“It’s my passion, my life.” Miguel Angel Zotto, tango legend, says it immediately after the great success of the show-event on Sunday at the Vittorio Emanuele in Messina, «Tango. Historias de Astor», for the Music and Dance season of the Theater Authority. But we had all seen it clearly, especially the enthusiastic audience of tango dancers, who also came from Reggio and Catania, led by the main schools in the area, now strongholds of the most beautiful dance in the world.
On stage, that passion was evident: in him, paired with the magnificent Daiana Guspero (the best demonstration of that ancient milonguero saying: «In tango the man proposes and the woman shines»), in the other three couples of dancers of the Tangox2 company (the perfect Mauro Rodriguez and Suria Lopez Echeverria, Cristian Luna and Ludovica Antonietti, Pablo Garcia and Roberta Beccarini), in the musicians of the Tango Sonos Orquesta – Nicola Ippolito on the piano, Alessio Menegoli on the double bass, Simone Rossetti Bazzaro on the violin and Antonio Ippolito on the bandoneón, the instrument, or rather the most powerful voice in the universe of tango, its “fuelle”, its lung and vital breath. And in the two voices that accompanied the entire show: Carlos Habiague, elegant and with melodious power, who seemed to have come here directly from the Buenos Aires of the “golden era”, and Jessica Lorusso, young but already established talent, who was the narrator. Because tango is music and voice, and gesture and story, all together.
And then he, Astor Piazzolla, the other protagonist who hovered over all of us, with clips of videos in which he appeared as a boy, a child, a consecrated musician, first opposed and then already a myth, whose music opened and then closed the scene (followed only by the traditional «Cumparsita», which in the world code of milongas is farewell and goodbye) with the notes of one of the most loved tangos of all time, albeit “modern”, a true programmatic manifesto starting from the title: «Libertango».
The show (born in 2021, entirely written and choreographed by Zotto) brings together two anniversaries: the centenary of Piazzolla’s birth and the 40 years of Zotto’s career. Two revolutionaries, how can one be revolutionary in tango, which has been conservative and innovative since its mixed, multi-layered and popular birth. Where revolutionaries don’t erase what was there before: they transform it. «They transform it, yes – Zotto tells me –, because that is the pure essence of tango. If Astor Piazzolla hadn’t played with Troilo, if he hadn’t done the arrangement of “Quejas de Bandoneón”, if he hadn’t lived with the orchestras he played with, if he hadn’t met Gardel, he wouldn’t have been what he was: he is the living history of tango.”
A story that we see unfold on the big screen, from the beginnings that are right within the great tradition, with some of its most sublime protagonists: Carlos Gardel, Aníbal Troilo, Horacio Ferrer. Then the turning point, the meeting with a legendary teacher, Nadia Boulanger, in Paris, who listened to Piazzolla play the piano and told him: «This isn’t your instrument, is it?». No, his was the vital breath of the bandoneón. And it was in Paris that Piazzolla and Zotto met for the first time: «We had a friend in common, a true ambassador of all the Argentines who arrived in Paris, José Pons: we met and talked a lot about history, his story. He told me how it started and I wrote this script through his story. From that evening I began to experience his music.” Living history.
A story that we hear in music (from «Quejas de Bandoneón», that heartbreaking “lamento del bandoneón” which is one of Troilo’s immortal pieces, to «Zum» by Osvaldo Pugliese, full of scales and dissonances, to the most beautiful pieces by Piazzolla, the moving «Adios Nonino» dedicated to the memory of his father, the strength of «Maria de Buenos Aires», the first tango opera in the world, of 1968, of which Piazzolla then entrusted the choreography to Zotto for the Broadway staging), which we see in the gestures, in the figures of the dancers as in an alphabet of passions: from the tango of the origins, a mixture of union and struggle, of courtship and contention, the tango that men danced among themselves and women among themselves in the conventillos, before meeting in the free space of the milonga; the tango of emigrants from fifty countries who, in the Lampedusa that was Buenos Aires at the beginning of the twentieth century, exchanged music and nostalgia. And then Paris and the tango that is refined, allies itself with the piano, spreads throughout the world. A driving force that has not been lost: «It is growing in the world – Zotto tells me, with ardor and conviction –. Every year people start dancing in all parts of the world: now Africa has arrived, there is a school in Africa. And I still haven’t been there…”.
It’s a promise, obviously: tango is humanity going around the world, spreading hugs. A tour of the twentieth century and of the world that we take with musicians, with dancers: it is a concert, performance and story, all together, as multifaceted as tango. With a fiery centre: Zotto and Guspero, elegant and imaginative, fun and daring in the milonga (the light-hearted, fast and co-op part of the tango, which had its own space in the show), precise as a compás but sinuous and creative on every proposal or hook of the music.
And in the end, by will of Zotto, choreographer of desires and humanity, a milonga is improvised in the foyer of the theatre: once the curtain has fallen the music starts flowing again, the dancers return to dance, this time for themselves, mixed with the spectators. «See what welcome, what love?» I ask Zotto. He smiles, looking at the people dancing – “a social dance” he had underlined: popular and social, and endless -, the legend alongside the beginners, the professionals alongside the amateurs. All happy to celebrate the same thing. No, not to celebrate it: to be it.