Alejandro Angelica — Biography

Dancer, choreographer, researcher, teacher, actor, director, designer, counsellor and Argentinian multidisciplinary artist, founder of the Tangopuro® system and of the Tango Codex© tango notation.

He came to tango in 1994, joining the Ballet Municipal de Tango de Zárate, with which he performed numerous shows every weekend for over three years; in parallel, he devoted himself to the study of classical ballet, contemporary dance, contact improvisation and theatrical acting.

In Argentina he studied drama following the K. S. Stanislavski method with various national and international teachers, performing as an actor in several theatre productions. In Italy, in 1999, he attended the professional drama school of Kuniaki Ida, based on Jacques Lecoq’s physical theatre method.

Moving away from stage tango, he devoted himself to the deepest aspect of tango: improvisation.

Frequenting the milongas of Buenos Aires, he began a personal course of study which, through the contribution of different dance disciplines and advanced movement analysis techniques, culminated in the development of a clear and innovative technique that allows the dancer to explore all the dynamic and expressive aspects of tango. Of great importance was his encounter with Luis Grondona — a “viejo milonguero” and internationally recognised dancer — who introduced him to tango canyengue, the earliest existing style of tango, from which both the milonga and all other tango styles derive, and in which one comes to understand the origins of the marcación (the leading technique), the walk, the embrace, the use of the body’s centre and the interpretation of the music.

Building on these foundations, he developed an innovative and original method, TANGOPURO®, based on the analysis of movement, communication, the interpretation of the music, and the interaction of the couple as a single entity within the milonga environment.

Pushing the concepts and principles of improvisation to their limits, he developed in his performances a technique of choreographic creation made directly and rigorously live, in the moment. He thus began collaborating with various orchestras, musicians and composers, not only in tango but also in jazz and contemporary music (Maurizio Pisati), thanks to his ability to make tango improvisation as spectacular and intense as a prepared choreography — though it is not one — with the added spontaneity and perception of the dancers’ live communication, creating a thrilling and overwhelming effect for the audience.

Of great importance for this aspect of his work was his meeting with Pablo Logiovine, an Argentinian musician, bandoneonist and composer, with whom, since 2005, he has developed a research project on the musicality of tango and the relationship between the terminology of musical language and the creation of a new vocabulary for relating the movement of the body to the music. This work has taken shape in a series of courses and seminars held in various European countries on musicality, improvisation techniques and musical interpretation, performed with duos of bandoneon and guitar or bandoneon and piano, as well as courses and lectures given with the quartet and quintet LaTipica on the musicality, history, stylistic evolution and rhythms of tango in its relationship between music and dance, from the end of the 19th century to the present day.

He has also written, directed and performed in various theatre and dance productions, collaborating with choreographers, actors, directors and theatre companies, including the Teatro Franco Parenti of Milan and the Teatro Blu of Varese, for which he created the choreography and stage movement of the award-winning play “Relazioni Pericolose” (“Dangerous Liaisons”), directed by Silvia Mendola. He has collaborated with Susanna Beltrami, regarded as one of Italy’s most important internationally renowned choreographers: beyond various performances and events, their collaboration culminated in the show “Tango di Luna”. He has also worked on many occasions with the internationally acclaimed Argentinian cellist and composer Jorge Bosso, as well as on various other personal projects and with musical ensembles, such as the Trio Solista led by Lorenzo Ravazzani, turning both dancers and musicians into theatrical characters and fusing theatre, dance and music into a single work.

Beyond his research on movement, Alejandro Angelica has always been a researcher in didactics and learning techniques, ultimately applying various discoveries about the most advanced models of how the mind works to the TANGOPURO® system, which is thus both a technique and a didactic approach. Since 2005 the system has become a training programme for Argentine tango teachers: a number of tango professionals have since become teachers and still base their teaching on the TANGOPURO® system today.

In 2016 he was selected to give a training programme at the Academy of the Teatro alla Scala in Milan on dance, tango and stage movement for opera singers.

In 2012 he distilled many of his discoveries on didactics into a complete manual of Argentine tango dance, which also covers historical elements and the foundations of tango music. The book, entitled “Tangopuro” and published by Hoepli — Italy’s leading publisher of manuals and reference books — has recently been reprinted and runs to over 300 pages on Argentine tango technique, complete with a DVD and more than 500 didactic and artistic photographs. For the book he also created Tango Codex©, an innovative system for the notation and analysis of tango steps.

In 2016 he moved to the United Kingdom, where he soon collaborated on “THREE TO TANGO”, an experimental music–theatre–tango project presented in 2017 at the Chapter Arts Centre in Cardiff to an extremely warm reception, together with tango guitarist Oscar Acebras (Buenos Aires), musician and composer René Griffiths (Buenos Aires), actor Dyfed Thomas (Wales), tango dancer Ornella Tirrito (Italy), creative director Phil Mackenzie (Australia) and project manager Yvonne Cheal (Wales).

In 2018 he performed at the Bristol Harbour Festival and at the Wardrobe Theatre in Bristol with his own creation, “Memorias de Tango”, combining dance, theatre and live music.

He is currently developing in England, as a systemic NLP counsellor, a new approach to relationships and self-awareness that uses tango as a model, blending elements of BMC© and NLP for corporate coaching in the fields of team building, leadership and change management, called Meta-Tango®. His leadership and change management course, using tango as a model, was also selected by the LUISS Business School in Rome.

Since 1999 he has held seminars and performed in numerous shows and international festivals across Europe and Asia.

He was a member of the Paris-based company QUAT’ZARTS, performing in the show “A Fuego Lento” by Catherine Berbesou; with the company, from 2001 to 2005, he toured the most important theatres in Europe, particularly in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany and Italy.

As director and choreographer, he has also created various shows that combine different art forms with tango, particularly contemporary dance and theatre, including Memorias de Tango (UK, 2018), Dada Tango (Italy, 2016), La Yumba (Switzerland, 2015), Androgen Tango (Italy, 2012) and Tango Misterio (Switzerland–Italy, 2010).

He starred in “Tango di Luna”, a landmark Milanese show whose final performance took place at the Castello Sforzesco in 2016, alongside Luciana Savignano, an artist of international renown and étoile of the Teatro alla Scala. The show, produced by the Teatro Franco Parenti of Milan, saw him collaborate with the choreographer Susanna Beltrami on the creation of choreographies blending tango and contemporary dance. It ran from 2004 to 2016 in Italy’s most important theatres and festivals, with over 150 performances.

In 2005 he founded the company Colectivo Tanguero in Italy, and is co-author, together with Lorenzo Ravazzani (musician and fencing master), of the show “Così fun Tango” — the first of its kind to unite music, dance and acting in pure theatricality, beyond the specialism of each individual performer: both the musicians and the dancers played theatrical characters.

In 2014 he founded the company Efecto Tango, which made its debut in a show with the Italian Women’s String Orchestra (Orchestra d’Archi Femminile Italiana) at the Auditorium of Milan, and with which he uncompromisingly develops his project of fusion and cross-pollination between theatre, tango and contemporary dance, with the show “Face of Tango”, created and presented expressly for the 2015 IT Festival — a showcase of theatre productions gathering the most interesting proposals from Milan’s emerging companies.

In 2015 he also began a new experimentation between tango and contemporary dance together with Matteo Bittante, with whom he collaborated on the creation of the show “Dada Tango”, presented in Milan between 2015 and 2016.

He has taken part in numerous television programmes and short films: for RAI, TG2 Dossier and “Costume e Società” (news programmes), “Loveline” (MTV), and a five-episode programme for VeroTv in 2012.

He was a guest artist at the 2003 Sanremo Festival — hosted for the last time by Pippo Baudo — where he danced with one of the presenters (Claudia Gerini) and created a choreography, dancing during the festival to one of the competing songs, “Fossi un Tango”, performed by Iva Zanicchi.

He is fluent in Spanish (mother tongue), Italian, French and English.