Brenda Angiel Aerial Dance Company

Taking the Tango to a New Level—Literally

Brenda Angiel Aerial Dance Company flies into the Durham Performing Arts Center, July 8-10

Choreographer Brenda Angiel is no stranger to the American Dance Festival. She made her Festival debut as a student, and since then her company, Brenda Angiel Aerial Dance Company (based in Buenos Aires), has performed at the ADF twice, in 1999 and 2005; she has also been selected for several International Choreography Residency programs through the Festival. Widely lauded for her inventive aerial dance work, Angiel now devotes an entire evening to re-envisioning the tango with 8cho. Her dancers are joined by a five-piece orchestra playing a jazzy, funky tango score (composed and arranged by Juan Pablo Arcangeli and Martin Ghersa), and a singer, Alejandro Guyot, who appears in a few of the numbers. The dramatic lighting and separate scenes give the sense that we have happened into a vibrant nightclub. We meet several sensual couples, two men competing for the attention of a woman, a lonely man without a partner, and a woman longing for a lost love; although the scenes progress successively, I could imagine that all of this might be happening at once in various parts of the club.

Using bungee cords or ropes and harnesses, Angiel enhances the traditional tango form with sweeping spins, playful bounds, and daring dips that hover just above the floor. Most often, although not always, the woman in the couple floats and glides through the air while the man remains earthbound, directing her motion. The sensuality and fancy footwork remain, amplified through the use of the vertical dimension. The possibilities for partner work are multiplied as the pairs flip upside down and use the back wall of the stage as their floor.

In addition to taking the three-dimensionality of the dance to a new level, Angiel has found new ways to abstract the elements of tango. The opening image reveals two women suspended in a mist, arms and legs twined around each other. Slowly, the two swivel their hips and their knees, wrap and unwrap their lower legs as tango partners do. With extreme control they turn each other around and hang upside down--somehow without setting themselves swinging like pendulums. In another scene, “Footango,” three pairs of legs appear from above the top curtain. Angiel shows us how expressive feet can be as they gesture to each other, flick their feet, and play out a scene in which the two women fight over the one man.

One of the most exciting scenes is “Tangay,” in which Ana Armas and Pablo Carrizo have just finished a playful tango. She flies backwards out of his arms….and lands in the arms of another man! She bounds back and forth between them as they try to win her attention. The partners keep switching, and they even dance a tango for three, with Armas enclosed in a circle of their arms, all three of them stepping quickly and sharply between and around the others’ legs. Finally, the two men decide she is too much trouble, and finish the tango themselves.

Despite the novelty of upside-down tangos and endless spiraling spins, the material starts to feel repetitive by the end. Although the last two numbers feature multiple pairs, it seems that we have already seen many of the ways they interact with each other. While each scene starts with a strong dramatic image and intriguing uses of the aerial apparatus, the ideas did not seem to develop enough to sustain my interest for the duration of each scene. The women, weightless, usually swung around by their men, begin to feel a bit like fairies, visions—a little imaginary. Perhaps I tired of this fantasy because the illusion was incomplete; I could not ignore the ropes for long, although it seemed I was meant to.

Nonetheless, Angiel approaches—and expands—the possibilities of aerial dance with imagination and vigor. Despite some clumsy technical work in last night’s performance (and an odd snippet of eerie, electronic recorded music that plays during every transition—baffling, given the live musicians on stage), 8cho’s dancers make the enormous effort of aerial work look easy and fun, and the live orchestra is outstanding.

Anne Morris