BelTango & Friends Festival Comes to Three Cities

The name alone says plenty. “BelTango & Friends, Balkanico City Edition” mixes a Serbian abbreviation, an English phrase and an Italian qualifier, and somewhere underneath all of that sits music that was born on another continent and settled into Europe as if it had always belonged there. Tango has spent a century traveling that way, from the dance halls of Buenos Aires to the concert stages of Paris, and it is now making the same geographic leap through Zemun, Novi Sad and Belgrade. Organizers announced the program for the five day festival on September 2, with the opening event set for September 16.

According to a statement released by the organizers, the festival runs for five days and does not stick to a single format. The program covers concerts, tango show performances, so called Gran Milongas with live music, and dance workshops, building an audience of listeners and dancers side by side. The statement reads:

“Over the five festival days, it will bring together domestic and international musicians, tango dancers, teachers and DJs through a varied program that includes concerts, tango show performances, Gran Milongas with live music, dance workshops and other festival content.”

That is organizer language, broad by design, but behind it sits a specific intent: the festival does not want to be a one off spectacle, it wants to be a platform where performers meet people who live tango as a practice, not just an audience that watches.

At the center of the program is the Beltango quintet, a group that performs tango across the range from Astor Piazzolla’s concert compositions to authentic dance music, playing in direct interaction with dancers at the milongas. One correction is worth making here: a Tanjug statement described the group as a quartet, but it is in fact a quintet, a five piece ensemble, as confirmed by Madlenianum itself in its announcement of the festival’s closing night. The difference of one musician is not cosmetic when tango is involved, since that density of voices, bandoneon, strings, piano, carries the characteristic air between the notes that defines the genre, and its absence is felt immediately.

What the festival is really trying to do is reconcile two versions of tango that rarely share a stage. One is the concert tradition, Piazzolla’s “nuevo tango,” written for listening in a formal hall. The other is social tango, the music of the milonga, where the audience is not an audience but a participant. A program that includes concerts, Gran Milongas and workshops shows the organizers are not picking a side, they are building a bridge, a more ambitious move than it looks, since it calls for a different staging and a different rhythm from one part of the evening to the next.

The sources do not fully agree on where the festival actually takes place. The Tanjug statement places it in Novi Sad and Belgrade, while the official announcement from the Madlenianum Opera and Theatre lists Zemun, Novi Sad and Belgrade as the venues. Since the closing night is confirmed at Madlenianum itself, in Zemun, that third location looks like a detail one of the two statements simply left out, rather than an actual change in the plan.

The closing night is set for September 20 at 8 p.m., on the main stage of the Madlenianum Opera and Theatre. Three dance couples perform that evening, Rodrigo Palasios and Indira Hijaes, Danilo Madalena and Pam Est La, and Vedran Marceta and Valentina Vavra, while singer Lukas Bok handles the vocal part of the program. Three couples on the same stage mean three different readings of the same music, which, if the program delivers on it, makes the closing night the festival’s peak rather than a formality.

This is the first time we have covered the story, so this marks our first look at the BelTango & Friends festival. The day by day, city by city schedule beyond the closing night in Zemun has not yet been specified in the statements.