Based on a detailed and unprecedented compilation of data on Argentine cinema and tango - from its origins to the present -, Unicamp researcher Natacha Muriel López Gallucci identified much more than a common history between these two artistic and cultural expressions. Throughout history, the danced tango and the cinema filmed in Argentina have, in fact, maintained “an intense romance full of tensions”, reveals the scholar who has just defended her doctorate thesis on the subject.

With tango performances in cinema, says Natacha Gallucci, the Argentine people begin to see themselves on the big screen and, when this happens, they observe, like, criticize and improve themselves. She maintains that the cinematographic images produced by Argentine cinema, from the silent period to the present, contributed and influenced the gestural coding of the danced tango. Furthermore, she adds, the oral transmission of knowledge about tango developed a philosophy of the body in the country.

A philosopher born in Rosário, a municipality in the province of Santa Fé, in Argentina, Natacha Gallucci has just defended her doctoral thesis at the Postgraduate Program in Multimedia at the Institute of Arts (IA) at Unicamp. In her research, she promotes an aesthetic discussion based on the relationship between Argentine cinema and tango performances.

“At the beginning of the 20th century, cinema and tango dance began to intertwine and spread, using each other's tools, and generating their own image language. At this time, for example, many film directors were also poets, musicians, painters or theatrical set designers. The majority, immigrants, belonged to the bohemia of this nascent rhythm that was tango. Consequently, it is not strange that the language of tango was captured as one of the main languages ​​of Argentine cinema and became a 'model of representation'. In the research, I found hypotheses that claim that there is a kind of union, of marriage between these two devices”, acknowledges the researcher.

The study was guided by professor Francisco Elinaldo Teixeira, who works in the Department of Cinema (Decine) at IA. This is the researcher's second doctorate, who already defended her thesis in 2008 in the area of ​​aesthetics and philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH) at Unicamp.

Natacha Gallucci is a choreographer and performer trained in classical and folk dances at the Escuela Nacional de Danzas Nigelia Soria, in Argentina. She runs a tango company in the district of Barão Geraldo, in Campinas, and coordinates the Working Group (GT) Tango & Culture of Rio de La Plata since 2004. The GT offers a space for theoretical and practical research as part of extension projects at Unicamp's Casa do Lago Cultural Space. 

The show Tango, a philosophy of embrace – the result of his doctoral research – was awarded by the Performance 2014 Project of the Center for Integration, Documentation and Cultural Dissemination (Ciddic) at Unicamp. The presentation takes place on the 26th and 27th of November, respectively, at the cultural spaces Maria Monteiro and Casa do Lago. Under the artistic and choreographic direction of Natacha Gallucci, the show presents several film fragments and performances in tango dance and singing. There will be the participation of the String Quintet of the Unicamp Symphony Orchestra. The arrangements and musical direction are by Argentine pianist Joel Tortul.

The choreographer explains that during the research she found the need to thoroughly describe the philosophical meaning of the oral transmission of tango. In this way, according to her, it was possible to interpret “this current furor that generates an immense amount of tango documentaries, even with little money and an economic recession in Argentina.”

“Tango, before the 20th century, was a ritualized event, popularly transmitted in Rio de La Plata. In the first decades of the century, it was adopted by Buenos Aires theater and cinema, which spread it massively. Despite social resistance to its hitherto unprecedented bodily form, tango spreads, inscribing in the world history of dance a bodily device linked to its closed, intimate embrace and its untimely interpretation of the music that dominates the dynamics of the dance”, states.

For the Unicamp scholar, there was a “second birth of tango”, at the beginning of the 20th century, in Argentina, with the arrival of the cinematograph, a device and technique considered a precursor of cinema. The philosopher also remembers the recording of tango in the circus as a contribution to this “birth”.

She cites the example of the short film Argentinian tango, directed by Eugenio Py and produced by Casa Lepage & Cia, whose exhibition in 1906 generated wide repercussions in Argentina, Europe and the United States. This “event”, according to the researcher, operated as a rite of passage that demonstrated a nascent body technique, bringing tango and cinema together for the first time.

Resistance and tensions

Tango's bodily expression generated social resistance in Argentina, especially after the European industrial revolution. With the consolidation of a new class, the industrial bourgeoisie, tango became a form of resistance to serial work through the concept of improvisation. The scholar clarifies that this new class advocated the European waltz as a perfect machine, a product of the gears of female and male bodies working in synchrony.

“The creation process in tango is associated with a form of subjective knowledge. His performative quest is inserted in a ritualized cultural context. The famous cadence accessed by tango dancers is a product of the tension intrinsic to their practice, whose philosophical core is the affirmation of difference, the concatenation of bodies as sources of the creative subject's instincts in criticizing the ideal of unity and mechanicity”, he argues.

The consolidation of tango dance refers to the cultural context of Rio de Janeiro in the process that goes from the independence of the Spanish colony (1810-1818), through the conflict of the Paraguayan War (1864-1870), until the first waves of migration. The body technique of tango, according to Natacha Gallucci, is the product of the rearrangement of modes of body expression existing in local folklore that are little by little recreated through gestural reading and the appropriation of the great European immigration. Gradually, these immigrants “defined” tango as the unique way of dancing of the emerging Argentine class.

“The emergence of tango as a dance occurs at a time of social restructuring in Argentina. The dance known today as tango had its formation associated, to a large extent, with the hug practiced at barracks dances, where women accompanied the battalions of mestizos and mixed race people sent to fight on the borders. After the War of the Triple Alliance ended, these practices moved to the living spaces close to the barracks reinstalled in Buenos Aires”, he contextualizes.

Selected films

In the study, the choreographer and performer analyzes the relationship between filmic images and the recording of the body in the tango danced in 30 selected Argentine films. 200 frames were extracted from this film production for a thorough investigation that allowed the identification of the main tango choreographic repertoires recorded by cinema.

The scholar emphasizes that the photograms serve as visual support for readers who do not know how to dance or know Argentine cinema. “In parallel to the extracted frames, we carried out a photographic study that synthesized key aspects of the coding of the tango dance choreographic cells contributed by cinema in the construction of its scenic language. The couple's framework, the structural division of the body and the process of creating tango for cinema were considered. The photographic study serves as a reading guide on the bodily creation processes of tango in Argentine cinema, extending to the pedagogical training of new performers.”

The 200 extracted frames were analyzed considering the references of five pedagogical methods that reflect on the social aspect of dance, scenic construction through improvisation and the philosophical values ​​of the body in the transmission of dance. The methods were created by dancers and choreographers Sebastián Arce and Mariana Montes; Victoria Colosio; Juan Carlos Copes; Rodolfo and Glória Dinzel; and Nicanor Lima.

Among the films analyzed, the philosopher highlights that some were recently restored by Funarte (Fundação Nação das Artes), in Brazil, and by the Museo del Cine, in Argentina. “There is film material from the silent period that seemed lost and was recently found and restored. When I started the research in 2009, I started with a set of more than 200 films, reducing this number to 30 in the final analysis. The justification for the selection is linked to the vigor with which these productions represent the consolidation of a characteristic language in Argentine audiovisual history.”

The period covered by the study corresponds to the silent cinema phase (1900-1933), industrial classic (1933-1955), modern and contemporary (1955-current). The philosopher analyzes the choreographic evolution and styles of tango in the main directors and choreographers of each period. 200 hours of interviews were also carried out with audiovisual directors, historians and dancers from Argentina.

Publication

Thesis: “Cinema, body and philosophy: contributions to the study of performances in Argentine cinema”
Author: Natacha Muriel López Gallucci
Advisor: Francisco Elinaldo Teixeira
Unity: Institute of Arts (IA)