For Brenda Angiel, diversity is in the air

“What I’m going to tell you about comedy is sure to sound like a cliché. But I think when clichés are broken, they can stop being clichés and let other things appear.

So, for starters, the choreographer Angelo Brenda refers to T for This new work, which contains the language of aerial dance on which he has been working for many years but which has now taken a new turn: the interest in developing a dramaturgy, beyond the always attractive forms of dancing in the air.

-What would those clichés be?

-The duels of the pandemic, the diversity of genders. I’ll start with something personal: my mother died at the beginning of the pandemic, possibly due to Covid. She always told me that as a young woman she looked a lot like actress Doris Day, but she never paid much attention to her. This on the one hand.

On the other hand, for some time I wanted to do a job on a couple and the title that constantly appeared to me was tea for two (the 1950 film and starring Doris day, a bright blonde who starred in much of the musical cinema of the time). I didn’t know why.

-You said the title was on your mind.

-Yes, and when I start looking for what that meant, I discover that it was a movie with Doris Day and that she was really identical to my mother! The song tea for two it was composed in 1925 and many versions were made. I therefore decide that many of these versions will be pretty much the only music in the work. Then I start to try and what I had planned changes course.

-How?

-At the beginning I imagined a romantic duo like the one the song says: “We will be happy together, we will form a family”. But the interpreters offer me something else: because the dancer, Mauro Dann, is homosexual, and the dancer is no longer a “dancer”: that is, the one I knew as Carolina Tironi for twelve years changed gender during the pandemic and is now he calls Lynx and wants me to talk to him as a boy. So I introduced this situation as an interesting contrast.

From “Tea for two” to one for three

– About what?

-To that ideal family the song talked about with respect to these new differences. And that tea for two ends up being a Tea for three – for this reason, in the end, the homonymous theme by Gustavo Cerati appears- and various shots are brought into play. It wasn’t my initial idea, but the truth is, I never do what I set out to do when I start a new job.

-The “T for T” (or for three) alludes to the fact that you are also on stage, the first time in ten years.

-Yup. I felt that in this work it was necessary to speak. And I speak as the author of the work within the same work. At the beginning I do a monologue on the starting point: the death of my mother, Doris Day, the song. And then the dancers “break” everything, even if this happens in the last ten minutes.

Here is another of my speeches. But the above, while the versions of the tea for two which give a movie-like atmosphere Woody Allenit is told as a purely romantic duet.

-Your participation therefore does not include the dance.

Yes, I dance a little. Not in the air with the harnesses because I can’t anymore, it’s too demanding. But I dance. I love to dance; in the air or on the ground is the same.

-There’s a new current of dancers who don’t leave the stage or who come back when they shouldn’t be old enough to do it, right?

– I think it’s beautiful. Experience and maturity give older dancers something that younger dancers, perhaps more interested in technique, sometimes don’t have.

Info: Preview Saturday 6 July at 21:00 Teatro Aérea, Bartolomé Miter 4272.

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