The Story Behind the "Starfish Tango"

(image credit)

It was what I call synchronicity, when I ran into this post on Facebook last night.  I watched Rutger Hauer's short film "Starfish Tango" a few years ago, and I wanted to write about it, next, for my blog.

I was glad to know that Loren Eiseley wrote this story originally.  "The Star Thrower" was an essay he wrote in 1969, which he included into an 1978 anthology of the same title, shortly before he died:

"On a point of land, I found the star thrower... I spoke once briefly. "I understand," I said. "Call me another thrower." Only then I allowed myself to think, He is not alone any longer. After us, there will be others... We were part of the rainbow... Perhaps far outward on the rim of space a genuine star was similarly seized and flung... For a moment, we cast on an infinite beach together beside an unknown hurler of suns... We had lost our way, I thought, but we had kept, some of us, the memory of the perfect circle of compassion from life to death and back to life again - the completion of the rainbow of existence."

On his website, Hauer writes about the lead-up to, and the spirit of, his film:

There are many descriptions of the Tango... 'A conversation between two people', 'Sadness transformed in dance', 'A vertical expression of a horizontal desire', 'A rhythmic force that develops strikingly to the point where it dissolves into something soft and sweet'... and the latter is likely the one that fits the 'Starfish Tango' because of the meaning it aims at expressing. With this in mind, body and soul I set out to shoot a short movie. It was to be an experiment with myself, with the camera, with a great bunch of volunteers and a young dance group from Milan. It would be a visual story that could tickle people's senses using my craft as the tool, so to speak. 

It was to cost as little as possible to prove that it can be done if people want to do it. It would be about AIDS. It would be light in tone. And ultimately, and hopefully, it would be about how all of us feel about this disease. 

The film would have many aspects (some hidden, some plainly visible) - in terms of COLOURS (red, which carries so many symbolic meanings in connection with AIDS: its ribboned symbol, the blood it infects), MUSIC (soft piano melodies donated by the great composer Ludovico Einaudi), SHADOWS (AIDS continues to cast its long shadows around the world), OCEAN (which we all carry in the veins of our origin - its continued source for life and death, its phenomenal force) and PEOPLE, because we all are just here, and now, overwhelmed by this plague.

"Starfish Tango" is clearly an artistic adaptation from the Eiseley piece, but to me it's more a humanistic evolution, that is, a cobbling of meaning and creativity among us.  The dance, the swim, and the narration are so full of symbolism, as to make this short film a truly rich one.  I'd say Hauer succeeds in strumming our heart strings on the poignant devastation of AIDS.