Argentina's Tango Fire at the Merriam

The January thaw— the warm-up that takes the midwinter nip off for a few days— didn't show up this year and was AWOL last winter as well. That's the New Climate, folks; no telling what it will pitch at us. Go tell the Tea Party.

But it's summer in Argentina, of course, and Tango Fire, the brilliant Argentine dance company, brought some of its warmth to the Merriam Theater just as Philadelphia's frigid month was ending. For two hours, at least, the town got hot.

The tango is to Argentina what jazz is to America: an indigenous and utterly original art form that has, more than anything else, defined the culture of its country. It began, as everyone knows, in the dives and brothels of 19th-Century Buenos Aires, because the poor will have fun despite the best efforts to prevent it.

Tango's appeal lies in its knife-edge balance between sensuality and violence. The only way to hold that balance is with grace.

It happened to jazz

Over a century and a half, tango has evolved, just as jazz has. Now the balancing act for both is to hold to their essential character even as they incorporate new elements. A wholly static form can't be art, but neither can a form that's been merely adulterated.

Tango Fire offers one answer to this conundrum: The company historicizes its dance. Its program at the Merriam began with a stylized version of the kind of 19th-Century club where the tango originated. The dancers are rough-edged "patrons" who do a great deal of pushing and shoving.

These ritual challenges generate the primal energy of the dance form, in which the participants fight over partners and space, and all truces are temporary. This is a dramatic reduction of the contest of the sexes, both within and between each gender. Males claim space; females claim mates. Nothing gets settled, because in the end the sexes, paired off with each other, continue their battle in the dance.

This is how it is, in Henry James novels no less than on barroom floors. It's why we love tango. Like no other art form I know of, it shows us who we are.

Ballet influences

Once the preliminary theatrics were out of the way, the show settled down to ensemble dancing, and, in its second half, to extended solo duets of increasing risk and complexity. The music was provided by a band consisting of a pianist, violinist, bass player and accordionist, with interludes from a singer who served as a ringmaster for the entire performance. The band got its own interludes, and the sinuous music— some by Astor Piazzolla, tango's best-known composer— more than held its own, even in the absence of the dancers.

The final duets and ensembles showed the influence both of classical ballet and contemporary dance. The virtuosity of these numbers was dazzling, but I couldn't help wondering whether, in all the breathtaking maneuvers and artful arabesques, some of the rawest energies of tango weren't being sacrificed. Jazz, too, got snake-bit from its encounter with classical music, and never quite recovered from it.

From brothels to five-star hotels

Cross-fertilization is inevitable, of course, especially in an eclectic age like ours. Tango is an institution now, and what started in bordellos is taught today at a national academy in Buenos Aires. It's trotted out for state occasions and performed, as the program notes boast, in "five-star hotels." There's a World Tango Championship, too.

You get the idea. But, with all the balletic grace notes that sometimes threaten to weigh it down, tango still carries a knife in its pocket.