Five editions ago, Oriente Occidente closed with a tango show featuring the company Tangueros, created by Alejandro Aquino and Mariachiara Michieli with some of the best members of the unforgettable group of Claudio Segovia and Héctor Orezzoli. In these five years, the nostalgic and sensual dance loved by Borges has returned frequently to the theatrical and cinematic scene. Just think of the gliding dances performed by Antonio Banderas and Madonna in Alan Parker's event film, Evita, or the extensive tour that brought the Tangueros Company back to Italy last winter. A dance of contamination since its distant late-19th-century origins, tango returns to the Festival this year with A fuego lento, a boundary-crossing show presented by French choreographer Catherine Barbessou, one of the new names in contemporary dance across the Alps. Trained with Françoise and Dominique Dupuy, Barbessou worked in the '80s with L'Esquisse by Joëlle Bouvier and Régis Obadia, and with the group of Claude Brumachon, founding the company Quat'zarts in 1990.
"The encounter with Argentine tango and its universe," explains Barbessou, "sparked a desire in me that I've been working on since '94: to combine my experience in contemporary dance and tango to create a show that is not a simple demonstration or imitation of tango style, but a reflection on loneliness, desire, violence, complicity, the current malaise that drives us back to couple dancing." The passion for Argentine tango, which erupted in Barbessou four years ago, led the French artist to Buenos Aires to study with masters Pupi Castello, Graziella Gonzales, and Gustavo Naveira. Returning to France, Barbessou continued to devote herself to couple dancing celebrated by Borges, working with Federico Rodriguez Moreno, an Argentine teacher who became a dancer with the Quat'zarts Company in '93. Successfully presented at the Lyon Biennale in '96, A fuego lento is a show that tells the tensions of today's couple through a dance in which the partners leave and come back, clash and move away, never managing, explains Pierre Monette in the French dossier of the show, to become independent from the attractive force that binds them. The contamination between tango and contemporary dance is thus nourished by a physicality in which the matrix of L'Esquisse and the technique of Argentine couple dancing can be felt. All danced sensually to a soundtrack that freely combines Carlos Gardel with rock and oriental music.
