As “Forever Tango” begins, with moonlight and the melancholy music of Lisandro Androver, a male dancer, formally dressed, his hair smoothed back, moves with a desperate grace. His face, his movements, his posture all suggest a struggle between self-control and desire.
His partner, who effortlessly keeps pace through a maze of swirling steps, is less a woman than a goddess. Her short, close-fitting dress is fluid silver, her body magnificently desirable, every motion sensual. But even as she throws her head back, pressing her breast to her partner’s chest, and braces her legs so that her body forms a crescent moon in the man’s embrace, she is elusive, gloriously physical but unattainable, a love never to be possessed.
This dance is the first of an exuberant show at the Royal George Theater, that features seven pairs of dancers and 12 of the world’s great tango musicians. All are from Argentina, where the dance originated in the brothels of Buenos Aires, much as jazz originated here and with much of jazz’s mix of sadness and sophistication, world weariness and vitality. The show has been touring for about two years.
The opening number represents “the longing of the tango for the night,” says the show’s creator, Luis Bravo, who played cello for the long-running hit “Tango Argentino.” Androver was the music director of that show for six years.
“The tango is a story you tell in three minutes,” Bravo explains. “This one is a romance between the female element–Miriam, the dancer, is the moon–and the masculine element of the music.”
On opening night the audience grasped the romance of it so clearly that as Miriam struck her final, sensual pose, one male theatergoer involuntarily cried, “Whoa!” He wasn’t the only one to have a visceral response. Judging by later conversations in the lobby, “Forever Tango” provokes an overwhelming desire on the part of onlookers to dress up, pair off and dance.
It’s always mysterious what will stimulate an audience not just to watch but also to go and do likewise. One emergency room physician at Cook County Hospital reported seeing an unusual number of injuries during the 1992 Olympics among individuals unwisely trying to duplicate athletic feats at home. The victims included a grandmother under the influence of the balance-beam competition, who sprained her back doing a somersaulting dismount from her coffee table.
Fortunately, learning the tango offers no such dangers, unless you include the peril of yielding to a smoldering passion. And although you may never move with the fatal aplomb of Jorge Torres in the show’s “Libertango” number (“I appear as a Dracula and with my eyes, my hands, my movements hypnotize the woman into my control,” Torres says), you can find a surprising number of clubs and studios in Chicago where the tango works its magic.
Omar Habib, cultural attache at the Argentine consulate, often dances the tango in Chicago.
“When I am homesick for Argentina the music of the tango is perfect since the music is about 80 percent melancholic,” he says. A nostalgic evening for Habib begins with dinner at the restaurant El Nantu. “A nantu is an animal of ours like an ostrich but a little bit smaller,” he adds helpfully. “The food there is Argentine, which means mostly meat, grilled.” Later he moves on to Yvette Wintergarden, next door to the Sears Tower, where tango is danced on Tuesdays nights.
“It is a very nice place,” says Habib, who adds that his mood is not entirely melancholic. “When I dance the tango I feel like Valentino,” he confides. “I used to seduce a lot with the tango.” Asked if the dance was, in such circumstances, effective, Habib gives a diplomatic answer: “I have no complaints.”
Because, he says, “you never finish to learn the tango,” he also takes occasional lessons from his old friend and fellow Argentine Jorge Niedas, proprietor of the dance studio Tango 21, in the Fine Arts Building. On Monday evenings Niedas teaches an hour-long class followed by two hours of social dancing, for a largely non-Argentine clientele.
He also encourages his students to go the last Wednesday of every month to the restaurant Emilio’s La Perla de la Mediterraneo in Hillside, where the tango is danced to the music of an authentic player of the bandoneon, the concertina-like instrument that is called the soul of the tango. There are only 200 bandoneon players worldwide (four are onstage in “Forever Tango”), so on these occasions at La Perla, a master is flown in from New York.
“My students get hooked by the music, the romantic image,” says Niedas, “then find the dance is not so easy as they think. It is risky because the man improvises steps constantly and the woman must be intuitive.”
Trying to analyze the tango’s allure, he adds, “It’s like a life art, a balance. The man wants to show off the girl. The girl also can make him look good. They both make the other wonderful, complete. If you can do that in life–well!”
Both Niedas and Bravo insist that the dance is not simply romantic but also a realistic expression of what life is about. “So intense, so dramatic, you dance with someone else, but in a way you’re alone. It’s the confrontation, the challenge between a man and a woman,” says Bravo.
“The dance began low class, in bordellos,” says the dancer Jorge Torres. “The men paid to dance, and if they couldn’t afford, they practiced dancing with each other, because the girls were so well versed in tango it became a matter of pride to impress them with original moves.”
The dance eventually caught on outside the brothels, with a classic era of tango danced by people of two generations ago. “In Buenos Aires, to see these old people dance the tango–it’s like gold,” Torres says.
He believes, as many others do, that tango is not only for the young. “It is a dance that expresses a mature sense of the self,” Torres says. “The very young don’t really understand it.”
Despite their passionate commitment to the historical development of the dance, explored in “Forever Tango” with movements from every era, Torres, Bravo and Niedas all welcome newcomers. Members of the cast will teach classes and give demonstrations both at Niedas’ Tango 21 studio and at the Chicago Tango Club’s classes held at the Athletic Club.
Charlotte Vikstrom, president of the club, is a purist. “We dance only to authentic Argentinian tango, none of this American tango, `Hernando’s Hideaway’ stuff,” she says. She adds that the tango is “so complicated to perform that it is cerebral, like chess, where you’re thinking 12 steps ahead.”
But Bravo gives beginners permission to experiment and interpret. “What we try to teach is, it doesn’t matter your nationality,” he says. “Do whatever you feel. Give the dance your personality. As an artist I have always struggled against museums–it is useful to educate people, but not to make them into copies. Every person has their own tango, their own dark side of pain, their romance. The way you do it is all yours.”
Permission having been granted to try tango in one’s own style, both novice and experienced dancers might like to make an excursion to Tania’s, a club at 2659 N. Milwaukee Ave., where a live band keeps things hopping from 10 p.m. till 4 a.m. An international clientele gives the place the glamorous air of Rick’s Cafe Americain in “Casablanca.”
“We want to please everybody,” says the owner, Elias Sanchez. “We play Caribbean music, music from Spain, the cumbia from Colombia, the bossa nova from Brazil, the conga from Cuba, the merengue from Santo Domingo. You request a tango, we play a tango.” The food is similarly eclectic, with an outstanding black bean soup.
And while the atmosphere is not that of an authentic tango ballroom in Buenos Aires, it has its own beauty.
“South Americans are the last remaining ones to dress with elegance,” says Emma Alejandro, who works in Tania’s office, booking parties and handling public relations. “People dress so beautifully to come here, like they’re going to a wedding.”
Many women wear gloves and hats, attaining a degree of fashion rarely seen outside a Hollywood movie of the ’40s. Squired by men in sharp-looking suits, they head for the dance floor, their steps already in rhythm to the music’s beat. Yet even in this bright throng, says Alejandro, “if you know tango, you come out of the crowd. Everyone looks at you. And if you’re with a good guy who knows how to move you around–oh my! oh my!”
Tango in such surroundings may not be authentic, but the daring spirit of the dance is clearly there. But if you haven’t yet learned the moves?
“You can also enjoy tango just looking,” says Jorge Niedas. “I can be hours looking at people do this dance.”
HOW TO PUT TANGO MAGIC IN YOUR LIFE
Meeting since 1986, members of the 175-person Chicago Tango Club dance tango socially on Tuesday nights at the Chicago Athletic Club ballroom, 12 S. Michigan Ave., and tango when they can on other nights at various venues. For times and locations contact Charlotte Vikstrom (312-493-0666) or Fred Romero (312-725-0518).
Classes are held Mondays at the Athenaeum, 2936 N. Southport Ave., at 7 p.m. for beginners, 8:30 p.m. advanced. The classes cost $8.
– Jorge Niedas teaches privately by arrangement and offers a Monday night tango class followed by social dancing in Curtis Hall, on the 10th floor of the Fine Arts Building, 410 S. Michigan Ave. (1-888-TANGO-21). The studio is currently offering workshops with members of the cast of “Forever Tango.”
– Debbie Giordano of the Gus Giordano Dance Studio, 614 Davis St., Evanston (847-866-9442) offers tango lessons by arrangement.
– At Yvette Wintergarden restaurant, 311 S. Wacker Drive (312-408-1242), tango is danced on Tuesday evenings, 8 p.m. to 11 p.m.
– At Emilio’s La Perla del Mediterraneo restaurant, 2135 S. Wolf Rd., Hillside (708-449-1070), tango is danced on the last Wednesday of every month, beginning at 8 p.m.
– Tania’s, 2659 N. Milwaukee Ave., (312-235-7120), features Cuban, Puerto Rican, Mexican and Spanish dancing, with tangos by request, Sundays through Fridays from 10 p.m. until 4 a.m., and from 10 p.m. until 5 a.m. on Saturdays.
– Just in a mood to listen? Try Antonio Lopez’s tango program on WONX, 1590-AM, on Saturdays from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m.
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`Forever Tango’
Through July 7
Where: Royal George Theater; 1641 N. Halsted St.
Tickets: $25-$45
Call: 312-988-9000
