Milonga Tango

            My only ever exposure to tango has been a select few glimpses of Dancing with the Stars, so I had little to nothing to compare this performance to. The dance, as a whole was fascinatingly complex, the dancers easily equal in skill to those we saw at the Hear the Dance: Russia performance. However, the dance itself was extremely different than anything else we’ve seen so far; where everything else has been fairly contemporary and fluid—almost delicate—predominantly ballet in basis, this tango group danced with sharp angles in their arms and legs in nearly all cases except that of the comical female dancer intentionally acting as though she were entirely unskillful. Whenever the dancers executed a lift, for example, the typical movement would involve a spin with well-timed kicks toward the audience or a sort of crooked snap of their leg matching his or her partner’s mirror movement, forming a sort of clapping motion with their calves.

Where slight lifts are occasionally used in ballet, here we had the chance to see a single dance that was essentially a single extensive lift, the woman’s feet barely touching the ground—if at all—for easily over a minute. Though this was a more contemporary portion of the event as a whole, there were distinct tango elements scattered throughout—perhaps merely to keep the continuity of the performance’s mood. However, the lifts executed in this portion of the dance were easily recognizable as of the more fluid, contemporary variety as she moved seamlessly around across his body over and over again, giving the appearance of the dance a lightweight quality. Yet, from my limited knowledge on dance, the final portion of this scene incorporated heavy tango influences as she spread her limbs out and then remained stiff as he spun her above him, with the rapid flare of a stereotypical tango.

The other drastic distortion of traditional tango we saw in the performance came when the female dancer was “running” humorously through the projected city and then joined in a near-slapstick routine with a very straightedge male dancer. They danced a tango but, when he—like any skillful tango dancer—would stop a move suddenly, allowing for those split moments of stillness between each step, she flopped around like a sort of doll. This humorous element gave the dance another form of extreme discipline, however, since faking bad dancing appeared to be equally—if not more—exhausting than dancing a traditional, articulate tango. Therefore, there were essentially three distinct dances over the course of the full performance: a traditional tango, a contemporary dance, and a floppy tango that served as somewhat of an homage to invertebrates.

Yet, even the stylistically traditional moments were uncharacteristic in their arrangement, often grouping three, or four or five, people together in a single hold or dismissing the expectations that a man and woman would dance together—allowing for a sort of brawl between three men or a mutualistic, but not at all intimate, routine with a pair of women. These holds appeared to be arranged to resemble the traditional hold between a man and a woman with slight adjustments. A trio of two women and a man, for example, was arranged with one woman between the other two people, facing the man, with each woman holding one of the man’s arms. In a scene featuring what appeared to a be a sort of gala with a mass amount of people, two groups of five dancers each dancing as dual masses, moving in a sort of united and noble manner; each person seemed primarily responsible for merely maintaining the rigid hold of a tango while they were guided around by the shoulders of the dancers on either side of them. And a dance of three men, featured directly after one of these gala scenes, resembled the tango perfectly yet only included momentary holds, favoring a more continuous, antagonistic action of dancing around each other with brief moments of interaction.

And, through all these alterations to the traditional dance style, the finishing lifts of most of the dances remained entirely indicative of tango: arched backs, rapid movements leading to a sudden halt, and a somewhat protruding, perfectly rigid hold. These moments were entirely what one expects from a tango, down to the stern expressions. And all the variance in the other dances allowed for a truly genuine multi-dimensional performance with a diversity of expressions.