Tango, more than a dance
The Age
Friday March 26, 2010
Cinema patrons will get dance lessons too, writes Philippa Hawker. THIS year's program for La Mirada, the annual festival of Spanish cinema, includes a focus on the art of tango. There are three documentaries and a drama, and free tango lessons for festival patrons after the screenings. It's a program that gives a sense of just how tangible yet elusive the tango is. More than a dance, more than a sound, it's about history, memory, language, identity, tradition and transformation, and about the people who embrace it.El Tango Di Mi Vida (Tango of My Life) is a light-hearted documentary that looks at an amateur competition in a Buenos Aires neighbourhood restaurant. It's not, however, So You Think You Can Dance but Tango Idol: the contestants are singing tango songs, expressions of love, loss, melancholy, pride and a sense of place that have particular meaning for them. They come from a wide range of ages and backgrounds; most of them are women.There's good humour and tangible disappointment as the contestants are whittled down to four, then to one. Yet, however much the contest means to the competitors, the notion of rivalry is subsumed in their appreciation of the form. As the emotional winner proclaims, "They say that tango is life itself, and I agree with that."Cafe de los Maestros, directed by Miguel Kohan, is also about the sound of tango, although it comes not from the passionate amateurs of El Tango Di Mi Vida, but from musical legends from half a century ago. They are in the throes of preparing for an event that will bring them all together: a concert at Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.Meandering, anecdotal, leisurely and erratic, the film engages with past and present, with recollections of glory days and the exhilaration of the immediacy of performance.The third documentary on the program, Gabriel Pomeraniek's feature, Tango: A Story with Jews, has an intriguing epigraph. "The tango is like a piece of blotting paper; it absorbs everything" €” a perfect starting point for a film about the richly inclusive tradition of tango in Buenos Aires, and the important contribution made by its Jewish community.And, for those for whom tango means dance, Sally Potter's 1997 The Tango Lesson embraces movement and its implications. Filmed in Paris, London and Los Angeles and shot primarily in luminous black and white, its central characters are a woman filmmaker who wants to learn to dance the tango, and a male dancer who wants to be in a film. Potter plays herself, or a version of herself, and dancer Pablo Veron does the same, in a work that's a risky, personal and unpredictable exploration of intimacy and dance.Potter's film aspires to something that Argentina's celebrated writer Jorge Luis Borges said about the tango. That it is "a direct expression of something that poets have often tried to state in words: the belief that a fight may be a celebration".La Mirada is at ACMI from April 1-12. www.lamirada.org.au
© 2010 The Age
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