Tango: Between Two Realms

This live performance will feature original tango compositions performed by cellist Joseph Tatum of Darabello alongside the choreography of Susana Rojo Miró and dance of Julia Auzmendi and Fredy Maldonado of Reno Tango Collective.

Joseph Tatum, cellist composer and arranger, approached the Reno Tango Collective in 2017 with the idea of creating a tango album that could go along with a dance show. Joseph had listened to Astor Piazzolla’s music but was curious about the history of tango music and what dancers liked to dance to. The idea was to compose a tango album that challenged the limits of the genre. During over a year of collaborative work –  long conversations and the study of musicians from Fresedo to Shostakovich – the album started taking shape and the dancers started composing their own work. Joseph ended writing his own Darabello original compositions using resources from tango music. He created new techniques on the loop cello in order to more or less faithfully recreate what a tango orchestra sounds like, reinvented together with his own musical influences.

As well as the music explores different realms, different genres, the dancers ventured into dancing in different spheres of the human experience: fantasy and reality. Situated in 3018 in Buenos Aires, a man and a woman meet and experience the broad spectrum of emotions within human connection. Curiosity, attraction, rejection, love, aggression, illusion, togetherness and solitude are some of the realms that the characters experience as they know each other and try to figure out which way to go. The ending is always unknown… does it even matter?