“Itelman Archive”, about Ana Itelman, with texts by the choreographer herself and her disciple Rubén Szuchmacher, which also includes documents and unpublished works
“Ana Itelman is a remarkable dancer since her colleagues hate her and find her unfriendly, but they recognize her genius that they cannot deny. “When you come across genius, you have to resign yourself to it.”.
So he gave Jorge Luis Borges his opinion about the artist, whom he met brought by his friend Cecilia Engineersanother dancer who promoted modern dance, like Itelman. The Borgesian phrase was years later compiled and published by Blas Matamoroand now appears as an epigraph to another compilation, the “Itelman Archive”from his disciple Ruben Szuchmacherwhich Eudeba has just edited in the Proteatro Library Collection.
This is a selection of the many texts that she wrote throughout her career. Thus we access several notes for cultural magazines, work notes, teaching texts for his disciples and for the general public (his three lectures at Bard College in New York are highly recommended, explaining the essence of “the three Dramatis Personae of the art of dance”: the choreographer, the dancer and the audience).
We also see a letter of complaint against the censorship of his ballet “Phaedra” by the de facto government of the general Levingstonand, very revealing, his elaboration of a possible work inspired by the story of Borges “Man on the Pink Corner”. He proposed it to Piazzolla between 1959 and 1960, he wrote three versions with their corresponding comments, which the book completely rescues, Piazzolla He composed the scores, everything was planned for dancers, narrator, singer and twelve musicians, and in the end it was not done.
All this, very enriching, is just a sample of what Szuchmacher and Maria Rosa Petruccelli found in the family basement Itlman (without the e, as was the original surname) and they were organizing and classifying, a long time ago and in the middle of their usual chores: “boxes, drawers, little boxes; handwritten, typewritten, printed papers; files, dust, more written papers, lint, loose index cards, sepia photos, a smile, cards,” Petrucelli lists in his prologue, and the list goes on, leaving a precise record of the work they took.
In other prologues, the author and Susana Tambutti They comment on the trajectory and enormous contributions of Itelmanand the stones on the road that he had to overcome during his career. As appendices, paragraphs from some interviews and technical sheets of all, or almost all, of her work as a dancer, choreographer and/or director, from 1945 to 1989 are included. For those who, after reading this book, want to know more, the originals of the Archive are deposited in the Ana Itelman Theater and Dance Documentation Center of the Buenos Aires Theater Complex.
Ana Itelman, Rubén Szuchmacher, “Itelman Archive” (Bs.As., Eudeba, 2024, 264 pages)
Source: Ambito
