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 lessen 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.
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