; and with the same result: "a ramshackle and conceited aberration", according to the Daily Mail. We are talking of the Carmen staged by Sally Potter and danced by Pablo Verón (who made also the choreographies), at the English National Opera. Our will was to send El Moplo to London to review, and possibly to back, that retaliation. Unfortunately, El Moplo couldn't go "for engagements taken after". The non-view didn't prevent him from giving us his opinion. Here it is.

El Gato on a hot tin roof by Tj Locatelli
There are a lot of felines among us. Whoever, even sporadically, acquaints with the Buenos Aires milongas, will certainly have admired, or feared, the El Tigre's poses, been hardly able to meet the El Puma's cross-eyed look and known more than a Cat. At La Ideal, for instance, there is the bald one with a plastic leg who applies the traspié even when he's not dancing. The Casa Suiza's matinées are officiated by El Gato Bernasconi, the Helvetic milonguero who wears 48-sized shoes. Then we have the Barbieri, who has little to do with tango and only in the last. After all, our favourite Cat is the one here below. Tj Locatelli, one of his oldest pal since the legendary O Milongueiro, tells us his story.

Tango chinein by Marco Castellani
As long as the tango is rhyming with business, the milongas are infested with exhibitions. One can't go to dance without being forced to sit and swallow a performance by a local or a passing wonder. These are marketing moments that lower the milonga to a showroom and the milonguero to a potential customer of pans. The periodical mobs called festivals, then, give cause for long shows, with a lot of costumes and even group choreographies. The performers are neither too fussy about lights nor about the four fronts that force at least three sides of a paying audience to watch the scaffolds of their jumps and the backs of their figures. A congress screen and, later, Internet will take care of widening their lack of pathos. From the counting milongas of today, these "artists without an explanation", are called to account by our Marco Castellani, who plays as sheriff one day and as indian the other one.

Newton from Pompeya by MC Ningùn Bobby
Everybody knows and have heard Pedro Alberto Rusconi alias Tete bawling at the milongas. He's an instinctive, natural talented dancer who's often right in the relationship between music and dance. Since the early january, Tete is senventy-two years old, most of them danced. He has no fault for the missing ones. MC Ningùn Bobby, the best kept disc-jockey at the Radio Colifata and Tete's compatriot from Pompeya, here portrays him as a protagonist of the tango-salón.

Pomp attaché by Marco Castellani
Gerardo Portalea has recently left the earth dancefloors. He was one of the last agents of the Villa Urquiza style, which has been much admired, imitated and - there's no reason to hide it - misanderstood. Elegance, fantasy, creativity, musicality, were its general feautures; Gerardo Portalea added something of his own: subtraction. Here it is the portrait that Marco Castellani dedicates to a great artist of slowness.

What is "people"? by Giorgio Agamben
Popular music, popular dance, popular culture, popular party, people here, people there. These days we talk a lot about it, but what a people is exactly? Let's read it in this essay by a scholar who unfortunately is no popular at all. And maybe it's better that way.