The Tangueros Monthly Newsletter
international edition - jul/aug 2001

10


High-quality bats

From the Krk riverside – It's a good thing that the foliage of these emancipated Dalmatian horse-chestnuts mitigate the noon temperature and partially inhibit the spontaneous combustion of your correspondent and his non-crease Montecristo (it's a hat). The Krk plays its cards while a gravitating and incontrovertibly blue sky is mirrored over and over in each one of the forty-two consecutive small falls: i don't want to sound boastful, but it's really a gorgeous day. Sheltered in the Grotto, which is not short of several species of bats - actually a few of them, my guidebook says, have a good reputation among the connoisseurs who hold them in high regard (also among these bald, ratlike mammalians, as well as in the Tango scene, the chantas prevail) – i prepare to compile, even though i am on holiday, the NCT press reviews from its scorching summer tour.
What an ineluctable fate for the homme de lettres! Despite of the nom de plume without vowels, a new hairdo, the dowsing wear and the preventive bribery to the postman, a postage due cablegram nevertheless came for me at twelve thousand miles from office, rescueing me from the certified health of these baths that were described so well, according at least to the popular fallacy, in the ungrammatical wakes of Finnegan and ordering me to “cover” the Tangueros.
Well, dear reader, here it is what the distinguished colleagues of mine have written about the above-mentioned wonderful tour. Have such as good holidays!

Michieli, sacré coup de jeune sur le tango
Le Festival de Marseille a fini en beauté en offrant pendant deux soirs un spectacle fidèle à l’esprit de cette danse sud-amèricaine tout en la modernisant avec esprit

Le Festival de Marseille rebondit toujours là où on ne l’attend pas. Illustration avec le spectacle de tango, l’un des rendez-vous dèsormais traditionnel de la Cour de la Vieille Charité. Traditionnel, avez-vous dit?C’était sans compter sur le tempérament de Mariachiara Michieli et sa rencontre avec Carel Kraayenhof. La première, découverte aux saluts dans toute sa beauté radieuse, est une choréographe italienne, née a Venise voici 37 ans, mais qui a épousé la cause du tango depuis 1987 en séjournant longuement à Buenos Aires avant de revenir porter la bonne parole en Europe depuis dix ans. Le second est un virtuose du bandoneòn, ce cousin de l’accordéon. En 1988, en Hollande, il cofonde le Sexteto Canyengue, tout premier sextet de tango en Europe. Dix ans après, en 1998, c’est la rencontre avec la Nueva Compania Tangueros que dirige Mariachiara. Depuis, le second accompagne l’autre sur scène. Le resultat? Une bouffée de fraicheur étourdissante, un formidable voyage au pays du tango, servi dans toute sa noblesse par des interprètes excellents mais revisité sous le sceau du contemporain intelligent. Le public ne s’y est pas trompé qui, deux soirs durant, a réservé un triomphe à ces Cuatro Noches où les codes du genre se retrouvent tout en étant détournés au profit d’un regard moins conventionnel, libéré. Buste en avant et cheveux gominés d’un coté, robes rouges fendues et talons aiguilles de l’autre, tout le tango est là, mais dans une souplesse infinie, hanches désaxées, jambes haut jetées, comme désarticulées. Pas de deux ou ensemble évitent la monotonie d’echaînements standardisés en jouant la carte du décalage avec une pincée d’humour. L’orchestre est de la partie avec sa partition saccadée, s’offrant même des incursions dans le répertoire classique. Après l’entracte, en début de deuxième partie, le coup de grâce de l’enchantement sera donné avec cette approche contemporaine inspirée, les danseurs évoluant en chaussons!
Un cadeau inoubliable.
Patrik Merle – La Provence

Nueva Compania Tangueros, the wind of seduction
A show run with unusual elegance and sense of style, as the ways of passion were looking for a grazing expression, misterious and deliberately underground, made of allusions, soft touches, luminescent reverberations, wistful and restless souls. Accompanied and elated by Sexteto Canyengue, the Company discovered its cards progressively, and disclosed among the folds of a mask rich in light and shade effects and sweet heartaches, a strong technique full of fresh and very original energy. The traditional Tango is in the same time close and extremely far. In the choreographies by Mariachiara Michieli, who is of Venice birth but Argentine in her soul, there is actually a new wind. Modes, times, matters and colors find here a mellow and still accomplished articulation. The dancers move exquisitely and smoothly, far off any formal plastering, with a freedom that gives remarkable sentiments to a dance that's still keeping intact its ancient lyric's roots. Inspiration, creativity, jumps, fast speed tangles of limbs are set up in a sort of changing relief tapestry, that maybe has its most brilliant and unexpected moment when the dance frees itself from the stiletto heels compulsions and offers a barefoot performance in which the movement seems closer to modern dance. As a matter of fact the game is much more subtle, since the Tango, rather than distort itself, raises to a dimension in which talent, style, intelligence and sober elegance mark out a new, daring and proud road.
Maurizia Veladiano - Il Giornale di Vicenza

 

Upcoming dates

The NCT happens to be guest of the Venice Biennale for the rehearsals of Corazon Quebrado (Milonga of the Broken Hearts). The show, which was created for the Festival of Nervi-Fondazione Teatro Carlo Felice the past year, will be tuned up with the new dancers for the Festival of Neuchatel. At presstime, an unscheduled performance in Venice is not yet excluded.

 

The Tangueros Quarterly Review n. 4

A few days more and the TQR forth issue will be on line with the following contents:

 

Atendidos por su dueño

The Patagonia's outside is in Argentina, the inside is in Switzerland

If on one hand the recent Genoa stage and the following minor performances in the G8 worldwide tour fulfill the ordinary duties of any modern gang's management (splitting the loot, planning a new job, etc.), on the other they reveal that the Capital's Real Dominion - according to what Giorgio Cesarano had clearly foreseen almost thirty years ago - it is a total spectacle involving the entire human species, in so far as it's no more possible for anybody - class, movement, religion or whatever - consider oneself as the other. The state of things, far from being abolished, is simply accomplished by a Capital with no visible alternatives (not even among the estimators of the sudaca cinco estrellas Manu Chao). The violation of the costitutional freedoms, the unilateral suspension of the international treaties, the educated brutality of the police, the foxy instigations plotted by the cops in disguise as punkabbestia, the illegal confinements, the false arrests and the summary justice - the proceeding against the mime troupe from Austria can be hold as excess of unfair competition - are all proven, yet profitable techniques. The latest novelty is rather the red zone, a life-size model which has been imposed manu militari to the democratic carrugi, but it is already operative in many areas of the planet and will be available very soon on, precisely, a global scale: no matter which side you are on, the affluent or the indebted one, you will be certainly atendidos por el dueño, attended by the boss.

 


NCTANGUEROS HOMEPAGE NEWSLETTERS JUNE 01