What happens when tango meets contemporary dance? This question was posed by Nomad Tango, the Santa Barbara and Buenos Aires–based nonprofit, dedicated to the preservation and evolution of tango as a social and performance art. The result — this time — is Malena, a collaboration between Maestra Fernanda Ghi , tango legend from Buenos Aires currently living and teaching in Boston, and the brilliant scholar-choreographer Meredith Ventura, founder/director of the Selah Dance Collective (see review here ).
Santa Barbara dance aficionados may remember the first Nomad Tango–sponsored collaboration, a sold-out performance at SOhO last November. Alejandra Folguera, founder of Nomad Tango , and Rodney Gustafson, founder of State Street Ballet and co-founder of Nomad Tango, presented Gustafson’s graceful and acrobatic Bolero, followed by the sensual, powerful Corporación Tango from Buenos Aires in a stunning concert that left everyone wanting more.
More than merely sharing the same program, for their next collaboration, Folguera and Gustafson wanted the tango and classical styles to dance together, to create a piece that “lives in the liminal space between tango and classical dance — a space where both languages can coexist in their full purity … to breathe together … intertwining but never dissolving into one another,” Folguera explained. She asked, “What happens when you truly need to speak to each other, to say something together? It feels like evolving from the toddler stage of 'parallel play' to a more mature state of true collaboration.”
