Friday, March 19
8:00 PM
Kirkland Fine Arts Center Theatre
Millikin University
1184 W. Main St
Decatur, IL
Ticket prices: $24, $21, and $18.
Box office: (217) 424-6318
I have more info about this show at
www.prairienet.org/white-street/tango.html.
Attached is a recent review from Newsday (for what it's worth).
joe
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http://library.newsday.com/getdoc.cgi?id=126330399x0y19825&OIDS=1Q001D000&Fo
rm=RL&bp=no
Tango: It Didn't Always Take Two to Dance
By Valerie Gladstone.Valerie Gladstone is a freelance writer.
TANGO BUENOS AIRES. "La Cancion de Buenos Aires" ("The Song of Buenos
Aires"). Dance and songs from 1905 to the present. Saturday night.
Tilles Center, C.W. Post Campus of Long Island University, Brookville.
IN A HEADY MIXTURE of formal rigor and sensuous phrasing Tango Buenos
Aires, a flamboyantly talented company of six couples, six musicians
and Karina Rivera, a robust singer, immersed the Saturday night
audience at Tilles Center in the steamy world of Argentinean tango. The
two-part program consisted of dances and songs from 1905 to the present
- a cornucopia of moods and styles that exhibited tango's breadth. In
one segment after another, the dancers, sleekly sexy in glittering
evening gowns and elegant suits, conveyed the longing and sense of
fatality that makes the dance more than an exhibition of eroticism and
athleticism. Particularly striking was the musicality of the
choreography. Everything flowed, no matter how tricky the footwork or
acrobatic the movements.
Credit must go to Osvaldo Requena, the artistic and musical
director, who established the company in 1985, after its rousing
reception at "Michelangelo," a famous Buenos Aires cabaret. A noted
pianist and conductor in Argentina, he has spent years researching and
reviving the indigenous music of his country. The teacher in him
designed this program, a very seductive history lesson that took us
through a century of dance. With only a lamppost and old-fashioned
record player as props, the evening began with the small orchestra,
which sat on the stage, playing "A Cumparsita," a popular march tune,
characterized by the poignancy that underlies all tango. Next came a
sequence just for the male dancers - since the tango was first only
danced by men who were alone in a strange port. Women joined them for
the second dance on the program but not as equals in status.
Although now identified with the glamor of high society, the tango
originated in society's underbelly - the brothels of Argentina. Many
of the immigrants from Europe, Africa and other regions who streamed
into the outskirts of Buenos Aires during the 1880's gravitated toward
the port's brothels, where they could drown their troubles in a few
drinks and find some companionship. From this intermingled cultural
brew emerged a new music which became tango - a mixture of the
rhythms of African drums and the popular music of the pampas known as
the milonga, which combined Indian rhythms with the music of the early
Spanish colonists. In the early days, the wailing melancholy of the
bandoneon, an accordion-like instrument imported to Argentina from
Germany in 1886, became a mainstay of tango music. It was the French in
the first two decades of the 20th Century who first brought tango world
renown and into cabarets frequented by the rich.
The exuberant cast illuminated both the light and dark aspects of
tango. While every dancer had tremendous elan, Nestor Ruben Gude, Lucia
Miriam Alonso, Dante Roberto Montero and Haydee Carmen Gonzalez stood
out in the "Milonga con Variacion" (Milonga with Variation) and "La
Trampera / 9 de Julio" (The Rat Trap / July 9). One moment their
flashing feet and intertwining bodies would convey pent up sexuality and
the next a romantic tenderness. Their gift was showing how such a
variety of emotions could exist almost at once. Unwilling to depart
without a special fanfare, the men did a final dance with twirling
ropes, finishing in a blaze of virtuosity.
Copyright 1999, Newsday Inc.
Tango: It Didn't Always Take Two to Dance., pp B02.