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The Original Story by Victoria Fischer

In September 2010, I made my way to a friend’s house in South London to learn the basic steps of Argentine Tango. I arrived apprehensive with preconceptions based on Tango I had seen on television – an abundance of passion, satin and leg – but here I was about to experience something at odds with my very British nature. My friend and I stood in socks on the kitchen floor. He took my right hand, touched my back with his other and we walked, in time together around the room with an orchestra accompanying our steps, violins, pianos and the deep guttural sounds of the bandoneon.

Two weeks later, I was 7,000 miles from home, at Buenos Aires International airport, praying that the impulsive trip to learn Argentine Tango in its heartland was not a mistake. However, over the next few months I realised that any fear I had of travelling alone was blown out of the water by the fear of stepping onto a dance floor in front of hundreds of strangers every night. Tango was not for the faint-hearted and here, congregating daily in dance studios across the city, I found something transcendent that welcomed all ages and nationalities into its embrace. Including this young British woman.

Returning home after three months, I felt like a foreigner in my own country. From the raucous streets of Buenos Aires I had dropped back into quiet, suburban Buckinghamshire; a scene change that couldn’t have been more jarring. Finding it difficult to move back to my daily routine – and with Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Don’t Cry for Me Argentina playing on repeat – I created a one-woman show, building on a blog I’d kept whilst away, and relived the moments I had experienced there.

Just as Tango appeared so swiftly into my life, two years later the story captured the imagination of a writer, Ron Hutchinson, and we began to create a full play from my adventure. Every Argentine Tango dancer, be it a beginner or a world champion, has a personal story to tell of how they came to find this dance, or as in my case, how it found them. Across the globe from Paris to Havana, Siberia to India there are thousands of dancers who discover that once they start learning, it becomes an addiction they cannot stop. Tango is just an improvised set of steps, but it becomes a compulsion that inexplicably grips certain individuals and compels them to travel alone across the world, to spend hundreds of hours in lessons and at social dances (milongas).

Over the last century Argentine Tango has continued to evolve in style and the number of dancers is constantly increasing, yet there are still very few studies, books or plays on the dance. Flying Into Daylight will be the first of its kind in combining Tango dance and bandoneon music in a theatrical form and it’s thanks to Ron’s magnificent skills as a writer, that having never danced one step of Tango he can express so simply and beautifully Virginia’s journey into that world. The play is not based solely on my experience; it is the passage of so many people also in search of that very human desire for change.

I am thrilled that this story is receiving its premiere at Live Theatre with a hugely talented cast and creative team and I hope that for a few hours, you too can feel the energy, escapism and vitality of Buenos Aires and Argentine Tango.

Victoria Fischer

Original Story