The Tradition is Transgressive 2017

The most significant TangoForge Berlin production was our second year at the Contemporary Tango Festival 2017 in the Berlin Hauptbahnhof. The core concept of this show was to present Argentine Tango in the cultural context of a hip hop cypher.

A cypher is a regular social event, like a weekly milonga for hip hop dancers. It’s open and inclusive and focused on skills development. Participants may later go on to compete in a battle (a more extraordinary event, like a tango festival), having gained confidence and skill by first performing with the encouraging community of a cypher. At a cypher, dancers enter the circle when they feel inspired by the DJ’s music and ready to perform. They exit after a minute or several, when physically or creatively exhausted. The members of the circle give their attention and enthusiastic vocal cheers to each dancer, and hug, high-five, or congratulate them on completion. The cypher includes different levels of dancers, from beginners to experts, who take the stage in an egalitarian manner, equally encouraged. Girls receive special enthusiasm when they dare to enter this masculine game.

We chose the cypher as a context for tango for several reasons. One is because we wanted to model an atmosphere of encouragement rather than critique as a social tango community. Second because we wanted to show that tango as a dance can be expressed in many other aesthetics than the cliché, including hip hop’s aggressive physical, virtuosic, risk-taking aesthetic. Third because we wanted to connect these two seemingly different and separate cultures both developed in the African diaspora.

The cast for our cypher included professional dancers, our three apprentices, amateur dancers, and students. The least experienced performer, Leon, had been dancing only 6 months. Most of the dancers who performed in the cypher were doing their very first tango performance. In order to ensure their success while maintaining our commitment to improvisation, we did two things:

First we created a story in which each dancer had a character to inhabit. We had OGs (Original Gangstas), YGs (Young Gangstas), good girls, gangsta’s girls, soured friendships, and new business alliances in the offing.This story was the basis of their costumes and the choreography by which they entered and exited the dance floor. 

Second, each couple was assigned two elements from which to improvise. They trained toward a 60 second improvisation maximizing the variations of these two elements. This structure was designed to ensure the dances would be improvised but not repetitive or suffering the expectable Mark’s performance brain-freeze.

For this Director’s Cut we made a new, shorter video of the cypher without the rest of the long show, with some real hiphop cypher footage interwoven.