The Tango Salon: La Confiteria Ideal

The great city of Buenos Aires is still reeling from the economic crisis a couple of years ago, but - paradoxically - out of the daily suffering of the portenos one of the strongest tango revivals ever has risen. On the one hand, Jana Bokova`s Tango Salon - La Confiteria Ideal can be seen as a Buenos Aires-set Buena Vista Social Club, full of great music and dance played out against the backdrop of the legendary Confiteria Ideal, one of the oldest of Buenos Aires` tango halls. On the other it is easy to see the tango as a defiant political act, a refusal to lay down and die in the face of the country`s continued poverty. Bokova celebrates the lives of the tangueros and tangueras - old milongueros, local dancers, tango teachers, foreigners and tango stars aged from 20 to 80 - all of whom share their tango stories of love, family, nationality etc., and shows how the political and the aesthetic are inextricably interwoven.

"At the Confitería Ideal, there is an atmosphere of eternal romance, haunted by the old 20s orchestras and the melodies of the tango bands that echoed between its columns in the 40s and 50s and the dreams of poets who were reinventing the world at their tables... The socio-economic reality of modern-day Argentina is felt in each step, each of the dancers' figures. The Argentineans' bandonéon soul reminds us of this talent to survive, a talent that renders these milongueros indestructible in their nostalgia and timelessness."--Jana Bokova