Department of Art

Catherine Angel: The Embrace of Tango 2007

Prints are Archival Inkjet Prints
Image size 14×17 inches
Matted 20×24 inches
Printed with Epson Ultra Chrome K3 inks on Epson Ultra Premium Luster Paper

ARTIST STATEMENT

I began this work in the early morning hours at the milongas (the tango dance halls) of Buenos Aires in September 2006. I had gone to Argentina to dance tango, to find my soul - if you will. Who was I? What was this mysterious dance that has a hold of my heart like a bewitching lover? To go to the source of this dance: Buenos Aires. To go to the source of myself, to find my truth. This dance does not lie. I am how I dance tango. Tango as a mirror, tango as life. A sense of strength and solitude, of completeness, comes over me at two or three in the morning as I sit and watch the dancers move past me. I have been there since midnight dancing; my legs are tired, my head is clear, my heart calm, my body drained. The milonga is starting to thin out and the people who stay are the ones who cannot leave. They need to stay a little longer, they need to dance this dance of tango, seduced by the music and the movement of others. I watch and I photograph the couples dancing, the emotions of their embrace, the enchantment, the secrets, memories that stay dear to the heart, this quest for equilibrium of self when joined with another. These photos are my response to the music of tango, the embrace of two people, the simple beauty of communication without words. They hold hands, they listen to the music together, they move as one. This is the embrace of tango that holds me.

Catherine Angel
2007

REVIEWS

Las Vegas Sun: July 10, 2007

Entranced by a Dance

Together yet apart, tango dancers escape to another world

By Kristen Peterson

A particularly engaging photograph in Catherine Angel’s “Embrace of Tango” exhibition shows a woman in a dark dress embracing her partner, her hand flat on his back. It’s 3:58 am in a dance hall in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and their bodies are tightly connected. Her face is pressed to his. But she is somewhere else, somewhere other than Nino Bien in the early morning. Her vacant, distant, sad and solemn look says so. “It’s a really complex photograph,” Angel says. “She is so solid and secure. But there is a look and it’s not exactly despair. It’s otherworldly. She is so lost in whatever that moment was to her. The possibility of whatever life is to her is there.” It’s as if this image captures her whole life. Her past, her present. Her heartache. Her triumph. Her joy. She is transparent.

Although seemingly voyeuristic, Angel’s photographs on display through Aug. 3rd in the Jessie Metcalf Gallery are not designed to capture the intimate lives of others dancing across wood floors in Buenos Aires dance halls. Rather, they are Angel’s attempts to capture her experience of tango through others. “The photographs are really an expression of what it feels like when I dance tango,” says Angel, a Las Vegas photographer and UNLV Professor. “This dance does not lie. I am how I dance tango.”

It’s pretty heavy stuff for a woman who has been dancing Argentine tango for only two years. But Angel, a former ballet dancer who grew up in central Florida, says she is lured to the dance in all facets of her life. She is hooked. She’s been to Buenos Aires four times. Even in Las Vegas, there are discussions about how tango should be danced in the social Argentine style that developed in late 19th-century Buenos Aires. “I wanted to see for myself. ” What she found in Buenos Aires were assortments of traditional dance clubs known as milongas that catered to different crowds - hip, edgy twentysomethings, middle-aged couples of the middle class and those much older.

What you see in her images is uninhibited emotion: bodies holding each other, dancers listening to music as they drift into another world, making a connection to life that goes beyond the walls and sounds of a dance hall. Normally Buenos Aires dance halls are brightly lit, but Angel manipulated the images to create the deep golden hues and soft lights in darkened rooms as a way to capture the intensity of the emotions she feels.

Angel, who teaches art, normally shoots black-and-white large-format photographs. She didn’t set out to photograph the dancers; she didn’t want to be intrusive or remove herself. Then one time she pulled out a point-and-shoot camera and realized she had something. She returned with a digital Leica and shot in black and white, but found it was too nostalgic for a dance that she sees as being in the moment. This solemn dance is what you see through Angel’s lens. A photo taken at 5:32 am of an empty dance hall, vacant chairs and tables, captures the room haunted by memories, love, loneliness, movement and shadows. In another image there is an older couple, in motion and slightly blurred. The light falls on them like a painting. Another portrays a woman with her eyes closed, feeling love as she holds her partner close. The bodies move across the dance floor like spirits.

The exhibit includes lyrics, most from the 1940s and ’50s - the golden age of a dance that began mainly in the bordellos, particularly among African and European immigrants who had arrived alone in the port city. The songs are about lost love, longing for home, for community. Tango is where Angel goes to find herself. “I’m dancing on the same wooden floors that thousands have danced on before me not just with a man but also with the history of tango,” she says. “If the man is emotionally open and you are emotionally open, you know who that person is. One night I danced with a man in his 70s and I felt like I knew him then and when he was in his 20s, 30s, 40s and so on. “Hopefully I am open, vulnerable and transparent in my energy in this dance of tango and in my life.”

Las Vegas Review-Journal: July 20, 2007

Embracing Color

Argentine Tango moves photographer Catherine Angel to take up another medium

By Ken White

For years, Catherine Angel had been dancing salsa, but one look at the movie “Tango,” and the artist was hooked. “I thought, Oh, my God, I want to dance like that,” says Angel, a Professor of Art at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. She took a year of Argentine Tango lessons in Las Vegas, then journeyed to Buenos Aires, Argentina, where tango originated. “Argentine tango is nothing like ballroom tango or the kind you see on Dancing with the Stars” Angel says. “It shows the beauty between two people. It’s very masculine-feminine. You have to pay attention to what’s going on, to be in the moment. It’s not an easy dance. For people who dance tango, it becomes a way of life.”

Angel was so taken with the dance that, after two trips to Buenos Aires and with the urging of her friend and tango teacher Hugo Latorre, she began photographing it. The results can be seen in her exhibit, “The Embrace of Tango: Recent Photographs by Catherine Angel,” on view through Aug. 17 in the Jessie Metcalf Gallery, located on the second floor of the Richard Tam Alumni Center at UNLV. What captured her interest was the dance’s transparency. “You really feel who the person is,” she says. “If the person is hiding, you can feel it. It’s like there’s a wall there.” The dance often is misunderstood, the artist says. “It’s sensual and intimate, but very respectful.”
“This is much different work than what she’s known for,” says Jerry Schefcik, director of the Donna Beam Fine Art Gallery and the Jessie Metcalf Gallery. “Black and white is what her reputation is built on.” Angel, who earned a Master’s degree in Photography from Indiana University in 1988 and a Bachelor’s degree in Photography and Drawing from the University of Oklahoma in 1985, usually works with a large format camera in black and white and in mixed media collage. Even the mixed media works that used color featured only black and white photos.
At first, Angel photographed Argentine Tango in black and white, but found it looked “too nostalgic, too old-fashioned.” She also took some digital photos in color and found the dance came alive. “It needed the color,” Angel says. “And you have more control (of the image) with digital.” She learned to use Photoshop software to manipulate the images. “This is the first body of work I’ve done in color. I darkened the images and color-shifted them to create the mood I’m looking for. They’re not documentary photos. I’m showing what I’m feeling about tango.”
Angel still goes to local tango dances, and she plans to travel to Buenos Aires with her three teenage daughters next month to photograph and dance again. “I think they think it’s pretty cool that I have interests of my own,” Angel says of her children, but they don’t dance tango. The trip will be a learning experience for them in many ways.
For Angel, the dance is a part of her life. “It’s important to live fully and completely, to be truly be alive,” she says. “As an artist that’s what I strive to do daily”

Las Vegas City Life: July 12, 2007

Taking the lead

Photographer Catherine Angel escorts viewers into the art of Argentine Tango

By Jarret Keene

For those too tough to dance, Argentine tango comprises sensual, elegant and intimate movements. Photographing these movements sounds misguided until you take a moment to examine the romantic, deeply expressive photographs of UNLV Professor Catherine Angel. Her new exhibit at the campus Jessie Metcalf Gallery is called “The Embrace of Tango”, and connects with you, chest-to-chest, before guiding you through the milongas (dance clubs) of Buenos Aires.

Angel had been dancing salsa here in Las Vegas because she wanted something to do on Friday and Saturday nights. This led her to explore other dance forms, and after watching an Argentine-Spanish film production, Tango, she made it her mission to master another dance.

“I just fell in love with Argentine Tango as an art form,” she says, during a recent phone conversation. “There is always a lot of discussion about how tango should be danced, some teach it with an open embrace, others with a closed embrace. Some teach the steps only, while others emphasize the emotional aspects. But I wanted to go to Argentina and visit the source.” So Angel packed her bags and headed to Buenos Aires, where she quickly immersed herself in the culture and tradition of tango. She went out nightly, searching for the city’s most authentic and obscure milongas, sometimes discovering as many as 10 in a single evening.

“I had no intention of taking any photos,” she says. “It was my tango teacher here in Las Vegas, Hugo Latorre who had encouraged me to shoot pictures at the milongas.” In the beginning all she brought was a point-and-shoot digital camera. After snapping a few images, she thought to herself: “Why am I not seriously taking photos of these amazing dancers?” For the next couple of trips, she shot with black-and-white film. However, she found the results too nostalgic. She eventually determined that, with a digital camera, she had more control over what her images looked like than by relying on a traditional darkroom. It ended up being a pivotal photo series for Angel: It’s her first body of work in color in 25 years, and her first body of work shot digitally.

Some of the images are deeply romantic; others are tinged with melancholy. But Angel stresses that her photos express what it feels like for her and her alone to dance tango. “I’m not trying to document tango,” she insists. “I’m not saying these images reveal any truths. For me, this series is about that in-the-moment feeling I experience when dancing to music that people have been dancing to since the 20s. It’s about the questions you may ask yourself while dancing: Who are you at that moment? What is this music? Who is your partner? This is the magical quality of dancing tango.”

Angel included the printed lyrics to certain tango songs as a way of “letting the viewer into the photos in another way other than visually.” She had danced tango for a year before she knew what the songs were about, experiencing the music only musically and physically at first. After perusing a website that translated Argentine music, she discovered that the lyrics were “beautiful poetry.” Angel’s opening reception on June 28 also incorporated live tango dancing, setting up the gallery like a milonga complete with tables, candles and tango music. More than 150 of Angel’s friends from both the Vegas art scene and the local dance community showed up.

“Most of the tango dancers had never been to an art opening, and most of the art people had never experienced tango. For me, the event was about bringing together the separate parts of my life. I have a life as a mom, a teacher/artist and as a dancer; everyone from these different parts of my life was there. “More important than the photographs was having the people who are intimate and dear in my life come together and embrace who I am.”

Posted on Monday, November 17th at 2:55 pm