Biography

Elena Roger
by Eduardo Álvarez Tuñón
Elena Roger sings even in silence, dances even in stillness, acts representing life with subtle movements, glances that say everything and are impossible to restrain, like the circles drawn in the water of a lake when a leaf falls. Elena Roger is a shape of light. Her eyes see what no one sees: they always seem to look at a distant place that belongs only to her, the place where music, singing, dance, everything she's chosen as her destiny, emerge.
Accustomed to dates and linear biographies we know that Elena Roger was born on October 27th, 1974, in Buenos Aires. But... when is an artist born? I don't know. I'm only certain that the universe perceives they have arrived. I imagine, for instance, that day in October, suddenly, colors started to be more intense, and nights clearer and more scented. Everyone must have discovered that the taste of water felt different, that sensations got more vivid, and the existence on earth had become more beautiful. All of a sudden, the wind begins to be the wind, the rain begins to be different, smells are more intense, as if that birth was missing for the universe to be created in fullness.
When did she listen to music for the first time? It's impossible to know it. We've lost that moment we'd have liked to witness, just as if by watching it we could find out the secret of her art. It's like wondering: When did she see birds for the first time? But maybe the question we should ask is the other way around: When did music discover Elena Roger? When did the birds see her for the first time? After having heard her singing, dancing, acting, it's possible to think that she's been chosen by music, and that the birds imitate her in the highest and most perfect flight.
Elena Roger said once that her contact with music started with a guitar and then a keyboard, and later dance, singing and acting... Everything converges in the reality of an artist that gathers it all, that can't be reduced to a single facet, and that's difficult to translate into words, because words have a limit, they aren't so useful to describe a sunset with precision or, for instance, the sublime moment in which she sings on a stage, that feels so empty when everything has finished and she's no longer there. Guitar, keyboards: I think of the first contact of music with her hands. There's something in Elena Roger's hands of intense expressiveness. There's something in Elena Roger's hands that hasn't been pointed out and goes beyond the roles she plays. I invite you to stop and observe them, even when she sings. At certain moments they seem to undo the light.
We shouldn't be surprised that the musical comedy, which integrates different genres, has been the natural sphere for her appearance and the evolution of her career. It's possible to remember her performance in Les Misérables, Saturday Night Fever, or Jazz, Swing, Tap, but I think we should pay attention to Mina, Che Cosa Sei?, which got an ACE award (Asociación de Cronistas de Espectáculo / Association of reporters of the show-business), it's a work of magic, with a dreamy atmosphere that's so moving. I think it's a turning point. Then comes Evita in London, Piaf -of an unequaled grandeur-, the nomination and next the Lawrence Olivier Award, and the certainty that, at last, the world's realizing who Elena Roger is. After that, Passion and Evita in Broadway, the indisputable success we all know.
I think in Elena Roger at present and I can't resist the temptation of going over the steps that led her here, as if reviving them would allow me to understand her mysteries. I wonder: When did she enter a theater for the first time, before knowing what her destiny would be? Perhaps she was carried there when she was a little girl, and I ask myself: what did she dream of that night when she went back home? Does she remember that scene from her childhood? But I guess it doesn't matter to know it, because the ability to turn every space into a small stage, into a theater, was already with her. Her first stage was a room in Barracas, surrounded by her brothers, with improvised dance, with something playful, watched by everyone.
I saw Elena Roger for the first time in Mina, Che Cosa Sei? and that night it took me some time to leave the concert hall. The lights went off and I could feel the solitude of the stage where she'd performed. Her absence was moving too, her way of ?not being? there made everything look overwhelmed by an elusive beauty. I found out that Elena Roger's performance not only did touch spectators but also the objects that surrounded her, and I thought of writing about her to give them a voice, because, just like us, they felt the sadness of everything having finished. Also the objects had lived the vertigo of watching her transforming herself. Since that night, every time I went to see a show with Elena Roger, I've delayed my leaving and I've been able to confirm that spaces didn?t remain the same: they were illuminated with a different light. We weren't the same either.
I think we could recognize a place where Elena Roger has performed (even without knowing it before), and feel that she was there as we feel the presence of the sea, or the change of the seasons.
We live something like that when she finishes a song. Recorriendo el Rock Nacional (2007; Going through Argentinean Rock) as well as Vientos del Sur (2011; Winds from the South), her two recordings, are the most comprehensive proof. Elena Roger's voice can sing it all. Once, in a Physics book, I've read that the waves of the voice that sings rise, and are never lost; they keep vibrating in space, and if we can't listen to them it's because of us, of our limits, not because they've ceased. Perhaps if we could rise like them, we'd keep on hearing them. It's beautiful to think this thesis is true and that nothing Elena Roger has sung is lost. There's a place in the universe where all of them coexist, her first songs, those the film Amadeus inspired her in her childhood, or the Italian music recordings, those she sang playing, and the ones from her first national tour in 2011. Something like a village in infinite space where one can listen to her singing ?El Acordeonista? (?L'Accordéoniste?), ?Mariel y el Capitán? (?Mariel and The Captain?), ?Every breath you take?, or some other that, maybe, she sang at ten, and even she's forgotten. Perhaps all those songs, playing at the same time, produce a perfect chord, similar to life. Eternity would be a place where one wants to get because one can always listen to Elena Roger.
Elena Roger's adventure in cinema, in my opinion, revolutionizes the concept of acting itself. Not for nothing, in no time, has she been called to play important roles in several movies, and from the short film ?La voz? (The Voice), they've already premiered Un amor (One Love), directed by Paula Hernández, Otro Corazón (Another Heart), directed by Tomás Sánchez and La Vida Anterior (The Previous Life), by Daniel Broitman, and we are looking forward to Lucía Puenzo's Wakolda and Eugenio Zanetti's Amapola (Poppy).
Elena Roger achieves something I've never seen in an actress: that the character's present also contains the past and all that will inevitably happen to them, for good or for bad. Her voice stands out all the time, even in the shortest dialogue. I recall some scenes, that become epiphanies, isolated encounters with perfection. For instance, when in the second sequence of ?La voz? she walks along with the music of the National Anthem, in a long dress, and stops to observe... The eloquent silences, and the play of the eyes, when Diego Peretti's wife arrives in Un amor. The song in Otro Corazón, the image of the keyboard, and the heartbreak of the phrase ?Call me? when she leaves a message on the phone. That close-up in La vida anterior, with a red rose in her hair and those single pearl earrings, when she says she sings opera, or the race in the edge of water. I could make an anthology of wonderful instants.
Now I look at her photos and find out that, just like when she acts, what has been and what will be are both present. I see her through the days, I see her in a room in Barracas singing for everybody and for no one, I see Fosca dressed in blue, with a hairstyle that makes her forehead and eyes stand out, and she seems to face infinity, I see Mina, Evita, Piaf, all of them and I see the wonderful light of the forthcoming, I see Elena Roger, unmistakable and unique.