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Por amor al tango
A visit to Colombia to attend the Festival International de Tango de Medellín in June overlapped with a tour of the country by La Guardia Nueva, the guitar trio from Argentina that, earlier this year, won a first annual world competition for tango orchestras. They presented POR AMOR DEL TANGO, a CD featuring the singer…
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Hermia & Helena
HERMIA & HELENA opens in a New York that might, until the clues cohere, be Buenos Aires. Flowers that could be in any garden, fulgent with color. The echo of drumming on the avenues. A city park – where? The impression depends, to be sure, on a sense of both cities. The Argentine director Matías…
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Our Last Tango
The Wim Wenders produced OUR LAST TANGO, by German Kral, reconciles art with life and narrative cinema with documentary. The lives are those of María Nieves Rego and Juan Carlos Copes, probably the longest enduring couple in Argentine tango as a performing art. I am careful how I put that, because there are social dance…
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Annemarie Heinrich
They might, in an English novel, have been called “womanly,” the left perched elegantly on the grip of the cane, the right draped, like a napkin, across the opposite wrist. From there, the eye follows the arm to the crook of the elbow and up to the face. It is, the portrait, perfectly proportioned to…
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Postales
I knew from seeing her a year ago that Karina Beorlegui can be streetwise and a little punky. Now I know that she can be supremely elegant. I knew that she could be tart and witty and clever. Now I know that she can be lush and suave and cosmopolitan. I knew that she was…
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The Princess of France
There is a type of film that tells a story from Shakespeare, with or without his language, that happens in a time and place that might be called “a world without Shakespeare.” A plot unfolds that is recognizable as that of a Shakespeare play. But, a funny thing about the unfolding: in a milieu that…
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Karina Beorlegui
When Karina Beorlegui alternates between tango and fado, she discerns a unity deeper than the obvious affinities and plays with something more than complementarity or contrast. Going from one to the other feels more like rounding a bend in the lane than switching to a parallel road. She gives voice to the shared historical drama…
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Social Tango
I was privileged to observe a rehearsal of SOCIAL TANGO and am the more regretful that the show’s opening does not overlap with my stay in Buenos Aires. This does not fit the stereotype of a tourist show, but a tourist ought to love it. The dances are not about acrobatics or overwrought sexuality. There…
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Todos tenemos un plan
There is an implicit moral cynicism in the title of this engrossing film from Argentina, which in Spanish is called TODOS TENEMOS UN PLAN. We all have a plan, a game to play, a scam, perhaps, things we want and a way to get them. In this film, there are those who want love, money,…
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Astoria Tango Club
On my first visit to Buenos Aires, an expatriate American that I became acquainted with said to me that the city had a “theme”, which he smartly suggested to me was “nostalgia”. He pointed to the Kennedy-era cars on every block, the coffeehouses with their bow-tied waiters, the grand Parisian architecture, and, although he scarcely…