Word: tango
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Suppose you wanted to stage a Broadway flop and were casting around for surefire bad ideas. What would you think of? Well, how about this: 15 mostly middle-aged and sometimes portly Argentines dancing the night away in that hoary old favorite, the tango. Add to that four singers declaring their sorrows in Spanish and an orchestra heavy on bandoneons (a type of accordion), and the marquee might as well say DISASTER. Indeed, when such a show was first mentioned to Choreographer Juan Carlos Copes, he answered, reasonably enough, "You must be crazy." But reason does not always prevail...
...there is, and it is called the tango. Not the basic dance you learned at Arthur Murray. This is the tango that got its start in the bordellos of Buenos Aires a century ago and even today seems almost shocking in its arrant sensuality. "The tango expresses something deep in our personalities," says Héctor Orezzoli, who conceived the revue along with his friend Claudio Segovia. "The dance is tortuous, complicated, intricate, mysterious, rough, but also sophisticated and full of humor and irony...
...theme of the tango is sexual entanglement and male domination of the female--Latin machismo, in other words. The man's upper body is rigid, and the woman revolves around him; down below, their legs and feet meet and embrace in steps too involved even for a computer to comprehend. "The tango is a connection between the brain, the heart and the legs," says Virulazo Orcaizaguirre, 58, who looks like a Hispanic Rodney Dangerfield but moves like a slim lad of 20. "First, you feel with your heart. Then the brain tells you what to do with your feet...
Segovia and Orezzoli visited dance halls and clubs all over Argentina to find the best tango teams. Five of the seven couples chosen are married. "In the American tango, everyone does it the same way," says Choreographer Copes, 54, who also dances in the show. "But in Argentina, everyone feels different. It's like love between a couple: some are sweet, some sensuous, some fighting." He has been dancing with his own partner, María Nieves, 48, for 32 years, during nine of which they were husband and wife. Even after their divorce, they-continued working together...
...Back to the Stadium: Games Two and Three were pretty good-in fact, really fine for April. And they were the first evidence that the Sox and Yanks were ready to tango again, in most entertaining fashion, in '05. Has baseball ever had consecutive seasons of extended theater as these two have provided since April of 2003? I can't imagine it has. And if we've got six more months of that in prospect, well, God bless...