Gritty street look for modern tango

The Peso Medio Tango Troupe. Photo / Supplied.

Mary Jane O'Reilly, artistic director of Tempo dance festival and matriarch of contemporary dance in New Zealand since the 1970s when she co-founded, danced in and led Limbs, would often jokingly declare, "I am off to learn to dance the tango in Buenos Aires."

Then suddenly last year there she was, in the city that is home to the tango, ostensibly to meet up with actor daughter Morgan who was en route to Bolivia, but with three weeks spare to take lessons, dance the nights away in as many "milonga" (tango dance parties) as she could bear, and to love every step, kick and twirl of it. "I can't jump in the air any more, or throw myself down and leap up off the floor again. As an, ahem, 'mature' dancer my body just doesn't like that any more," she says. "But I can still move around and I love the musicality of the tango.

"You can play with the music in the tango," she elaborates. "It is subtle and fascinating, not like the salsa where every move is on the beat relentlessly. Dancing the tango you can play with the stillness, the slow motion, the quick, quick quick and then the slow ..."

In Auckland she had been taking tango lessons, and joining a number of other dancers who also enjoyed the local tango social scene, where there are regular milonga on alternate Friday evenings and practices on Sunday afternoons. "But in Buenos Aires the tango is everywhere. You can go and dance any time and everywhere."

One afternoon she saw a very different sort of tango, via a small screen set up to advertise a dance studio.

"It looked so different and exciting," she says. "The girls were not wearing the usual tango uniform of mini dress split to the hip on the side and high-heeled shoes. These girls were in tight matador-style pants, jazz boots and hip metallic-finish hoods on their heads - a very gritty street look and super sexy."

Their style of dance was also far from traditional, still obviously in the tango tradition, but with more than a nod to contemporary choreography as well. O'Reilly headed straight for the company's live show that evening, loved it, and afterwards went back stage and invited them to come to New Zealand.

The company is Lado Ciego and they perform their show Peso Medio, which translates roughly as "middleweight wrestler" at the Maidment Theatre, under Tempo's festival umbrella, next week.

The company's choreographer Julio Zurita is a trained contemporary dancer as well as tango expert, and his work introduces a subtext, where traditional tango shows are technique based, in this case using the concept of a wrestler as a metaphor for the fight to survive in the big city.

"And their music is wonderful," says O'Reilly, "played by Orchestra Astileros, a seven-piece band who have performed at the Barbican in London and who are highly regarded in Europe. I heard them playing live in Buenos Aires and I swear there was an element of rapping."

Older style tango music can be a bit schmaltzy, she confesses.

Bringing the company to New Zealand for Tempo was a calculated business decision, she says, based on many Aucklanders' familiarity with and love for the traditional tango form, and made possible by sharing costs with two other New Zealand festivals, in Otago and Nelson. Lado Ciego will also run a tango workshop in Auckland tomorrow afternoon.

Performance:

What: Lado Ciego's Peso Medio

Where and when: Maidment Theatre, October 19-20

What: Tango workshop

Where and when: Pasion por Tango, Barrington Building, 10 Customs St East, tomorrow at 2pm