YES BLOG

Tango Ghost

(As for Norway, as it happens I went there on impulse last week, for one night, to see Pablo Veron perform in a production of Ibsen’s ‘Ghost’, at the National Theatre in Oslo. The actors all spoke in Norwegian, of course, but it was a tango version of the play. Pablo played ‘the ghost’, whose presence haunts the play, but who is normally not seen. He whisked each of the characters into a dance at some point in the play, but the idea was that he remained invisible to them. After the performance we went in search of somewhere to dance, taking a taxi into the dark foggy suburbs. Our destination was a veterinary college where he said there was a tango ‘salon’. We arrived at a gloomy deserted building and peered into windows at operating theatres for animals with sinister looking hoses and other bits of apparatus. There was no music playing anywhere to guide us to where the salon might be, in fact no clues or signs of life anywhere. The dark Oslo streets surrounding the college were deserted. Eventually Pablo reached a friend on his mobile phone. They shouted at each other across the echoing courtyards until we were able to locate him at the other end of the complex. It turned out the ‘salon’ was being held in the refectory. A nice wooden floor, the tables and chairs pushed back against the walls; a tango D.J. with a small sound system to one side.

Pablo and I danced happily together, surrounded by Norwegian tango dancers, until, reluctantly, the organisers decided they had to lock up.)

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