GRAN BALLET ARGENTINO
Invested by the pioneers on horseback called gauchos, the southernmost country in the world with Chile, extends for nearly four thousand kilometers, from the tropical bushes of the province of Misiones, to the north, to the frozen solitudes of the land of fire. On this immense territory there are barely thirty million men, a third of whom live in the capital, Buenos Aires.
There are two worlds in Argentina. The first, covered with mountain areas including the Aconcagua at more than six thousand meters, and vast plains and plateaus that gradually rise to the Andes. This chain constitutes an impassable barrier with Chile. These peaks give rise to a few sites, the most majestic being the Iguaçu Falls, which are located at the meeting point of Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. The second, constitutes the area of the Pampa. An immensity of lands flat as the back of a hand covered with a short grass that populates a population of horsemen and which is lost in the south in a kind of sidereal void, dotted with a few urban nuclei.
In the "crazy geography" of this huge triangle, upside down, and as big as half of Europe, which aligns with the Tropics to the Land of Fire, the extreme variety of climates allows to find, whatever the season, amazing landscapes.
This geography awakens in the Argentines the dizziness of a nation without limits. After four centuries of history, Argentina is still in pursuit of its unity. She would gladly proclaim herself "the only white country south of Canada." That would be to leave out those men from the north with slanted eyes, a dark complexion, hair in drumsticks, and the distinctly Bolivian allure of Indian women wearing strange little black bowler hats, whose height is measured by four or five overlapping petticoats. Nor can we forget vicuña and lamas, both inseparable from the sharp, jumping and melancholic complaint of "carnavalitos", where the Indian population has integrated Spanish Christianity into the solar adorations of its own universe.
The other side of Argentina is life and the strange melancholy that one day gave birth to tango. The "porteños", inhabitants of Buenos Aires, have invented a unique art of living that is organized around multiple coffee breaks. In their company we do not know when the conversation ends and where literature and tango begin. This plaintive music, which regrets all the things we loved, has its origin in the port’s bouges and in the acrid smoke of cigarettes. Here has raised a population of emigrants, mostly from the Mediterranean countries, pushed back until then by a kind of sad tide that is that of boredom and failure.
So, there settled this wave at the soul that is said today to be inseparable from Argentina. On the ports, violins and bandoneons sing, even if to overcome this misery, life in cafés is essential for the "porteño". He cultivates his taste for a chic ghost, that of a Europe imagined from the antipodes. Between the icy mountains and the glaucous bushes of the ports, the question arises of how to be Argentinian. Culture is then the last line of defense against chaos.
This is the challenge of the show by Alejandro Miguel TAPIA’s Gran Ballet Argentino.
