PROGRAM NOTES

The mystique of tango can only be experienced—not explained. TANGORIUM’s design as an immersive portrait of tango music and culture, as it encounters and collides with the world, makes the experience even more complete. As the name suggests, TANGORIUM is a meeting place, in this case for the fusion of tangos with other musical genres, elegantly tied together with a ribbon of spoken word and evocative videography. This celebration of tango coincides with Bridge & Wolak’s 10th anniversary year of being a musical duo. Our longstanding collaboration with The Isabel and The DAN School of Drama and Music reaches a new apex with the world premiere of TANGORIUM with the Queen’s Symphony under the baton of Wolf Tormann.

Our protagonist in this musical story is tango itself—travelling the world, making musical acquaintances, and eventually ‘dancing’ with other forms of music. The tango-fusion of this laboratorium-like experiment brought us the name for this presentation in the most natural way. To decisively break any mould or limitations, the show starts with a total cross-genre fusion of a modern tango-club interpretation of Jenkins’ Palladio with a tango-lounge remix of Beethoven’s Fifth. Staying in the classical ether, we draw on the intrinsic motivic similarities from across centuries to fuse Bach-Gounod’s Ave Maria with Piazzolla’s Libertango into a new work called Ave Astor. The next course is one of Piazzolla’s lesser-known works, Ausencias (Absence), a gentle prayer for all of us who felt isolated during the pandemic. In the Euro-Tango Suite, we visit three poignant Eastern European and Yiddish songs of the Post WWI era of rejuvenated cabaret-style tango. The magnificent Tango de Roxanne, with lyrics by Sting and cabaret-inspired music, crowns the show with fusion of English and Spanish text, classical and tango aesthetics, and a passionate expression of raw human emotion.

In response to the first wave of the pandemic that broke out in 2020, Bridge & Wolak felt a strong, reactive drive to create their own artistic commentary on the time—even if only metaphorically through the process of musical fusion: a call for unity with other touring artists who suffered the same fate of the lockdown. Once the idea for TANGORIUM was born, the next step was to create a highly innovative orchestral score for all the fusions. With over 2,000 orchestral arrangements under his belt, Canadian composer-arranger Charles Cozens was a natural choice. He agreed to take up this challenge and started work in March 2020, meeting with Bridge & Wolak every Sunday at 10am on Zoom for a year! Soon after, we began to work on a general storyline with a Brazilian-Canadian dramaturge, Ludmylla Reis—their super innovative approach has had a profound imprint on the overall flow of TANGORIUM. With the music shaping up and a script in hand, we then turned to visual artists who completed the project. Queen’s’ own Clelia Scala offers touching shadow puppetry, set to the Euro-Tango Suite. Her art has brought a very human element to the project through hand-made shadow-puppetry characters telling a story of love, passion, death and reunion. Finally, Jean-Philippe Finkelstein, a Parisian-Canadian graphic designer in Toronto, created immersive and elegant videos that hit upon the idiosyncrasies of tango with respect to its origin and culture, portrayed in a delicate retro—sometimes even black-and-white—aesthetic.

Financed by both the Canada and Ontario Councils for the Arts, TANGORIUM is the fruit of intense, collaborative work by an extraordinary collective of experienced and highly creative artists who worked tirelessly over the pandemic under the artistic leadership of Bridge & Wolak. One could say that this project is the expression of an unstoppable desire to create high art and entertainment in the times of hardship and isolation—a symbolic triumph of the collaborative spirit over challenging reality. We see it as a true testament to the known fact that creating beauty and working together is the most meaningful expression of care for humanity and its culture.