[Tango-L] Report No. 5 on the Tango Festival & Mundial Buenos Aires August 2011

[Shahrukh Merchant]

This report covers the two days of Wednesday-Thursday, Aug 24-25.

On Wednesday the Stage Tango qualifying rounds started, and lasted for 2 
days, from 11 am to about 9 pm each day (about 20 hours total!). Unlike 
the salon Tango, the Stage Tango performances are choreographed to music 
selected by the dancers, and so only one couple can dance at a time. I 
saw maybe a total of 10 couples over the 2 days and in retrospect wished 
I had had time to see more of it.

I'm somewhat jaded perhaps, when it comes to seeing Tango performances, 
as there are so many, even from well-known dancers, that just leave me 
cold or, even worse, bored, owing mostly to the lack of connection and 
emotion, acrobatics for acrobatics' sake, and the absence of true 
excellence (really good Stage Tango demands a level of technical 
excellence that few seem to achieve, though of course many achieve the 
level needed for a typical tourist Tango show or for a demo at a 
milonga). But I have to say that 90% of those I saw during these 
preliminary rounds were interesting at least, often exciting, and some 
downright remarkable. The vast majority of participants seemed to be 
from somewhere in South American, many Argentines of course (but not 
just from Buenos Aires), Colombians as one might expect, but also 
Paraguayans, Chileans, etc., etc.

I think for most of these people it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, 
for which they really worked a lot, put everything into it, from the 
costumes to the music selection and of course the dancing and 
choreography. And that enthusiasm and "positive nervousness" came across 
in the performance, and you could tell that they were putting heart and 
soul into it. For attendees who chose to watch these rounds, it was like 
seeing a 20-hour marathon of among the best stage Tango that exists 
today, all brought together under one roof, and all for free. Wow!

(Of course many of these will end up teaching these stage Tango moves as 
social Tango and add to the havoc on milonga floors around the world, 
but let's dwell on the positive--and there was a lot of it--and not 
burst the balloon quite yet, OK? :-) )

On Thursday night I was there at the end when they announced the 36 
Stage dancing couple who had progressed to the semi-finals. Lots of 
screaming, excitement, waving of country flags, etc., ... Note that the 
semi-finals on Saturday and the finals on Tuesday need advance tickets 
to attend (which I don't have :-( ), but they should be broadcast live 
on TV in Argentina.

With that general overview of the Stage Tango qualifying rounds, I'll 
continue to my usual review of the musical performances that I watched.

Wed, 6 pm: "MYTHS & TRUTHS ABOUT TANGO DANCING"

I caught the tail end of Laura Falcoff's verbal presentation on this 
subject (I came early for the following performance). She was explaining 
to the audience the cabeceo, line of dance, appropriate behaviour, the 
"códigos" of the milonga, etc., all of which have been discussed in 
great detail over the years on Tango-L. There was even a couple giving 
amusing demonstrations of all of this. The interesting part of this for 
me was to see who the intended (and actual) audience was. It was not 
foreigners being taught how they are supposed to behave at milongas (I'd 
guess 5% of the crowd at best was non-Argentine), neither was it Tango 
dancers from Argentina (who would know most of this anyway, even though 
they often don't follow it). The audience was comprised of "regular" 
(that is to say non-Tango-dancing) Argentines, most of whom seemed to 
know little or nothing of these códigos!

Wed, 7 pm: ORQUESTA MIGUEL ÁNGEL BERTERO

This orchestra comprises mostly strings (lots of violins, violas, 
cellos, 1 bass) + piano + 1 bandoneón. Mr. Bertero, the orchestra 
leader, who plays lead violinist up front, has impressive credentials. 
However, with all due respect to these credentials (which I do not have 
the musical authority to question), this was one of the few orchestras 
that I did not really enjoy. The performances were formal and almost 
lack-luster and the performers seemed to lack energy. The arrangements 
sounded too sanitized, like 101 Strings or Mantovani playing Tango, or 
at best the Boston Pops (for whom Mr. Bertero has indeed performed). And 
in fact the Tangos whose melodies I did not know I would not even have 
recognized as Tangos, owing to their sanitized "stringy" arrangements. 
If the poignant "Niebla de Riachuelo" by Osvaldo Fresedo/Roberto Ray is 
one of your all-time favourite tangos (as it is mine), then hearing a 
bright Boston-pops style big-orchestra version of it just leaves one 
cold. And their rendition of "Romance del Barrio" really was much more 
suited to dancing a Viennese Waltz than a Tango Vals. It was all good 
music, but it just didn't feel "Tango" to me, as did almost all of the 
other music I heard at the festival, whether danceable or otherwise, 
modern or classics, performed by the very old or the very young.

Wed, 8:30 pm: TANGO Y TURF

This was another of the precious moments of the festival that words 
cannot adequately describe. Juan Carlos Godoy was born on 21 August 1922 
if you believe the interview at todotango.com (see
http://www.todotango.com/english/biblioteca/cronicas/entrevista_jcgodoy.asp 
). That would mean that he would have completed his 89th birthday just a 
few days before his performance yesterday.

Mr. Godoy, along with three guitarists "old enough to be his kids" 
(again, no bandoneón), sang about 10 songs non-stop, standing, with no 
sign of fatigue or anything less than total enthusiasm, and with such 
feeling that it brought tears to your eyes. He is and always has been a 
self-confessed-and-proud-of-it racing addict, and the Tangos he sung 
were all about horses, racing and related topics (the most well-known of 
which would be Por Una Cabeza). Most were light-hearted but in a couple 
of rather dark Tangos that he sung (especially one that had to do with a 
stallion that was stabbed and a blood-covered knife brought to the woman 
who had betrayed him with the claim that it was the blood of her 
lover--something like that anyway, I didn't quite follow all the 
lyrics), he conveyed the feeling of darkness and dread so thoroughly in 
his singing and his expressions that the whole audience fell deathly 
silent and chills literally ran down your spine. What a performer!

Aside: Watching this historical performance, and since I happened to be 
sitting next to where an official videocamera was recording (as all the 
performances were being), I got to wondering, "What's going to happen 
with these hundreds of hours of valuable video recordings being taken 
here?" The ideal would be for some light editing to be done, and then 
for them to be classified, labelled, and stored, preferably on the 
Internet. But somehow I seriously doubt this will happen and I think it 
will be very hard for anyone to track most of these again, even though 
they may actually still exist somewhere in the governmental equivalent 
of a shoebox. I sincerely hope I am wrong in this, but I would not bet 
high odds on this happening (racing metaphor coincidental).

Thu, 7 pm: CONCIERTOS ATORRANTES: QUASIMODO TRIO

This is a young music trio comprising bandoneón, bass and piano. Their 
style is kind of a fusion between jazz and tango and in fact was very 
much that. Instead of "neither here nor there," as some fusions end up 
being, there were distinctive elements of both styles in their pieces. 
Enjoyable.

Thu, 8:30 pm: ORQUESTA TÍPICA CONCIERTOS ATORRANTES

Larger version of the above trio, with those musicians plus 8 or so more 
to make up a full Tango orchestra. As one might expect with a larger 
orchestra, though, it was less jazzy and more Tango. Also very enjoyable.

Conciertos Atorrantes is actually part of a series of young musicians 
who are carrying on (and extending) the Tango tradition. They have a 
cycle of performances every Saturday at midnight at the Sanata bar. 
Check it out at www.sanatabar.com (yet another Tango bar-type venue 
unknown to the "Tango tourist" and to most Tango dancers, even locals, 
but very much part of the contemporary Tango scene).

They even have their own annual Tango festival (focussing on the music) 
late-September/early-October in Plaza Almagro, as they announced at the 
show, and they seem to have already confirmed many well-known 
contemporary Tango orchestras in Buenos Aires--mostly, they are NOT 
those that would be known on the milonga circuit. (They seem to be 
better musicians than marketeers, though--it's not much more than a 
month away and there is no mention of it online anywhere that I could 
find, other than vague references to last year's festival!)


Shahrukh