I dash off, without going over it, as if i would rid myself of a worry that’s slandering my blood. I mean the show named “Circa”, which has been staged in these days by the canadian company The Holy Body Tattoo in joint-venture with the english trio The Tiger Lillies.
I read in the night program (i always read the night programs because, at least in the beginning, i like to suspend the unbelief, be cheated and let myself be duped):
“A celebration of sensuality, between possession and seduction… for the Holy Body Tattoo, every experience in life leaves an indelible mark, like a tattoo”.
Well, according to what i saw later on, this mark was quite erasable and as sharp as the tattoo we licked from the chewing gum paper in our childhood.
“The two dancers use all the languages in the popular culture of today in order to explore human nature and speak of our frailties, our collapses and the grace of imperfections, by through a multimedial performance”.
That’s to say, there will be a filmed sequence. It remains to be discovered – but i fear i already know, since i am here – what these “languages in the popular culture of today” are.
The Teatro dell’Elfo cellar-hall is packed. The audience is welcome by a scene with dim lights coming from two furrier’s chandeliers and by some elevator tunes. The smoking machine is working behind the curtains and that’s enough to put me off. Why, they first persecute the smoker and after they replace him with a device that’s artificially reproducing his same emissions, moreover cherry-scented, in order to reach a smoky dancehall effect? The costly air-exhausters the Authorities and the Good Citizen have commanded to the theaters, draw the smoke everywhere but on the stage; so, as it always happens among clever people, the supply of this harmless poison is stopped.
The show starts. Steps in the dark. A mini-spot is turned on from below and reveals a well-known face: oh, Boy George, maybe a little aged, but equipped with his regular bowler hat, white make-up and night gown. He sings while playing an accordeon. The songs concerns the splatter adventures of a certain Beautiful Lisa who breaks into pieces in the street. On the background: a saw. I mean the sound of a saw.
When the tune is over, Boy George (now i can see he also looks like Alex, the poor guy in Clockwork Orange), patters back like an old man or a gallego with brand new socks. After one month, he reaches the piano and starts to squeak a slow waltz: that’s pure Nyman & Greenaway’s presbyterian kitsch, the bombastic minimalism i dislike so much. I can’t understand much the lyrics, but i bet they are ghastly.
When the lights are on, the two dancers (Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras) are already on the stage and, ow ow ow, start to dance the Tango – the Copes’ basic step (uno, en el lugar), the typical pisada of the amateur, the involved figures from the Dinzels’ sticky pastry. Now i can see that the Dinzels made heavy damages also outside Buenos Aires, both personally and through their weird book.
All that seems perfectly logical: what’s better than the Tango Argentino “to celebrate sensuality, between possession and seduction”, or what’s better than the Tango Argentino according to the Reader’s Digest to celebrate the anglosaxon-protestant’s sensuality? Red velvet curtains, black costumes, hot “caliente” attitude, and that’s it. 
The two deafs (it is slow, but it remains a waltz) are dragging out and repeating themselves. Then, in a dead silence stressed by their panting, they execute the standard range of the Tango-show positions coming near to the bruises. The moment has arrived to perform on the floor. A friend of mine says that Contemporary Dance is the dance in which at a certain moment the dancers fling themselves to the floor and rub their bellies against it. Well then, i can officially state that the Holy Body Tattoo is a Contemporary Dance troupe. The rollings are quite tough; when they reach the climax, the red curtain sweetly goes up revealing a hidden screen, like in the Berlin brothels: at last, I say to myself, the spicy view. Not a chance: we have the Paris roofs in black and white and their first Tango lesson instead. I would say they never had a second one. In the meantime, the two dancers simplify their sufferings on the floor: they don’t like to disturb the Touring Club documentary.
Music is back: Boy George settles down on a high chair and wags his little feet like Sandra Mondaini when doing Clarabella. “The Tiger Lillies defy definition; their style is a sort of Porno Surrealism”. Probably he is whispering some misterious rude words in cockney. This guy must be someone who, as Charles Bukowsky would say, goes out in the garden, opens a rose and spits in the heart of it.
Another bad song, then an unholy one that certainly have scared lots of grannies in Paddington. On the other hand, the dancers strive hard to follow the script having a showy sexual intercourse. Several missionaries have been caught in that position. The usual patter of yes, yes, yes and no, no, no. If i were him i should pick no; the sketch reaps a few laughters anyway. The accordeonist chips in to inform us that we can also applaud. Done: the audience still keeps aloof. Soon after, the musicians (there are also an electric bassist and a toy drummer) go out the stage because the urban act is coming, as a further element in the popular culture of today. Quasi-techno tape-music, and other rollings: it’s time to hip-hop. They must have taken only one class of this dance too, since they can’t even make the freezes also my neighbours do so well. In return, they saw the air with the Carolyn Carlson’s typical strokes and do a lot of the dervishes offline turns. The half-baked knowledge ain’t missing in this show. Also the other movements are rather provincial: the province of Vancouver, of course!
The Lillies come in again with a gag as old as crime: the drums destruction. Four willing people laugh for encouragement. Another film follows: a room, late afternoon, same red velvet curtains, same strokes, same sequences. Of the pig, they say in the countryside, nothing is wasted. Then again, a bare-chested male solo and another tango with a furious final. One only sequence that has been created by Mayoral and Elsa Maria: the dancers endlessly repeat it, the same way Mayoral and Elsa Maria use to do, faster and faster in order to increase, if possible, its grotesque effect.
The Irish number in the Riverdance’s style rounds off the stock of popular languages. It is well done and funny just enough to get the keenest cheerings in the night.
The last - let’s hope so - film shows some pedestrian crossings with a close-up to the feet; then, a surprise: some Tango steps with a close-up to the feet, and the red velvet curtains in the background. Feet here, feet there: a podology videoclip, with the live distractions of the couple who merely dance as they were keeping an apple between their foreheads.
The show is on its way to a close with a nice song about the gonorrhoea, a female solo that proves she owns a strapless bra and umpteenth tangazo. Same steps, same figures as always - even a sandwich, a colgada and an arrastrada: they must have taken a Naveira’s masterclass.
This is the end of the story, the “ritual encounter” of a human couple: they just needed to throw the cutlery to each other.
The audience is much more qualified than me to cheer, to stamp their feet and to throng at the exit where the Tiger Lillies, those “who stay off the commercial circuits”, are selling their CD personally. They are still wearing their costumes, otherwise when would they clip the customers again? Also this concert must “leave a mark”. As far as i am concerned, it did: a mark that looks like 15 euros.
Now, neither I am in the habit of jumping to conclusions, nor i want to blame much the out-of-focus Tattoos who perhaps lead a bohemian life in British Columbia; nevertheless, aside from my worries, something must be said in Tango’s defence against the well-paid High Brow Arts’ raiders! Or should the tanguero’s aesthetic torment be endless and the lump in his throat be forever? Why should we tolerate the Julio Bocca’s rookie posture and flatty feet, the Stekelmann’s sketchy choreographies or the Paul Taylor, Van Manen, Béjart and Pina Bausch naïve tango? Since Rough Galliano and Foxy Gedeon have been allowed to play Piazzolla in public and mr. Baremboim to turn Horacio Salgàn into a cheap spa pianist, then they should have simmetrically engaged El Negro Portalea for the Swan Lake, El Dios de Ebano and La Muñeca for Romeo and Juliet, Virulazo for the Corsair and Pichuquito for the Goldberg Variations at the Colòn Theatre. The artistic result would have been third-rate as well, but more romantic, more clever and more gentle.
It is true that The Holy Body Tattoo neither pretend to be a Tango Company, nor to dance the Tango: in fact they dance it, badly, with no cognition and no respect, exactly as Bocca, Stekelmann, Galliano, Kremer and the other Establishment stars do.
To all them i want to say that the Tango is a cathedral in Hell, it’s a sanctuary, a geography, an era. You should tiptoe into it, with the hat in your hands and asking for permission, because everything here, every step, every sequence, every aesthetic act has been deeply lived through blood of gold and tears of salt. If you don’t feel it in your flesh, Tango is not for you: there is to much life inside. In that case it’s better you’d be content with the infinity lowered to the poodle level, as Céline once said. Confine yourself to your poor game and keep off big things. And above all, when you go out in the garden, spit into the roses of your own.

© El Moplo, October 2003
translated from the castellano by Jean Fajean

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