ANTHONY HOWELL & LINDI KÖPKE

Upcoming performances:

May 2011-May 2013:

Tango Schumann is available for bookings. 

  

Current projects (please scroll down):

 

Homage to Chopin  - with Katarzyna Gorna

 

For their 2012 programme, Tango Schumann will present Homage to Chopin.  In traditional tango, dancers demonstrating their skills usually dance three numbers, followed by an encore.  They may use a tango, a tango waltz (vals) or a milonga – since these are the principle rhythms enjoyed when there is a gathering of dancers at a salon.  With Chopin, there is also a range of rhythms to explore.  So while it is tempting to dance three nocturnes, and remain in the same mood throughout the performance, we have chosen to work with a variety of rhythms.

Liszt speaks of ‘the little groups of super-added notes falling like light drops of pearly dew upon the melodic figure.’  His biographical rhapsody on Chopin is so overblown that it perfectly underscores the essential notion of Romanticism.  

Music was to the 19th century what visual art was to the twentieth. 

In its day, Romanticism was distinguished by the belief in ‘correspondence’ – it was essential to evoke, to assign natural or human characteristics and emotional value to every cadence.  Everything suggested something else. There was a magnification of implication.  This was the buzz idea of its day.

Chopin pioneered a tempo rubato – a rule of irregularity – similar to tango.  And tango has assigned to it a romanticism bordering on the melodramatic.  For both, the melody undulates to and fro.  Tango Schumann will be dancing or simply listening to certain nocturnes, exploring a vals also, working with one of the noisier etudes and finishing with a contredanse. 

Zal will be mingled with Duende.

But can we find meaning through the music for every movement, guided by the authentic Zal of Chopin – pity, regret, resentment, sorrow?  The theme of emotional articulation through abstract action is one continued from last year’s Homage to Schumann, performed for Schumann’s bicentennial in Zwickau, his birth-place last year. 

 

Tango Story - with Lindi Kopke

 

A key aim of Tango Schumann is to expand the range of tango as a dance-form, demonstrating that the style can be effectively applied to more musical forms than traditional tango.  For the Tango Story programme, Lindi and Anthony arrange their dances in the historical order of the music's composition.

They dance first to a moving Symphonic Etude by Schumann, then to a traditional tango, La melodia del Corazon, recorded by Edgardo Donato in 1940 with Romeo Gavio singing, then to Duke Ellington's Isfahan, from his Far-East Suite (1966), and finally to a piece of electronic tango by Axel Krygier called Taxi Nocturno.  Thus the story begins with classical music, continues with traditional tango, then jazz, and concludes with contemporary 'tango nuevo'.

This programme is designed as an outreach programme, suitable for schools, for tango salons and festivals; bringing Tango Schumann's work to a wider public and demonstrating how versatile the tango is today.

 

 

Longer term projects:

Anthony Howell:  Homage to Morel

In the longer term, Tango Schumann is planning to participate in a new venture in which tango skills will be combined with performance art.   The project: aims to contrast the present with the past.  There will be two pieces performed one evening.  We intend to premiere this ambitious programme in Paris in 2012/13.

Performance 1: Going

 

Performance 2: Quintet

 

A source of inspiration for Going was the film L'Année dernière à Marienbad by Alain Resnais and Alan Robbe-Grillet, who were in turn inspired by a novella The Invention of Morel by the Argentine author Adolfo Bioy Casares.  Bioy Casares is the foremost exponent of what might be dubbed “the conceptual surreal”.  The full programme is dedicated to the inventiveness of his character ‘Morel’. 

 

The show will be performed by Tango Schumann’s expanded company: 

Six performer/dancers:  three men and three women.  Any five in any one piece.

1:  Going

Going is a performance by the Theatre of Mistakes, a performance company founded by Anthony Howell in 1974.  This particular piece for five performers was first shown at the Cambridge International Poetry Festival in 1977, and subsequently at the Musee d'Art Modern, in Paris during the Biennale de Paris in the same year and also at F.I.A.C. in the Grand Palais.  Subsequently it was performed in Belgrade, at the Student Cultural Centre; in Amsterdam, at the Mickery Theatre; in New York, at the Theatre for the New City; in Pittsburgh, at the Cathedral of Learning, and, memorably for its participants, at Pittsburgh's State Penitentiary.  In 1980, Going was performed at The Jeanetta Cochrane Theatre, London, as part of a season of pieces by the Theatre of Mistakes.  A programme note at the time described the piece:

The notion of a performance where the early scenes of an act are instigated by one performer with subsequent performers trying to repeat the actions instigated has for a long time been a preoccupation of the company.  "Going" explores what this plan allows when every gesture is rehearsed.  Attempting to be each other rather than attempting to enact different characters, each performer has to learn all of the parts.  "Going" is a fugue put together out of the verbal and physical mannerisms of departure.  It concerns going or attempting to go.  This content seems to have its roots in the form of the structure itself, or perhaps in the exasperation experienced when an exciting prospect becomes a fixed idea: the desire to get away from the problem, or to go away from each other, when the participants in a situation are bound together as closely as the strands of a knotted ring.  Each weaves a role identical to that of the others into different moments from the same role.

 

 

2.  Quintet

Tango Schumann, whose dancers specialise in performing the Argentine tango to classical music – interpreting works by Robert Schumann and other classical composers – will be expanded in order to perform Going and then Quintet.

Five dancers, all experts in the tango, mirror each other in the dance and demonstrate the art of leading and following.  However, not only do they exchange partners, they also exchange roles.  Imbuing the piece with an eerie melancholy, the music of the romantic era accompanies these fluid, ever-changing partnerships, where, as in Going, any performer can occupy any role,

Tango Schumann have performed at Tango Extravaganza International Festival, at Modern Art Oxford, the Ikon Gallery and other venues around Britain.  In 2010 they were invited to perform in Schumann’s birthplace, at the Kunstsammlungen, Zwickau, in an exhibition celebrating the composer’s bicentennial. Quintet is designed to accompany Going, and augment the resonances of the earlier piece by providing a translation of its performative preoccupations into the language of dance.

INTERCONNECTIONS:

Thirty years separate the two pieces, yet interesting resonances come from their juxtaposition. 

Going concerns following in time, and the art of tango involves following, but this is nearly instantaneous, so following in the dance is more like mirroring in space.  The two pieces share a preoccupation with what it means to repeat, mirror or follow another’s actions. The notion of temporal repetition in Going, emerged first as a structure for improvisation.  Tango provides dancers with a similar structure.  Both systems can provide the armature for choreographed actions. 

In Going, all roles are interchangeable, and can be performed by men or women.  This is true of leading and following in tango. 

While the standard view of tango is of men leading and women following, men often practise with each other, while women often learn to lead: so there is no intrinsic reason why women should not lead men and women, just as men may lead women and men.  These variations get explored in Quintet.

Following and mirroring have a strong appeal, and they are the basis of countless children’s games, song systems such as cannons, musical structures such as fugues, as well as providing the dynamic for catwalks and military drills. Repetition is one of those fundamentals that sculpts our universe, and the notion of symmetry in time and in space has an obvious bearing on physics.  This programme exploits these resonances to create an eerie dialogue with the audience that may prompt an investigation of the property that constitutes an individual’s identity.