Jean-Sébastien Rampazzi : dance instructor and performer

Jean-Sébastien Rampazzi is a world-famous tango dancer, teacher, performer and choreographer based in Paris, France. He regularly tours as a teacher and performer throughout North America (New York, Washington DC, San Francisco, Boston, Montréal) and all of Western Europe, Iceland, Russia and Asia.

As a choreographer, he helped originate the show "artango, bal concept", performed by himself, Cecilia Gonzalez and the musicians of Artango. Since 1999 he has been working on contemporary (modern) dance and has originated, among others, the choreographies for Maja Ratkje's opera, performed in Oslo at the 2003 Ultima Festival. In January of 2004 he created his own company: Compagnie Jean-Sébastien Rampazzi. In collaboration with Eliane Decostanzi for choreography and Mathilde Tournyol du Clos for conception, he produced the choreographic triptych for two dancers: "l'écrin". The premiere of this piece was given in Auxerre, France, in May 2005 and the French tour started with three presentations at "Le Théâtre de la Bastille" in Paris in July 2005.

Before becoming interested in dancing, Jean-Sébastien received a master's degree in Mathematics and an engineering diploma from the ESTP (Ecole Speciale des Travaux Publics) in Paris. He also plays classical piano and has been working with the great pianist Alice Ader since June 2004. jsrampazzi.free.fr

Jean-Sebastien will be assisted by Mariana Galassi on Friday and Veronique on Saturday and Sunday. He will demo with Veronique.

Watch Jean-Sebastien dance (with Cecilia Gonzalez, San Francisco, 2004):
 workshop demo Quicktime 4.7Mb
 performance Quicktime 4.2Mb

Hector del Curto : orchestra leader, music instructor, and performer

Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, bandoneón player Héctor Del Curto has traveled the world both as soloist and chamber musician, sharing the stage with world–renowned tango composers Astor Piazzolla and Osvaldo Pugliese, ballet dancer Julio Bocca, and the ensembles National Symphony Orchestra (at the Kennedy Center – Washington D.C.), Orquesta Sinfónica de Buenos Aires and the Teatro Colón Ballet.

After a Carnegie Hall concert in April 1999 with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and such outstanding artists as Gary Burton, Joe Lovano, Argentine pianist Pablo Ziegler and his Quintet for the New Tango, and famous tango singers Jose Angel Trelles and Maria Graña, the New York Times highlighted Del Curto´s artistry, making special mention of his "wistful, piercing solos on the bandoneón". This was no new discovery. In Buenos Aires, Del Curto had won the title of Best Bandoneón Player under 25 when he was only 17 years of age, and he was later to receive the Golden Note Award from the Italian–American Network in recognition of his artistic achievements (1999). As conductor, Del Curto directed the spectacular show "Forever Tango" on Broadway and he also leads the "Eternal Tango Orchestra", a ten piece ensemble.

With Eternal Tango (Quartet and Orchestra) Hector Del Curto has performed at Lincoln Center Summer Festival, Hudson River Park Trust Moon Dance Series, Levitt Pavilion for the Performing Arts, Embajada Argentina (Washington), among other festivals and venues.

Besides his own projects Héctor Del Curto is also an active member of Fernando Otero´s X–Tango, Pablo Ziegler Quintet for the New Tango, Gustavo Moreto´s Alas and Pablo Aslan´s Avantango. www.hectordelcurto.com

Rebecca Shulman : dance instructor and performer

Rebecca Shulman is the coordinator of Dance Manhattan's extensive Argentine tango program. Born in New York City, Rebecca studied classical ballet all her life and Contact Improvisation and yoga since 1993. Her tango career began in 1991 with Daniel Trenner, with whom she began to perform and to visit Buenos Aires. Her tango teachers include Mingo and Esther Pugliese, Gustavo Naveira and Olga Besio, Tete and Maria, Juan Bruno, and Antonio Todaro. She has performed with the finest dancers of her generation, and given workshops across the U.S. Students everywhere seek Rebecca's clear instruction on improvisation, technique, adornments, and musicality. She has produced half a dozen popular instructional videos, available through Bridge to the Tango.

Rebecca is a co-founder and artistic director of TangoMujer, an all-women dance company. In 1999, TangoMujer received a National Dance Production grant from New England Foundation for the Arts, which sent the company on tour to seven cities in the 2000-2001 season. In 2003 TangoMujer performed at Jacob’s Pillow, Denver Tango Festival, Queens Theatre in the Park, and University of Maryland. In May 2005 they took their show to the Tanzhaus in Dusseldorf.

In the summer of 2002 Rebecca was honored for 11 years of contribution to tango in the U.S. More than a dozen of New York's current tango teachers are Rebecca's former students. Her dance partners after Daniel have included Omar Vega, Metin Yazir, and currently Constantin Rueger. Every Monday night she hosts the largest milonga in New York, Luna, which has been running at Dance Manhattan for over ten years. www.dance-manhattan.com

Tango Lorca : music/dance instructors and performers

Merge old world tango aesthetics with a sinuous texture of jazz, flamenco and classical music and you have the immediately distinctive sound of Tango Lorca. Formed in 1999, this fiery quintet has created a fresh and continually growing body of original compositions and arrangements equally suited for the tango dance hall or the concert stage. While evoking an undoubtedly Argentine sentiment with classics from the "Golden Age", they also create new, innovative works with a timeless sense of beauty. Tango Lorca plays their music with a deep understanding of tradition as well as an obsessive desire to evolve the art form to new plateaus. In 2004 Tango Lorca competed in New York City's International Tango Music Competition and won a Special Prize trip to Seville, Spain, to participate and perform in the 6th World Tango Congress.

Tango de los Muertos welcomes Beau Bledsoe on guitar, Lidia Kaminska on accordian, Christine Brebes on violin, Brad Cox on piano, and Jeff Harshbarger on bass. For individual musician's biographies, go to www.tangolorca.com

Homer Ladas : dance instructor, DJ and performer

Homer Ladas is an inventive enthusiast of the popular "New Tango" school while also reflecting the traditional roots of the dance. Closing his ninth year of tango obsession and fourth year as a full-time teacher, Homer continues to grow and discover new ways to create a positive class environment where small epiphanies occur in his students all the time. He focuses on a fusion of open & close embrace tango ideologies...while emphasizing the social aspects of connection, musicality, and floorcraft. As a social dancer or in performances, his creative energy and utter joy of tango dance is simply beautiful to watch. Homer is committed to helping dancers discover that tango is more than just steps, and that everyone holds within them a creative voice to share with their partners.

Homer is a DJ of both traditional and alternative tango mixes.  In addition, he is a founding member of the non-profit group Project Tango which endeavors to promote tango as a social dance and evolving art form in our world culture while building & maintaining individual & community integrity, balance, & respect. In his free time, Homer practices his bass guitar and spends time with his most amazing wife Cristina. (pictured here) www.organictango.info

Bernardo Monk : music instructor and performer

Bernardo Monk, saxophone player, is a unique voice in tango music, since his chosen instrument is unconventional for the tango. When listening to him play (or sing) tango, particularly on his original compositions, one is struck by his extensive knowledge of traditional tango and his high-level of technique.

Bernardo Monk was born into a family of musicians in Buenos Aires, so it was only natural when, at the age of nine, he started singing tango. Five years later he began playing the saxophone and soon was leading his own groups and composing music. In 2000 Bernardo graduated from the Contemporary Music School in Buenos Aires where he received a scholarship to study at Berklee College of Music. He won many competitive awards at Berklee and graduated Summa Cum Laude in 2003 with a major in Jazz Performance. In 2002 Bernardo founded the tango group Mass Tango with his wife, Argentine tango dancer Fernanda Cajide. In 2004 Bernardo and the pianist Octavio Brunetti won first prize for the duo category at the first International Tango Competition in New York.

Bernardo is an active educator. He teaches saxophone at Solomon Schechter School in Stoughton, MA, and organizes Argentine Tango clinics in colleges and universities on the evolution of tango as a music-dance genre and as a social-historic phenomenon.
www.bernardomonk.com

Gabriel Soto and Daniela Paez : Argentinian folk dance instructors

Gabriel has studied Argentinian folkloric dances since he was six years old, eventually graduating from Instituto Fracassi as a Professor of Folkloric Dances.

Between 1985 and 1995, he danced with the Ballet Folklorico Argentino "El Camaruco", from Comodoro Rivadavia, his hometown. The company participated in many festivals in Argentina and abroad, notably Festival Nacional del Poncho (Catamarca), Cosquin (Cordoba), Feria Nacional del Libro (Buenos Aires), Festival Nacional de la Fruta Fina (El Bolson), Festival Nacional de la Cereza (Los Antiguos), Festival Austral del Folklore (Pico Truncado), Festival Folkorico de la Patagonia (Punta Arenas, Chile), Festival Internacional de Folklore de Portugalete (Pais Vasco, Spain) , and several individual presentations in Argentina, Chile, Brazil and Spain.

Gabriel has taught folk dances to a wide range of people, from 5 years old to 85 years old. Since he came to the USA to pursue graduate studies in Mathematics, together with his wife Daniela (who, he says, "is one of my best students") he taught several Argentinian folkloric dance workshops in Minneapolis, together with the Minnesota Tango Society.

Ben Bogart : Tango Jam leader and DJ

Ben Bogart has been a performing musician since age 10. In 1995, he started teaching music and saxophone classes. His career as a jazz musician contiues to grow as he travels and performes regularly with the Ben Bogart Jazz Collective and as a freelance artist. When introduced to Argentine Tango music, Ben immediately found it to be a physical improvisational expression of music and connection very similar to playing jazz and contemporary improvised music, and persued it vigorously as a means of personal and musical development.

After a few years of dancing Ben began to become more involved in the tango community in Providence, RI through teaching and DJing and exploring the art of community development.

Ben studied music performance and theory at the University of California at Santa Cruz, and the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and has been able to apply his musical knowledge to dance, as well as to the performance and development of live tango music.

As a DJ, Ben plays both the most inspiring traditional, as well as the funkiest alternative tango music. Most recently, Ben has DJed milongas and practices in Providence, Boston, New York, San Francisco and an Alternative Milonga at the 2005 DC Tango Marathon. www.tangojam.com and www.providencetango.com

Avik Basu : DJ

Influenced primarily by the music and atmosphere of the milongas in Buenos Aires, Avik's purpose as a DJ is to seamlessly weave an evening of music that does justice to the tremendous range of emotions that tango expresses. In doing so, he hopes that the milonga will have something for everyone and that dancers will float home late, very late at night with music still playing in their heads...

Eray Yuksek : DJ

Eray has been active in the Argentine tango world for the last six years as a dancer, instructor, organizer and, last but not least, a DJ. Eray’s music is well known and loved in Boston, where he DJs regularly for his twice-a-month Bailatango Milonga, but he has also DJ-ed on numerous occasions in New York City, Syracuse, Vancouver, as well as Istanbul and Ankara, Turkey. If Eray is in the DJ stall, the miloga is bound to be a wonderful experience for any Argentine tango dancer!
Currently, Eray and his wife Martina hold regular classes, organize workshops and milongas in the greater Boston area.
www.bailatango.com/boston

Tine Herreman : DJ

Tine Herreman has an ear for beauty, and her tango selections are warm, melodic and rich in rhythm and lyrics. What makes her happy is to have all the dancers on the floor all the time, and she achieves this with wonderful Golden Age music, spiced up with some surprising and superbly tangoable alternative music.

Tine organizes, teaches and DJs for the Yale Tango Club in New Haven, Connecticut. She DJs at Triangulo in New York City, CATS in New Haven, the Boston Tango Society, and various venues around the Northeast. Recent gigs include the Boston Tango Festival, Tango Porteño at South Street Seaport, and coming up, Chelsea Market in New York. www.tangomuse.com

Tova and Carlos Moreno : festival organizers and dance instructors

Argentine tango dancers, teachers, and performers Tova and Carlos merge the grace of tango's past and the innovations of its present with the connection and musicality that has always defined the tango. As they flow between open and close embrace, they play with the extremes found in traditional and modern tango music. They mix deep, powerful elements with small playful movements; brow-furrows and secret smiles. For them, the dance is nothing if it doesn't reflect the varied texture of a good tango song.

The Morenos started dancing tango together in late 1997 in Seattle, WA, a hotbed of tango learning and experimentation. Their dance has been most strongly influenced by studies with Luciana Valle, Eric Jorissen, Rebecca Shulman, Gustavo Naveira and Giselle Anne, and Fabian Salas.

Tova and Carlos became professional tango instructors in Baltimore, where they established a tango community that continues to grow and thrive. They moved to Boston in the fall of 2003, and have established themselves as respected tango instructors in Boston's active tango community. Students express gratitude for T & C's fresh, funny, clear and well-structured teaching. www.morenotango.com

Thuy Lam and Providence Tango : Dance instructors

Providence Tango, founded by Ellen Mayer in June 2000, is home to Rhode Island's Argentine Tango community. Best known for its hospitality, Providence Tango is based in a mill building featuring an incomparable 3000 sq.ft. dance studio with cafe area, and plenty of comfy places to chill and doze.

Over the past 3 years, Robin Pfahning, Ben Bogart and Thuy Lam have joined this vibrant community. Together, with Ellen, they are the instructors, board, and staff of Providence Tango, organizing and teaching classes for all levels on an on-going basis, hosting visiting instructors for special workshops, and providing regular opportunities for social dancing and practice for its growing community and for out of town visitors.

Thuy will be teaching a beginning workshop with other members of Providence Tango, which is a co-sponser of this festival. www.providencetango.com

Jackie Wong: Dance instructor

Jackie is an Argentine Tango Teacher whose dance and movement background and love for Tango has enabled her to become one of the region’s best tango technicians.

She has taught in the Berkshires area, Canyon Ranch, Albany NY, Woodstock NY, Brattleboro VT, NoHo Tango, E. Hartford CT, Washington DC, St. Louis MI, Illinois, Dance Flurry in Saratoga Springs, Beijing China, Sherbrooke Canada, Durham N.C., and Bard, UMASS and Williams Colleges.

Jackie is also the Founder of Tango Pulse, a popular Argentine tango website, host for milongas and workshops, and co host with Daniel Trenner for the alternative milonga in Northampton, Neotango Zone.
Tango Pulse is a co-sponsor of Tango de Los Muertos.
www.tangopulse.net

Tango Society of Boston

Since the Tango Society of Boston's formation in 1997, it has been dedicated to supporting the growth of Argentine tango dance, music, and culture in Boston. The society is a non-profit organization that offers milongas, classes, workshops with visiting instructors, the annual Boston Tango Festival in June.

The Tango Society is a co-sponsor of Tango de los Muertos. www.bostontango.org

David Reynoso : graphic artist
David created the artwork for Tango de los Muertos

A theatre designer and a painter (his paintings are exhibited by private collectors, as well as venues in Texas, Boston and NYC), David also works in residency as A.R.T.'s Costume Crafts Artisan. Design Credits include: the world premieres of Jeffrey Hatcher's "The Fabulous Invalid" directed by Melia Bensussen, "Training Wisteria" by Molly Smith-Metzler (Winner Best New Play for Kennedy Center's ACTF Competition), Jordan Seavey's "This is a Newspaper" for CollaborationTown, NYC and Caitlin Condy's "Little Wing" at the NYC Fringe festival. He worked in New York as assistant designer to James Noone on over 14 productions nationwide (Glimmerglass Opera, Pittsburgh Public, Manhattan Theatre Club, National Actor's Theatre, the Guthrie, Broadway, and Huntigton Theatre Company.) David has collaborated on over sixty productions since receiving his B.F.A. from Boston University, and has received awards and nominations for his design and artistic skills (Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts,Princess Grace Award, Kahn Award).