The Tango Touch (2015-17)

The Tango Touch project is a performance-based investigation of the Tango dance in various public and performance spaces of the city of Melbourne. As an artist migrating to Melbourne I tried to develop a connection between myself, my art practice and my new city. Tango offered me an opportunity to experience the inner heart of the city as a “stage” where people move following certain rhythms and trajectories.

I have been observing on almost a daily basis people waiting for trains, taking trams, crossing streets, walking on pavements or in laneways, etc. focusing on their feet and legs and chests and arms etc. and on the ways in which they physically connect or don’t connect to each other. I have been listening selectively to the various soundtracks of city life - humans and machines - and to their surprising overlappings and mergings. The more I dwelled in the city, the more I felt part of it and perceived a creative tension between the spontaneous potential of people’s movements as “dance” and the instrumental dimension of movements as determined by the dominant patterns of city life (straight lines, scheduled times, public announcements, etc.).

During this time in Melbourne I have also engaged in a series of pedagogical performative activations and in the envisioning and organisation of social participatory events within the Melbourne Tango community and the network of Tango teachers. These events were aimed to activate spaces for social inclusion and collaboration while “queering” the tango scene by contributing to a culture of experimentation and playfulness.

To know more about the pedagogical and participatory areas of “The Tango Touch” project:

The Tango Touch: Pedagogical performative activations and participatory events

See also The Tango Touch: Performing publicness (2)

 
 

THE TANGO TOUCH: PERFORMING PUBLICNESS (1)

 

CROSSWALK TANGO

2016, Melbourne CBD

Site responsive performance

Conducted in the middle of a busy pedestrian crossing in the inner streets of Melbourne, this improvisational performance explores the possibility of having a shared experience of internal time in the public space of the city by becoming vulnerable to the otherness of the outside world. In this approach to the crosswalk, the Tango dance can become a gateway to promote diversity and foster plurality.

 

SoUL CODE: AN INNER CHOREOGRAPHY OF TANGO

2017, Sally Walker Project Space (Geelong)

Site responsive performance and video installation

This video presents the movement exploration of my inner tango in the non-conventional space of an art gallery (Sally Walker Project Space, Geelong) by revealing the sensuous traces of the dance form as they are enskinned on the external map of my body. In improvising without a (human) partner, the tactile exploration of the gallery space (floor, walls, viewer with a camera and pedestrians walking outside) provides different perceptual reference points in the absence of the traditional framework of tango practice while bringing to the surface the porous boundaries between internal life and external world.

 
 

SIDEWALK TANGO: ATTUNING TO THE MOVEMENT OF THE WORLD

2017, Geelong

Site responsive performance

This video shows the process of sensory attunement I am going through in the attempt to explore the connection between the inside and the outside of my bodily experience on a sidewalk near the train station of the city of Geelong (Melbourne). In this improvised inquiry, conducted through the movement framework of Argentine Tango, attuning to the world is approached as a process of listening to how sensory inputs are affecting me and how I can connect with the bodily sensations felt moment by moment.