Marcela Trapé
Dancer. Tango. Ballet.
Body Awareness Method®.
The artistic beginnings...
With 40 years of dance experience, Marcela Trapé´s artistic and teaching career encompasses an unique combination of ballet, contemporary dance, tango, and her self-created Body Awareness Method.
As a performer, Marcela has partcipated in many ballet classics since entering dance school in 1979, through 1989, including El Flautista de Hammelin, La Casa de Bernarda Alba, El Principito, Nuevo Tiempo, and many more.
In the 1990s, Marcela branched into neoclassical and contemporary dance and formed the group Contempx3, with which she created varios ground-breaking works as choreographer and dancer. Near the end of the 90s, Marcela began teaching classes based on stretching and release, which would soon become the foundation for her BAM.
Body Awareness Method
The Body Awareness Method® is the result of the investigative work Marcela has conducted over the years while training the many professional and amateur Tango dancers who have come to her for classes at her studio. The method was developed out of their growth process. In 2009, she codified the system in her book BAM GO TANGO, Body Awareness Method - BAM applied to Argentine Tango.
Her observations have led her to the conclusion that with the help of supervised training, catering to the individual’s needs, it is possible to accelerate growth. Furthermore the process may be made painless and even pleasant, as the individual limitations and the frustrations these cause are lessened.
Normally, we learn to dance by copying the instructor, whose movements we try to re-create with our own bodies. The learning process, however, can be made more efficient as the individual becomes aware of his body, its limitations and how to tackle them.
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Using this method, Marcela has trained Eugenia Parrilla, Mauricio Castro, Carla Marano, Laura Melo, Melina Brufman, Alejandra Gutty, Fabián Salas, Cinthia Fattori, Eladia Córdoba, Beatriz Zuloaga, Andrés Amarilla, José Manrique, Jose Garofalo, Solange Acosta, and Natalia Pombo, among others. She also gave a especial body training for a tango-theatre-dance piece in Amsterdam by Pablo Inza, Esteban Moreno, Pancho Martinez Pey, Moira Castellano, Lucila Cionci, Valencia Batuik, and Claudia Códega.
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Tango
In 1998, Marcela was teaching private classes of what would later become BAM, attended by non-dancers as well as contemporary dancers. When two tangueros showed up, Fabian Salas and Mauricio Castro, Marcela began to relate to the tango. In the early 2000s, Marcela began going to their tango classes in La Galera de Tango at San Juan and Boedo. There, she began to understand what tangueros needed in their bodywork in order to deal with the constant uncertainty and the sensation of never knowing what will happen.
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In 2003/4, Marcela formed a dance partnership with Andrés Amarilla. They gave their first performance in Salon Canning in 2005, with some traditional tangos and a song by the Beatles which was miraculously awarded a standing ovation by the milongueros of the time.
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In 2007, Marcela formed Metangomorphisis, a work of tango-theatre-dance, presenting the work El Ombligo de la Luna Theatre, and fragments in the milongas as performatic interventions.
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In 2008/9, Marcela immersed herself further more into the microcosm of the milonga, exploring a tango dance that was more traditional with Mario Ferraro. Throughout the 2010s, she travelled around the world to teach and perform tango, in addition to BAM, in France, Germany, Switzerland, Turkey, Romania, Bulgaria, Czech Republic and the United States,
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Works in the 2010s include Consigna 6 for the Cambalache Festival in 2012, participation in a show by Martin Pons in 2015, and Ensamble, a dance film in 2019.
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The Tango Body Awareness® class experience
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“When we are dancing Tango in a Milonga or we are in a Tango class, sometimes a step we want to do does not work ... it is perhaps because we are not managing our body organization effectively. Some areas have become blocked so that the continuity of movement is broken and we lose coordination, posture, elasticity and stability. To compensate this disorganization, we wrongly make demands on other parts of the body and thus increase the possibility of injury to ourselves and also increases the sensation of discomfort within our body and with our partner. To face this type of situation, Tango Body Awareness® work invites us to direct our attention to HOW we organise our body in order to perform the tango movement”
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The Tango Body Awareness work is for all levels and you can attend to the classes in a couple or alone.
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The work doesn´t propose tango sequences (tango steps). The work focuses in the funcionalityy of the body in order to the dance. Tango Body Awareness ® proposes discovering our own kinetic coherence and our own development of non-verbal communication, through a delicate understanding of the body movement.
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In the classes of Tango Body Awareness ® we experience the class in two parts:
1. The Body Awareness ® part is where we detect the limitations of our body, and work over them through exercises on the floor, exercises seated and standing, alone, in a couple or in a group. Using comfortable clothes, and barefoot.
2. The tango part is where we dance and do exercises focusing on HOW we organise our body in order to perform the tango movement and in order to move to the tango music. Exercises are performed alone, in couple or/and in a group, with and without shoes.
Formal Studies
1979-1989
School of Classical Dance in Bahía Blanca, Argentina
Degree in Dance and Dance Teaching
1996-2000
Superior National Institute María Ruanova I.U.N.A. (National University Institute of Arts) in Buenos Aires
Degree in Contemporary Dance
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1994-1996
Scholarship from Fundacion Antorchas for improvement in
Classical and Contemporary Dance in Buenos Aires
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