The two labyrinths of Tango

Ten years after that unforgettable night with Tangueros at the Settembre Musica Festival in 1993, the Teatro Regio of Torino will open again its solemn hatches to the Nueva Compañia Tangueros' tango.
Next April 2nd, Mariachiara Michieli and Marco Castellani will give a special danced lecture by the title of "The Tango - from the origins to the Modern Tango" in which they will fight their way through the passage from the early Tango to the Modern Tango's first sequences.
This is indeed the most suitable time for a sight-seeing in the "kitchen" while Mariachiara is cutting apart like a meccano all the steps we use today.
A phylogenetic performance by Silvina Aguera and Sebastian Romero, the NCT Principal Dancers, will close this intersting evening (admission free).
Here it follows an introduction to the lecture:

But what do we finally mean when we talk about tango? Where does it come from and how has "the deepest popular art in the world" been born?
Experts who tried to verify its roots have suddenly found themselves in the same desperate situation of the two kings in the two labyrinths that Borges has described in his famous apologue: musicologists got lost in a deafening flood of audio documents; dance critics got paralysed in the thick fog of conjectures.
In music, a labyrinth of evidences made of rolls, recordings on any support, vinyl, pasteboard or wax, partitures and trascriptions, led them to a redundant taxonomy on a full-size scale, or in other words to a porteño version of that legendary Chinese map, which was so exact that it coincided with the land. Even the Carlos Vega Institute's musicologists were overcome by the collectors' enthusiastic supply and had to cut down the research to one only book and three records in which they concluded in 1987 that most of the primitive tangos sounded like the habanera: this concept was already stated in 1926 by Vicente Rossi in his “Cosas de Negros” and confirmed by the following generations with the sense of hearing.
On the other hand, in dance, the labyrinthine informations coming from witnesses who have not been contaminated by a direct presence at the events, didn't reach an agreement about anything. No recordings, no visual document, no shared terminology. The most successful labyrinth, Borges said, is the desert. This paradoxical mixture of scarcity and exuberance is barring any researchers' scientific approach to the Tango. For one time more, we should resort to the body, to its organic memory, to what is still alive and true in the tangueros' physique despite the Tango-business' dubious furnishings that have been stacked on it in the last ten years. That's why the lecture Mariachiara Michieli, the Nueva Compañia Tangueros Artistic Director and Choreographer, will give on the next April 2nd will be a “danced lecture”.
Mariachiara, making use of a couple of her Principal Dancers, will display the passage between the Primitive Tango and the Modern Tango through the steps and the sequences that have been created by her Master Antonio Todaro, who had provided the most innovative generation in Tango (the generation of the Forties: Cacho Lavandina, Finito, Petroleo) with a complete language. The phylogenetic performance in the deep of the "movement of two" will be further enriched by an Elisa Guzzo Vaccarino's speech about the relation between Tango and Contemporary Dance.
The comparative musicology's resources will be spent by Stefano Zenni in his lecture dedicated to the Astor Piazzolla's heritage (April 9th). Here again, the Tango's connection with the formal techniques of classical and jazz music will be pointed out: different worlds and cultures melting together in a unique musical gesture which is in the same time based on the dance - that's to say on the body - and beyond it.

El alma, on the road again

Two more performances of Desdelalma in Italy. The first one, lightly reduced because of the stage size, will be presented in Belluno for the cheritable Transculture Festival while the second one will take place in the orthodox Teatro Lux of Camisano Vicentino. The young bandoneonist Jean-Baptiste Henry will play in both. Jean-Baptist is the César Stroscio's favourite pupil, as well as the only Tango musician who graduated with gold medal and honourable mention at the Paris Gennevilliers Conservatory.

DESDELALMA
choreography by Mariachiara Michieli
music by Maximo Mori, César Stroscio and Astor Piazzolla

dancers: Silvina Aguera and Sebastian Romero  Silvia Vaccaro and Mariano Suazo
bandoneòn soloist: Jean-Baptiste Henry 

The Tangueros School on the go

In this first week of March, the Tangueros School's courses start in Milano, and take again in Mestre, according to the following schedule:

TANGUEROS SCHOOL
teacher: Mariachiara Michieli
assistants: Silvina Aguera and Sebastian Romero

Ash Wednesday

Only if we look in the face the masks that hide the violence we can really deprive the war of its institutional status. The popular truth that thinks the military actions as insane slaughters has been in force among us, but only until it has been ushed down in order that it didn't draw the conclusion - which was current among socialists and anarchists once - that in public matters and in the institutions we live every day, and without realizing it too much, together with horrible peace criminals.
People, their organisations, their trade unions, their parties, who don't come out into the streets and don't oppose our armed forces' partecipation to the expeditions of "internazional" police", and who on the contrary keep voting for who tolerate and promote them, that people are not vile and hypocritical. In a twilight zone of their conscience, they believe that to enrol in the violence's field against the others, the numberless and farest others, it's self-defence for their privileges. They think it is fair and inevitabie - as Alcibiades used to say in the platonic dialogue - that their happiness lives off the others.

Franco Fortini, June 21st 1991
in "Disobbedienze II" - © Manifesto Libri