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A Word From The Writer

ONE

The two competing theories of evolution are that progress and change occur steadily and, alternatively, that everything goes along much as it always has until one day the roof falls in. Coming from Northern Ireland, I’m genetically and temperamentally pre-disposed to believe in the roof-falling-in theory of history; in personal affairs as well as public.

That’s why I was so taken with the life experience of Victoria Fischer, who inspired this play. An actor in another of my plays, she responded, when asked by the director to outline a moment or decision that fundamentally changed things, by talking of going to Buenos Aires to learn the Tango. Out of the blue. Without a word of Spanish. Just knowing that some force inside her was telling her to do it. Now.

Soon I was to discover that she wasn’t alone in feeling that impulse – or interior command – and obeying; without question but certainly with apprehension. Argentina’s a long way away. They beat us regularly at football and we have a continuing political disagreement with them. No matter. People, like Victoria, of every age and nationality and class, wake up one morning and decide that whatever else their life contains, it must have room for a studio or bar or nightclub or ballroom thousands of miles away. On the floor of that distant place they will learn Tango.

TWO

In the days when you could get to Australia on the Assisted Passage Scheme for ten pounds, my parents had their bags packed, ready to leave Belfast for a new life. Blue skies. Sunshine. A guaranteed job for my dad, a brickie, at a good wage. At the last minute my mother backed out. She had four sisters and didn’t want to leave them so far away. The moment was there when their lives could have changed for ever. They argued. He lost. She won. They both lost.

They stayed together for another fifty years but I know that the bitterness of his failure to talk/force her into getting on the boat was sharp in his side as he lay on the bed he died in. I know that he never forgave her or himself. I know that in many ways his life hadn’t lasted the ninety three years it said on his death certificate; the fifty years he spent working on the buildings; the eight years he spent in the RAF. It had lasted until the moment he paused in his anger and then shrugged and said ‘Have it your way, missus.’ In that half second he undid his life.

THREE

A Femtosecond is a measurement of time equal to 10⁻¹⁵ of a second. That is one quadrillionth, or one millionth of one billionth, of a second. Which means it’s in proportion to one of your average seconds as that average second is to thirty two million years. Scientists use it on a daily basis. When you think how many Femtoseconds your life therefore contains (70 x 365 x 24 x 60 x 60 x 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) it doesn’t seem such a bad deal. Plenty of time to fix the gutters, learn Italian, read War and Peace or learn the Tango.

FOUR

As a writer I spend most of my time in a web of words. My interest in dance as an art form that uses a different language to express the truth I look for was sparked by the work of Richard Buckle. A ballet critic and outrageous, larger than life character, he behaved with conspicuous bravery – and eccentricity – in the Second World War. In the bloody Italian campaign he refused to lie down under shellfire so that he wouldn’t get mud on his uniform. When his regiment liberated a town after a brutal hand to hand fight he went into it alone, ignoring the snipers still there and emerged with several old books, many of them pornographic and a wedding dress which he wore that night at dinner.

I still remember his paragraph in an Observer review that made me think that dance in general and ballet in particular might be worth looking into. In it he expressed his astonishment that educated, cultured people could be unaware of the existence of one of the true creative geniuses of the twentieth century – George Balanchine. I’d never heard the name. It was one not bandied about in Coventry, where we’d moved to after Belfast.

I discovered another way of being when I started to learn about Balanchine and his work and I’m very conscious that we are premiering this play in a theatre so strongly associated with Lee Hall. His Billy Elliot threw open so many other windows for so many people who might not otherwise have found their way to that extraordinary, profound, joyous and demanding art.

FIVE

On second thoughts, perhaps not even 2,207,520,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Femtoseconds would be enough to learn and perfect all the varieties of Tango – anyenque, orillero, salon, milonguero, nuevo, tradicional, con corte y quebrada and fantasia. Better start now. Tonight. After the show.

SIX

Most of my writing life has been spent in Hollywood; where I’m continually surprised at how ready audiences are to pay to see the same movies, stories and characters re-imagined and sometimes totally re-invented. Maybe that’s not just creative exhaustion but speaks to an endless human fascination with the possibility of personal change. Most of us are stuck with the personas and lives we’ve created, even if we are, consciously or not, living a fictionalized version of ourselves. It’s great to believe that we could start again with a clean sheet.

In the form of Tango I write about in the play, the dance floor is always a clean sheet; the dancers being required not to follow a set series of steps but to continually experiment and improvise, without words or pre-arrangement. It combines Performance and Invention; Mind and Body; Desire and Technique; our need for order in the part of ourselves that acknowledges Apollo and the need for ecstatic release in the service of Dionysus; offering those caught in the spell of its music new perspectives on themselves, new ways of being and the always present possibility of finding our true selves…but only if we are brave enough to take that first step when the moment of decision arrives and walk onto the dance floor…

Ron Hutchinson

Writer & Co-Director