Tony
I stumbled at the first hurdle with my book for Tango as I confused it with Flamenco. My poor excuse is I saw them performed in Buenos Aries and Madrid respectively but a long time ago. I was disappointed as I really wanted to use castanets for my book cover. To shoehorn this idea into the theme I decided to compare Tango with Flamenco in a fun, simplistic way.
Here are my feelings on the differences between the dances. Hopefully I don’t offend any aficionados of either dance.
| Tango | |
| Sleek Sharp Domination | Aggressive Dangerous Male |
| Flamenco | |
| Frenetic Flamboyant Musical | Exaggerated Flounces Female |
Dawn
This small pamphlet book is an attempt to capture the essence of the Argentine tango, soft and sharp at the same time. Sweeping black lines curl and snap back on themselves; crimson arcs cut through with more urgency; a fine spray of ink spatter scatters like percussion. The marks are as much gesture as image, the flick of a leg, the pivot of a turn, the sudden stop and held breath before the next phrase. Black and red against raw white paper is the tango’s own colour narrative: control and heat, restraint and abandon, sitting in the same frame. The mark-making shifts between the dance’s discipline and its reckless, improvisational moments — a visual attempt to catch not just its shape, but its rhythm.
Gill
As I have an interest in making books from materials that are not necessarily paper, I decided to make my book from cut up Tango drinks cans. It wasn’t easy to manipulate the metal and to make it lie flat, and I included a health warning. The structure is a simple A4 piece of black paper….. A folded book with pockets.
Patti
This book explores the language of tango as a metaphor for a relationship: contact and connection, waiting and following, silence and absence, adapting to another person’s rhythm, and the shifting balance between holding, direction and control. Short, emotionally charged texts are paired with diagrams and imagery derived from tango steps and gestures, creating a tension between the apparent precision of dance and the ambiguity of the relationship.
The book’s structure is one of the trickiest I’ve ever made, not because of the structure (based on a Jacob’s Ladder), but the difficulty in getting the text and images in the correct place. It reinforces the content through its structure, which makes the pages interact with one another rather than simply being read as a linear sequence.