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Atelier Tango (2025)

Director: Juliet McMains  

Featuring: Irina Jabsa & Guadalupe Santiago

Music: Ezequiel Uhart | 3m 45s   

Atelier Tango

Shot inside the painting studio of Martín Reyna and spilling into the adjoining garden of Dumont Studio, this short film stages an improvisation where tango movement and live bandoneón meet the painter’s process. Reyna’s work—rooted in expressionist gestures and an ongoing dialogue with natural forms— provides both setting and conceptual framework. The camera treats the studio like a canvas, lingering on hands, feet, faces and textured surfaces where pigment and sunlight meet. Dancers Irina Jabsa and Guadalupe Santiago, central figures in the contactango scene, draw on improvisational partnering, weight sharing, and somatic listening to respond to both the music and the studio’s textures. Bandoneonist Ezequiel Uhart shapes the score with conversational phrasing and spontaneous timbral shifts. The garden becomes an extension of the canvas, bringing Reyna’s colors to life and underscoring improvisation as a living, evolving process.

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Faces of Contemporary Tango

Funded in part by the Floyd and Delores Jones Endowed Professorship in the Arts

University of Washington

© 2023 by Juliet McMains. 

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