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April 12, 2005
No Place Like Home V - Mythology
Cities have an interest in creating and preserving their own mythology; cities like New York and Buenos Aires have every right to it. New York stories tend to the eccentric or the harsh; Buenos Aires stories revolve around passion.
Michele called me about 10:30 am to set up our lunch date; she was still woozy from an overreaction to headache medicine. I was fighting off sniffles from a combination of change of environment, strange sleep hours and air conditioning. So together we weaved and wheezed to Palermo to have a very un-Buenos Aires meal of vegetarian food at a Krishna restaurant. It was a welcome respite from steaks.
Michele moved down here about a year ago to work intensively in tango. We talked about the vitality of the Buenos Aires art scene. Virgil Thomson was right - cheap rent is everything. The scene here is nascent rather than established, and exciting to contemplate. She feels that the city changed her. A major jazz teacher in New York then Miami, she's no longer interested in doing jazz; it's too linear external to her and she's no more interested in a more centered form. She also felt that Buenos Aires feminized her almost subliminally. She told me what I romanticize as the perfect Buenos Aires story. Taking a taxicab, in conversation with the driver it came out that he also danced tango. She mentioned that she hoped to meet him soon at one of the milongas, the tango houses. "Why wait?" he asked, and pulled over to the side of the road. Flicking on his stereo, they danced two tangos on the sidewalk, got back in the cab when they were finished and continued on.
Michele begged out of visiting the Colón with me because of her wooziness, but we made a date for Wednesday to experience some real tango. I sniffled on to the Colón.
Buenos Aires' two major icons are within a few blocks of each other, the Obelisk at the intersection of the Avenida Corrientes and the Avenida 9 de Julio and the enormous sand colored hulk of the Teatro Colón right off the Avenida 9 de Julio on Viamonte. The Colón is a great opera house in the traditional horseshoe style with legendary acoustics from the shape and the decorations. Even at 3000 seats, they do not use microphones or amplification.
The dome in the entry hall of the theater:
Another view looking upwards.
I had called the day before and was warned to take the 3 pm tour rather than the 1 pm tour because the main auditorium would be dark owing to a lighting rehearsal. This is Buenos Aires. When I got there for the 3 o'clock tour it was announced, sure enough, that the auditorium would be dark. When we got there, they were on a break, and it was light.
Buenos Aires fights its humidity. The paintings in the auditorium's dome date from the sixties; the original frescoes fell apart in the thirties from the humidity. It pervades the city; I am showering and changing shirts twice a day.
The tour took us through the formal reception rooms and down to the subterranean workshops that extend under the Avenida de 9 Julio. What interested me most was that they made their ballet slippers in-house according to the tour guide, though not the pointe shoes and I'm not sure she didn't mean specialized ballet footwear for performances rather than ordinary rehearsal slippers.
By the time the tour was over the sniffles were becoming a full-blown cold. I bought large bottles of water and took the usual Buenos Aires pre-evening nap. I awoke, sweating. Still, I got myself together to see the performance at the Teatro San Martin. The performance was not of the state modern dance company, but of a group of independent choreographers.
Posted by Leigh Witchel at April 12, 2005 6:47 PM
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