Laughter and tango: Wilfred Sarr and his dancers

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Untitled, by Wilfred Sarr

Eight decades in, Wilfred Sarr has learned a new dance.

The painter some regard as the South Bay’s Van Gogh (if Vincent had a sense of humor, danced, and lived through the 1960s) comes from a decidedly non-dancing people, religious Midwestern farm folk who took life altogether too seriously to let loose on a dance floor. Sarr rejected such seriousness while still a child.

“Being raised as a hard core primitive Southern Baptist, I became leery of ‘seriousity’ early on,” Sarr said in an interview last week. “I said, ‘There is just something wrong with this.’”

Dance was rebellion, and so was art. Naturally, as a rebellious teenager, Sarr combined the two.

“I was born on a farm in Iowa, spring of ‘36,” Sarr wrote in an artist’s statement accompanying his newest show, “Tango,” at Gallery 381 in San Pedro. “By age five a readable sense of perspective was noted in my drawings. By age 15 the ‘dancers’ first appeared, harbingers of the dance-of-life theme, dominator of so much of my life. Electrons dance, planets dance, clouds dance…Does not even death have a dance?”

Later, as a young man freshly returned from a strange stint in the military (he had his artistic epiphany in a faraway field, soldier that he was), Sarr and his newlywed wife learned another kind of dance — that is, dance as a drunken spectacle.

“My first wife and I would go get shit drunk and go to cowboy bars and dance around and grab each other by the crotches,” Sarr remembered. “This was back in ‘61, ‘62. People would buy us drinks and invite us back. We talk on the phone now for hours and laugh. ‘Who were those people?’”

A decade later, just past the apex of the psychedelic hippy-dippy dance decade and at the very dawn of the age of disco, Sarr discovered his own Sufi-like dance of abandon.

“I visualized myself as a big roaring fire and just moved everything that is moveable,” he said. “Bones snap, gristle stretches, sweat pours…So that was my dance.”

Five years ago, his attention as an artist honed directly in on dancing in what would become his most successful show to date, “The Dancer is the Answer,” at Cannery Row Studios in Redondo Beach. He showed the many permutations of couples in movement, flying and flowing together arm and arm, exchanging love, lust, disgust, union, separation and everything in between.

The paintings were purely exuberant – vibrantly alive, playful, wildly colorful, the dancers almost leaping off the canvas – and audiences responded in kind.

“I thought, ‘What can I do to top that one?’” Sarr said. “Now, I think I’ve got it.”

And so comes “Tango.” His new show, which opens Thursday night, features forty new paintings from Sarr and will be accompanied by a free tango dance party (Milonga) and will culminate in a tango “flash mob” outside the studio.

Untitled, by Wilfred Sarr

Untitled, by Wilfred Sarr

With “Tango,” Sarr has found his perfect dance partner. Tango emerged from poor, immigrant neighborhoods of Buenos Aires at the turn of the 19th century, when was denounced by the Pope for its supposed lavaciousness. But tango persisted, and erupted for a while into a worldwide craze – a story in the New York Times from January 16, 1914, was headlined, “Pope denounces ‘New Paganism’” (a far cry from Pope Francis, who is from Argentinia and dances tango). It is a wildly expressive dance form which, like Sarr’s work, is somehow both intricate in its detail yet boundless in spirit. Tango, like the artist, has also proven to be utterly irrepressible.

“It is like Wilfred, in a way,” said Annie Appel, the founder of Gallery 381 and curator of Sarr’s current show. “Tango is a dance form that is a little bit about defiance of decorum.”

“Technically speaking, tango came of age when it was ballroom dancing – big hooped skirts, and wide open embraces, because those dresses were four foot round,” Appel said. “You could barely get your arms to connect, the dress was so wide, so the tango leader would place his foot beneath the dress to make contact with the woman’s foot. That was sacrilege; that was the end of decorum, as we knew it. It was all about feet connecting, locking at the knees, beautiful moves, and connection.”

Gallery 381 has become an epicenter of the LA tango scene since giving rise to Tango San Pedro seven years ago. It happened when Argentine tango dancer Sylvia Askenazi arrived at an art show in the gallery and noticed a certain quality in the room. She sauntered directly across the room to Appel, who she’d never met before.

“Nice floors,” she said.

Thus a creative partnership was born that would result in the art gallery flowering into a dance studio, as Gallery 381 joined forces with Tango San Pedro.

“As a gallery, I was using my walls, and the floors weren’t being utilized,” Appel said. “A tango dancer thrives on floors. They don’t really care about walls, in the least.”

Sarr, meanwhile, had discovered tango by way of one of his favorite research devices – YouTube. Though he was for forty years a fixture of the South Bay art world, ten years ago he moved to Santa Cruz. He never emerged as an artist in his new home, but kept showing in the South Bay. A year ago, a gallery owner in Santa Cruz told him he was curating a show focusing on tango.

“I said to myself, ‘I’ve been here ten years, and I still haven’t surfaced,” Sarr recalled. “I thought, ‘Well, I’ll jump on anything I see.”

Thus he fell deeply into tango.

“I watched a video, and there was like 42 or 43 steps that all have names,” Sarr said. “You’d see three or four couples execute the steps in their own way, and everybody stands around and watches the couple in the center doing all this stuff, and then somebody else will come out and dance…And I thought, ‘Gosh, that is quite different than the way I discovered dance.’”

“I think what it is, they get into some kind of a zone. A friend of a friend told me, ‘It’s like having the affair without having the affair.’ You are very close to that person and you are moving together and there is no way you can deny the 50,000 different levels of energy exchanging between the male psyche and the female psyche. And they ride on this —  they just ride it around. I can see how you could get attached to that.”

Untitled, by Wilfred Sarr

Untitled, by Wilfred Sarr

Sarr’s work habits are legendarily prolific. Within two and half months of turning his attention to tango, he’d completed 55 paintings.

“Well, once I crank the door open, you can’t put it all in one painting,” he said. “So I’ll do 40 or 50 paintings, then I’ll paint out 20 of them. So if you see something you like, you better speak up, because it will be gone —  if I pick it up one day and don’t like something I see, it’ll be whited out.”

Sarr showed a handful of the paintings in Santa Cruz, and then on a visit to the South Bay earlier this year, his friend and fellow artist Cie Gumucio introduced him to Annie Appel. They talked on the phone, then Sarr arrived at Gallery 381 a few nights later on a tango night. He showed Appel, Askenazi, and a roomful of tango dancers a little slide show of his tango paintings.

“I knew right away, by looking at them…We had a room full of tango dancers giggling and laughing,” Appel said.

This is one of the qualities that sets Sarr apart —  his gift for laughter. The art world tends toward the highfalutin; in the history of art, few paintings have been composed with the simple intention of a laugh.

“I’ve been telling people, these paintings are more than slightly irreverent of tango,” Appel said.

Untitled, by Wilfred Sarr

Untitled, by Wilfred Sarr

The great Italian novelist and essayist Italo Calvino, in the six lectures he gave at Yale to young writers shortly before his death, identified six qualities he found essential in great art. The very first was lightness —  which he described not as not lacking substance, but rather not weighed down, possessing a lightness of being.  Much as Shakespeare’s fools are allowed to make the most serious observations because the weight is leavened with humor, Sarr’s irreverence isn’t an end unto itself, but a way to go more directly to the heart of matters.

His paintings, Appel said, are like the spirit of tango itself.

““It’s that great collision, in life….that duality, that two things can be true at the same time,” Appel said. “To take a dance form like this, in which the more specific you are with your form the easier and more fluid the dance becomes, and couple it with Wilfred’s loose, inaccurate [depictions of tango] —  like, legs don’t bend that way, a foot is sticking straight out way longer than it should be, a hand is reaching way behind a back in a way that would make a person lose balance…In reality, they are tango caricatures. They are innately funny and they are supposed to be, playing on our flaws. There is this couple opposite each other and people are just roaring, smiling, happy. And tango, the history of it is irreverence, even in the exchange between two dancers…As a dancer, you have a plan laid out, then comes the spontaneity of your dance partner and the dance floor, which is what makes it so exhilarating.”

Wilfred Sarr. Photo by Annie Appel

Wilfred Sarr. Photo by Annie Appel

In his artist’s statement, Sarr notes that the longer he has lived, the more he has realized his intent. Unsurprisingly, it’s so unserious it manages to be quite serious.

“Now, at 80 years with nothing more (to try) to prove, maybe it’s time to get real,” he writes. “Whatever project is offered, must be x-rayed.  If it can be made fun, it gets a second look-at. If it’s solid I’ll give it hell. There’s no bucket-list, just haul me away. Ah yes the ‘dance of death’ angel seems soon arriving what shall we ask of it?  Glib angel, What next? How to inject into this brave-new world a crack of Levity. What zany dance could move the bowels of all that machinery?”

“Considering all the truly gifted folk on-planet, if you feel compelled to hold me in memory, for any reason, for God’s sake, let it be laughter…”

“Tango” by Wilfred Sarr opens December 3 with a reception from 7 to 11 p.m. at Gallery 381,381 6th Street, San Pedro (also first Thursday art walk). The show runs through February 27. The evening will be accompanied by a free tango dance party (Milonga), tango lessons, and at 8:30 p.m. in the evening there will be a “tango dance flash mob”  in the street outside.

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