‘La Muñeca’
The Tango Doll
Tango Theatre Performance with Body Art, 2015
Patronage CITY COUNCIL OF VIMERCATE (MILAN AREA, ITALY)
production: "Abrazos de Tango" Partnership
With: Valentina Vitolo and Raffaele Rufo (tango dancers and actors)
With Alessandra Di Paola: Actress, Set Design Assistant, Costumes Assistant, Dramaturgy Assistant, Body-Art Assistant
Other tango dancers: Gemma Testa, Jampol Fumagalli, Stefano Laguardia, Federica Redaelli, Ermes Faggian, Marinella De Grandi, Luigi De Bortoli, Rita Vinci, Stefania Conti, Annette Kraemer
Narrating voice: Paolo Bertinelli
Story, Direction and Film: Raffaele Rufo
Choreography: Raffaele Rufo and Valentina Vitolo
Body Art and Set Design: Nora Giambelli and Nicola Loda
Costumes: Alessandra Brambilla
Original music: Gabriele Serighelli
Organization: Simone Fabbriconi
Photos: Verso Agency Milan
First performed on July 4, 2015
SYNOPSIS
1920s. In a street corner on the outskirts of Buenos Aires the clandestine music of the Tango gathers a group of people. In this black and white film scene, a romantic reminder of a distant past, ‘la muñeca’ (the doll) appears in her bright red dress. ‘La muñeca’ is the puppet of a woman who in the course of the performance, through her fatal encounter with the Tango, will be filled with feelings, change her appearance and become aware of the thin thread that separates past and present, imagination and reality. ‘La muñeca’ expresses the woman in a provocative sense. We want to question the spectators on the many aspects that belong to women: femininity, courage, passion. The performance blends the experience of dance, music and poetry of Argentine Tango with the art of Body Painting. It is a physical, visual and emotional journey of strong impact, in which the most common feelings of the primordial relationship between man and woman change and shape themselves from scene to scene, just as it happens in life.
VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH TANGO MAGAZINE
On 4 July 2015 Raffaele Rufo was interviewed by Raffaella Catinelli of Tango Magazine just before the first performance of 'La Muñeca: The Tango Doll'. In this interview, Rufo tries to give an overview of what led him to take this angle on "Argentine Tango" and on the main principles of his work. Rufo believes that “The Tango was born and developed out of ‘creative tensions’ - between different music genres and dance styles, cultures, languages, social groups, art-forms, etc. - and that, in order to keep it alive, it is important to keep the experimentation going. At the same time, we need to bear always in mind the roots from which we stem, we need to keep working on the fundamentals of the dance which also the fundamentals of the human encounter”.
“The Tango was born and developed out of ‘creative tensions’ - between different music genres and dance styles, cultures, languages, social groups, art-forms, etc. - and that, in order to keep it alive, it is important to keep the experimentation going. At the same time, we need to bear always in mind the roots from which we stem, we need to keep working on the fundamentals of the dance which also the fundamentals of the human encounter.”