Eduardo Delgado Hernández
From León to Patagonia and Back
Eduardo Delgado Hernández
My first memory of tango is the music. I got some CDs from an Argentinian friend of mine, Daniel García Belardinelli. He gave me them as a present. It was some tango nuevo, and Astor Piazzolla. He was working as a director with a theater company in León / That ´ s how we met, working together. That is probably the best way to know someone new. We got along really fine from the beginning. But, it never occurred to me that I could dance to the music.
I used to play those CDs during rehearsals and drama classes with my students, because of the intensity of the interpretation that tango usually conveys. It helps being alert, working with different intensities of emotion as a group, enhancing and developing your inner view. It is a whole atmosphere that makes it easier to get into focus when you listen to tango beats and melodies.
Of course, what I first heard was very elaborated and contemporary music. It was not Carlos di Sarli or Homero Expósito and certainly not Carlos Gardel. I kind of fell in love with the new tango. Before this music came to me, I usually took long time looking for the appropriate music to create an inspiring ambiance for the warm ups and classes. Philipp Glass, Yann Thiesen and experimental music are awesome, but they have their limits. At least, for me they have a limit. But, Astor Piazzolla, Gotan Project, Tanghetto, New Tango Orquesta, even Bajofondo with Gustavo Cerati’ s El Mareo where ro hit the right note to induce my students and myself to be tuned with whatever the themes of the drama workshops were.
With time, more Argentines came to León: Darío Castro, a Patagonian, came to act in a play. It was my good fortune that Darío shared a three day tango workshop with me. To be honest, I was not that interested in the workshop, not because I wasn ´ t interested in tango; but because I wasn’ t interested in the dance.
What I knew about tango as a dance was that it was full of some sexy poses and that was it. It was my actor-girlfriend( at the time) who insisted that we take the workshop together in the hope, un the hope of improving our very conflicted relationship on and off stage. I still feel a strange vibe when I think of it. Darío Castro ´ s workshop took place in Casa de la Cultura ´ s Salon Trece, the same salon where I took my first important drama workshop for three years. Two life changing experiences taking place in the same location!
Tango crowned and gave sense to everything. I started healing in some other ways. For instance, I moved to Patagonia. It was thanks to Daniel García Belardinelli, again. He contacted me after some time and offered to direct me in one of my favorite plays; Marsal-Marsal, a smart monologue from the Spanish playwright, José Sanchís Sinisterra. That meant I needed to live for a while in Patagonia. The first thing I did when I hung up the phone was to get myself a new passport, then I sold my car and bought myself a ticket to Chubut. I was going to live in Esquel, this gorgeous village of Patagonia for a considerable length of time.
The first thing that happened to me after coming from León, a city of two million peoplw, was that I felt kind of crowded and at the time was suffocating me. I arrived to this huge place, full of silence, vastness of natural landscapes and really very few people. Before I had been so full of noise that I couldn ´ t get in touch with myself.
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