Because the scenic tango is moving further and further away from the traditional tango

If we stop and think for two seconds about what the term “scenic tango dance” suggests to us, the image that will appear will probably be this: a dancer dressed in an impeccable dress – 1940s fashion – fluttering in the air, not without passion, to a tight ballerina in a dress with a deep side slit and dazzling glitter.

However, although the image evoked in the previous paragraph is the most insistent, this genre – which began to take shape with the first tango shows of the 1930s – changed over time. And not only by changing but also by breaking the previous models.

The brand new premiere of I’m not -a show created collectively by Milagros Rolandelli, Lisandro Eberle and Ollantay Rojas- offers us the opportunity to retrace some traits and milestones of this very particular genre which is the stage tango and which I’m not, in some way, it is questioned. We will return to him.

Ollantay Rojas himself, in an interview before the premiere, pointed out two dates that frame the apogee and twilight, according to him, of the stage tango. On the one hand, November 1983 with the premiere in a Parisian theater of the music magazine Argentine tango by Claudio Segovia and Héctor Orezzoli. On the other hand, the death of the famous dancer and choreographer Juan Carlos Copes in January 2021.

The audacity of Juan Carlos Copes

Juan Carlos Copes was, from his youth, a strong milonguero who frequented the ballrooms of the northern neighborhoods of the city of Buenos Aires in its heyday. That was the environment that fed him: that of tango as a ballroom dance, which he will then bring to the stage with a choreographic elaboration that did not exist until then.

In 1955, at the age of 24 and with the somewhat unconscious audacity of a complete stranger, he proposed and convinced one of the most powerful theatrical entrepreneurs of the time, Carlos A. Petit, to stage a tango show he had imagined. from a plot idea.

Thus, with this inaugural step, Copes began a long and successful journey, strongly influenced by Hollywood musical comedy, albeit with the language of tango, of course; and even more marked by the figure of his admired Gene Kelly.

Copes’ career, always alongside his partner María Nieves, embarks on a great international flight in the United States and more particularly in New York, where the couple will return in 1985 with Argentine tango. Claudio Segovia had hired them as dancers and Copes also as choreographer.

The boom of the “Argentine tango”

To give an idea of ​​the significance of this show in New York – and which had already been a devastating success in Europe – just think that the production was sold to a Broadway theater for $ 300,000, an insignificant figure considering that Argentine tango he has collected that amount per week since the first.

Segovia and Orellano have given a very different prejudice to the tango-stage genre: nothing, or practically no plot; a completely stripped scene; each couple with a different personality and a refined yet understated delicacy in the wardrobe.

All of these dancers – the average age was over 50 and one of them, Virulazo, was clinically obese – were of popular and milonguero origins. Segovia found the perfect term to describe the cast and the show: “Reo-chic”.

The path of Plebs and Zotto

The younger couple Argentine tango, Milena Plebs and Miguel Angel Zotto, who had just joined the Broadway cast, left him after a while to find their own way. In 1988 they created their own show, staged exclusively with the two of them and which forced them to make dizzying costume changes, conceived by Renata Schussheim.

In the now classic magazine format, they have recreated the repertoire of music and dance styles of the Cachafaz days. Antonio Todaro, a former bricklayer who became a famous tango teacher, and Pepito Avellanada, a great amateur expert in milonga rhythms, trained Zotto and Plebs in authentic ballroom dances; this was the most important material of his creations, far from the erotic-acrobatic qualities so much imposed in subsequent shows by other companies.

Plebs and Zotto have preserved the purity of the genre’s origins and had a great international success. The culmination of his production was the extraordinary a night of tangohe made his debut in 1996 and was soon invited to the prestigious Lyon Dance Biennale in France.

The plan of “Noestango”

Let’s go back to the very cool now I’m not and its relationship with the currents that preceded it. For now, the three creators have written a kind of manifesto:

“We won’t be wearing heels, hair gel or 1940s clothes; we will not beat women like floor rags; we will not seek applause at the end of each topic; we will not break the “fourth wall” to please the public; we will not pay homage to past glories. All of the above will have an exception if it appears as a problem.

Hence, the development of I’m not It is proposed, to a large extent, as an exposition of various problems in the following scenes: the woman “brings” the man into the dance and not the other way around as tradition dictates; the typical tango embrace is presented as a violent act; the woman manipulates or is manipulated; two men are intertwined in a close union, in which it is difficult to discern the limits between one and the other.

With five excellent live Revolutionary Quintet musicians and five no less excellent dancers – Milagros Rolandelli, Lisandro Eberle, David Palo, Marcela Vespasiano and Nicolás Minoliti- I’m not It is placed much more in the field of research and experimentation than in that of choreographic elaboration.

But what it cannot, and perhaps does not want, is to do without the vocabulary of tango dance: its characteristic forms, steps and language run through the work from start to finish, even if almost completely stripped of any sentimental or emotional connotations.

INFO: Tuesday in August and first Tuesday in September at 8.00 pm at El Galpón de Guevara, Guevara 326

MFB