The dancers in “Tango After Dark,” an Argentine production that opened a two-week run at the Joyce Theater on Tuesday, are skilled, seasoned professionals. Their biographies list the many competitions they have won and the many shows in which they have performed, most with “tango” in the title. What distinguishes “Tango After Dark” from these other tango shows? Not much.
This one is directed and choreographed by German Cornejo (no relation to Herman Cornejo, the Buenos Aires-born ballet star who was at the Joyce last week). He and his partner, Gisela Galeassi, are joined by four other couples and an onstage band that plays adaptations of compositions by the great Astor Piazzolla.
“Tango After Dark” contains all that you might expect from a tango show. There are elegantly dressed couples moving as one in ballroom holds, sensually cool up top while their legs flick like grasshoppers, sneaking between the legs of their partner as often as possible, the women’s legs periodically wrapping around the waists of the men. Routines are punctuated by deep lunges and dips.
And since this is presentational tango, the women’s legs sometimes extend above their heads, stretching past 12 o’clock. And the men don’t just lift the women in low flight, allowing them to doodle with their feet in the air. They lift them overhead, one handed, or swoop them in loop-de-loops — feats met by mid-number applause.
This two-hour show has a nominal theme. A singer, Antonela Cirillo, welcomes us to Buenos Aires, “the city that never sleeps,” and most of her songs, which she sings in Spanish, refer to the city. At the start and several times later, a dancer in a Louise Brooks bob pretends to play a bandoneon, the accordionlike instrument central to the sound of tango.
This theatrical idea, both inane and inept, is as imaginative as “Tango After Dark” gets. Each couple is given a featured spot. There is a four-man number, with a dash of the male-male partnering traditional in tango. There is one for a woman and two men. There are group numbers during which the dancers circle and change partners carousel fashion. And after intermission, there is more of the same.
All this would be tolerable if the dancing were better. Presentational tango tends to strip the dance of its intimacy, of the sense of a conversation in the language of the feet. That’s the case here. All the chemistry is put on, and while the costumes keep changing, the couples aren’t sufficiently distinguishable by style. These dancers express passion mainly with muscle, and when their traveling footwork gets fast, it gets frantic and messy. The soul of tango — the subtle play of electric musicality and wit against a sense of fatedness, what the tango lyricist Enrique Santos Discépolo characterized as “a sad thought dancing” — is mostly absent.
The music doesn’t help. Cirillo is more impressive pop belter than chanteuse. The drum-heavy arrangements of Piazzolla aren’t improvements, and at least on opening night the band had trouble locking into the same groove. The musicians fared better when not accompanying the dancers, sampling more of Piazzolla’s wilder, avant-garde side. That music isn’t really meant for dancing, but if Cornejo had taken on the challenge, it would have been a welcome sign of boldness.
As it is, “Tango After Dark” is basically an overextended nightclub floor show, the kind offered to tourists in Buenos Aires, now offered to stay-at-home tourists in New York.
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