One step short of total fusion: TANGO

Linz University of Arts puts on a curtain raiser for Linz09 in the autumn of 08

Idea and Concept: Herbert Lachmayer
Project management: Bea Henzl – Tango Sin Limites
Dancers: Carlos and Rosa Forte-Berg (Argentinia)
Music: Ensamble Urbano // Jhibaro Rodriguez (guitar), Juan Carlos Paniaqua (accordion), Serkan Gürkan (violin), Carlos Pino (double bass)
DJ: Bea – Tango Sin Limites

Venue: Café Landgraf, Linz – Urfahr
Time: Saturday, 4 October 2008
Start: 6:30 p.m.

How to cope with passion is one of the most demanding challenges faced by any culture. What is at stake after all are strategies of arousal when we are talking about seduction or the heat of desire when eroticism turns into sex. Deferment as a cultural technique is a major contributory factor to libidinous excitement, a kind of holding back in the expectation of even more intense pleasure. Religions and churches have always used sexual morality to secure themselves a monopoly on ecstasy and yoke pleasure maximisation with the harness of procreation. The human obsession with freedom and the emancipation of the principle of individualized lust follow other rules. Rituals of pleasure maximisation may tend to contain an additional spiritual element but they are always grounded in the physical domain.
Tango contains all this – the modulation of emotion and ecstatic fusion, even if a certain distance is always maintained: as an art form it is all about what we do with our bodies. Tango is a distillation of pure passion and it is no surprise that it was occasionally banned for its alleged obscenity as it was felt to be overly suggestive and to demonstrate what couples will do in bed with a clarity denied to fantasists with no props for their imagination. Controlled self-exhibition, where every step back is no less than another twist to the spiral of arousal – and it’s all happening so publicly and with such exquisite counterpoint. Complete bodily control is much more than mere perfectionism, it is “intuitive perfection” – a playful encounter with the “volcanic mystery” of the fusion of mind, body and passion.
Born in Buenos Aires, tango has grown up into a highly regulated form for intimate yet non-committal encounters, for two people to be very close to each other for the duration of one dance. Such encounters take place on the quasi obvious premise that barriers in terms of nationality, class, age, gender are not relevant (any longer).
This tango gala serves not only as an autumnal curtain raiser for our exhibition “Welt im Kopf” but also helps round off the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue 2008. At the same time it is a metaphor for a highly differentiated popular culture, a “pathos formula” of passion, which has already made a change for the better in the aesthetic understanding of artists and intellectuals.