• U.S.

Dance: Love Those Crazy Steps

3 minute read
Gerald Clarke

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 on Broadway, where near sellout audiences at the Mark Hellinger Theater have turned Tango Argentina into the season’s surprise hit. Says Co-Producer Mel Howard: “There’s obviously a little bit of magic going on.”

So 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.”

The 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. “The two of us dance as one person; the tango is not male and female, but their union as a couple.”

It is that rare feeling of a genuine emotional encounter between male and female that probably best explains the show’s success. “The thought of going to New York was frightening,” says Orezzoli. It was a little bit of a kamikaze decision.” On such decisions are fortunes made. The Broadway run, originally scheduled for five weeks, has been extended at least through New Year’s, and after New York, Tango will make an extensive North American tour. The dancers want the whole world to love those crazy steps. “The tango is the star of the show,” asserts Elvira Santa María, 56. “We’ve come to prevent it from dying.” Judging from audiences’ ecstatic reaction to those furious feet, it will have a long, if strenuous, life. –By Gerald Clarke. Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York

More Must-Reads from TIME

Contact us at letters@time.com