Tango x 2
at the Harold Washington Library, October 10 and 11
By Laura Molzahn
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At least a Shubert ticket is cheaper than airfare, and you can drink the water. There are other advantages to concert performances as well. The dance is distilled and perfected, if somewhat stylized and artificial, placed on display by artists with an agenda that goes well beyond finding a partner for the night. It’s even possible that, because the tango is purified of its dross in concert, it reveals more; this evening of performance might be seen as an encyclopedia of approaches to the act of love.
The youngest of the couples, Erica Boaglio and Adrian Aragon, seem to wander half-knowingly, half-innocently into seduction: in their “soccer and tango waltz,” he tosses a ball and pulls her braids, then steals her hair band. The setup may be kitschy, but the payoff is dancing that surprises with its athletic, airborne lyricism. These two maintain a lot of space between them, yet they never break or violate their connection; their energy, however buoyant, whatever its centrifugal force, remains centered on each other. That airy but ever-present connection is even more visible in their Tango Americano, inspired by the dancing in the 1941 film The Pride of the Yankees: with some of the fluidity and diffidence of Fred and Ginger, Boaglio and Aragon create elegant loops and figure eights, overflowing with the impersonal energy of the young.
Bharata natyam, the classical East Indian form danced by Natyakalalayam Dance Company, has an entirely different purpose from the tango, a social dance for drunks (though they wouldn’t be welcome on the stage of the Shubert). In a way, bharata natyam has always been a concert-dance form: deeply tied to Hindu beliefs, its gestures and steps are codified in a 3,000-year-old treatise called the Natya Shastra. Bharata natyam was a religious tool intended to convey uplifting tales to the masses and raise consciousness–in the words of Natyakalalayam’s mission statement, “to entertain the laymen, educate the entertained, and to enlighten the educated to a higher spiritual understanding.”
