@Santiago Orti

Dos.Danzas
A duets-eveninig

Daniel Goldin and the closing of a remarkable cycle


The Argentinean choreographer ends on Sunday the putting on of two extraordinary works: “A la deriva“ (Drifting) and “Sueños rojos“ (Red dreams).

One of the highlights of the 2019 dance season is a program composed by two duos that on Sunday, November 24th will close a series of just four performances in the small hall of the Teatro Payró (down town Buenos Aires). Two extraordinary pieces, beautifully performed by Noelia Meilerman and Emilio Bidegain “A la deriva“ (Drifting) and by Carla Bugiolacchi and Maximiliano Navarro “Sueños rojos“ (Red dreams). Its author is the Argentine choreographer Daniel Goldin, who has been living and working in Germany for more than three decades. There, in the city of Essen, he joined one of the two ensembles that Pina Bausch directed and then, for sixteen years he directed one official dance-theatre company in Münster.

Goldin was trained at the San Martín’s Theatre Dance School (Buenos Aires) and afterwards he was a dancer in the Contemporary Ballet of this theatre. He never lost the link with Argentina: in addition to giving regular seminars in Buenos Aires, during 2013 he was invited by Mauricio Wainrot to create a beautiful choreography with San Martin Ballet: “ Oscuras golondrinas“ (dark swallows). He also designed a choreography named “Pequeños Retratos” (Small portraits) with the UNA (National University of the Arts).
In 2017, for the Festival Rojas Danza, he brought to light the duo “Sueños rojos/Red Dreams”, which he assembles for this new presentation now with “A la deriva/Drifting”.

Since the presentation is too short for such a long dance career, let's get to the point. 

-How did Sueños rojos/Red Dreams " come about in the first place, which I understand was a commission?

Alejandro Cervera invited me to create a work for the Festival Rojas Danza; he only told me that it was related to the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. A challenge: although the framework was official, the way to approach it had something of an independent project. I asked myself two questions: how to approach the subject and how to elaborate it with a generation that has certainly had no contact with the Russian Revolution or Soviet art. I put my conditions on the dancers: two months of work, three rehearsals per week, three hours each time; an unusual requirement for an independent task but which they fulfilled completely.

-How did you approach it?

At first completely unknown names and terms appeared to them such as: film directors Nikita Mikhalkov and Andrei Tarkovsky, socialist realism. I had taken part in a tour of the Ballet del San Martín to the Soviet Union in 1984, in which I asked myself what was left of illusions, of ideologies of Russian revolution, not from a political but human point of view.

-Did the dancers read texts and watch related movies?

Yes, I gave them links, I showed them pictures, photos. We worked movements and poses from these materials, not to copy them, but to discover what inspired them.

-Could it be that there is an ironic approach to the work?

No, not irony, but rather an effect of the ingenuity I found in that iconography. I thought of those images of the “new man", heroic, and who was behind those images; what they wanted, what they longed for.

-And “A la deriva”, how was it born?

In 1992 I set up a duo together with a student from Folkwang School and won a competition at a festival in Sardinia. At this festival, I was asked to create a new work for the following year. I started looking for “in the drawer"; and remembered a tour of Galicia, a region I fell in love with. Thus in this landscapes appeared the shipwrecked sailors, the women dressed in black and above all the Celtic legends and their music. But it is fundamentally a lyrical, poetic work, a kind of filigree in a space reduced to the minimum.

Laura Falcoff, Clarín, 19 November 2019