Te amo, Tango! is proud to Welcome Javier Rodriguez and Moira Castellano to Kuala Lumpur for the first time in 2017!
Don’t miss this opportunity to learn tango from these amazing instructors, and to watch this beautiful couple, here exclusively on the weekend of 17-19th November2017.
For more information on the workshops and the gala, please visit https://sites.google.com/view/javier-moira-malaysia2017/programme.
ABOUT JAVIER RODRIGUEZ AND MOIRA CASTELLANO
Javier Rodriguez, a milonguero with vast experience as a professional dancer; is one of the
world’s most sought after and prominent Tango Maestro of the century. For the past 20 years
Javier has been a part of the most famous tango festivals in Argentina, Europe and Asia, where
he never stopped dazzling the participants with his art of dance and pedagogy. Javier Rodriguez
began dancing tango when he was 18. Together with his first professional partner, Geraldine
Rojas, they quickly became one of the most sought after tango couples in the world. They
toured the globe, performing in the best theaters and working in the most prestigious tango
festivals. The next stage of Javier’s professional tango career was his partnership with another
prominent dancer, Andrea Misse, with whom Javier worked for 9 years until Andrea’s tragic
death in 2012. Together with Andrea, Javier toured throughout Europe, Asia, Brazil, Uruguay,
and Chile and they continued being one of the most popular couples worldwide. In Asia, Javier
made his first visit to Taipei in year 2003 and today he has built-up numerous reputable Tango
Festivals in Asia such as Taipei Tango Festival and Seoul Tango Festival. Javier has also made his
footsteps in Sydney, Hong Kong, Busan, Tokyo, New Zealand, Singapore and India and has
implanted his dance style and grown many talented dancers in this part of the world. Javier’s
teaching focuses on posture and elegance, emphasizing those many little important details that
can polish a dance. His highly impeccable dance movements and intrinsic musicality will make
one caught mesmerized.
Javier is touring with Moira Castellano, a professional tango dancer, choreographer and
teacher. She has an extensive dance background going back to her childhood, when she
studied ballet and modern dance. She discovered tango in 1996 in Rosario, Argentina, with
maestro Orlando Paiva. Shortly after she moved to Buenos Aires where she studied with various
famous maestros, such as Vanina Bilous and Roberto Herrera, Natalia Games and Gabriel Agnio,
Fabian Salas, Gustavo Naveira, among others. Between 1999 and 2006 Moira lived in Paris,
France, performing as part of the Caterine Berbesou company in work that was based on tango,
theater, and modern dance. After partnering with Pablo Inza for a couple of years, in 2008
Moira began her partnership with Gaston Torelli, with whom she has travelled all over the world,
teaching tango dancers, as well as performing at milongas and on stage in Europe, Canada, Asia,
and the US. Experienced teacher, Moira Castellano is currently one of the references in the
Argentine tango pedagogy. She is renowned for the quality of movement in her dance, in which
she projects elegance, personality, tradition, and innovation. In her teaching Moira focuses on
basic concepts, such as liberating your body and conditioning it for dancing, connecting with
yourself and your partner, internal movement vs external movement, sensibility and quality of
movement. Moira is also a co-organizer of Misterio Tango Festival, one of the most important
tango events held yearly in Buenos Aires.
ABOUT THE TANGO DANCE
The exact origin of tango – both the dance and the word itself are lost in the myth and an
unrecorded history. The word “tango” maybe straight-forwardly African in origin, meaning “closed
place” or “reserved ground” or could have been derived from Portuguese (the Latin verb) as picked
up by Africans on the slave ships. During the latter years of the 1800s, Argentina experienced an
influx of immigrants where in 1869, Buenos Aires had a population of 180,000 and by 1914, its
population growth increased to 1.5million. The intermixing of African, Spanish, Italian, British, Polish,
Russian and native –born Argentines resulted in a melting pot of cultures, and each borrowed dance
and music from one another. A new sub-culture was born, the culture of the ‘portenos’ (person who
is from or lives in a port city), of the man and women whose lives were centred around the docks,
the place where people both arrived and found work. Eventually, the ‘portenos’ begin to embrace
each other from different cultures through a common language dance – Tango, quite literally the
essence of the dance is also in their embrace – ‘abrazos’.
Tango was born in the courtyards of the tenement blocks where the poor lived. With so many
people living together in a building, it was very likely that someone might play the guitar, perhaps
someone else might play the violin or the flute, and that from time to time they would get toegther
to play the popular tunes of the time. And other people in the building would take the opportunity
to dance, and keep practising among themselves (mostly men). It was the potential wives and
sweethearts that lived in the tenement blocks – conventillos – that they were hoping for a chance to
dance with. To win a sweetheart in the real world took something more, and being a good dancer
helped a lot. As most immigrants were single men hoping to earn their fortunes in this newly
expanding country, they were typically poor and desperate, hoping to make enough money to return
to Europe or support their families to Argentina. The evolution of tango reflects their profound sense
of loss and longing of the people and place they left behind and their only solace is to seek for a
women in the conventillos or the bordellos.
As Argentina became very wealthy around the turn of the century, the sons of rich families would
often look for adventure and excitement in the rougher parts of town, and learnd the tango as part
of their escapades. Some of these young men of privilege would show off the tango as a treat for
their friends on their sojourns to Paris, then the cultural capital of the world. The Parisians were
shocked and titillated by this raw, sensous dance, which led to a “tango craze” that swept across
Europe & America. Herein, tango was elevated into club dancing among the socialites.
You may consider tango was first began as a street dance in the ‘bordello’ areas, and slowly
captivated the high society and introduced it into their social clubs. As Tango originated from the
courtyards, or by the street, the dance is constantly on improvisation mode without fixed steps nor
beats, just how it should adore & adorn the orchestra/ live bands. As the saying goes “if you get all
tangle up, just tango on” by Al Pacino, Scent of a Woman movie.