Walking with cadence

I often regret that I’m writing in the past tense here, but never more than about milonga. It is such a smash show in every way that by rights it would be having a six-month run where everyone can see it, rather than five measly days at the elite Sadler’s Wells dance theatre where people aren’t put off by a choreographer’s tripartite name that takes several goes to pronounce.

Tango has a way of curdling in show presentation — just to say ‘thrusting loins and stiletto toes’ is already a Strictly-type parody. Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui is something of an expert cook, however. Uncategorisable except in that mysteriously wide umbrella called contemporary, now 39, he has made an outstanding creative virtue of his polyglot background and Belgian–Moroccan parentage, rather as Akram Khan has alchemised his British–Bangladeshi roots. In fact, they appeared in a show together a few years back, two of the most fascinating male dancers of our time not quite convincing as a harnessing.

Cherkaoui’s unbridled curiosity about what can and can’t be combined found a home with Sadler’s Wells, under its admirably eclectic artistic chief Alistair Spalding, who sent him off to Buenos Aires. After three years’ delving he produced this mesmerising production, in which tango is danced in all its sharp, dark gloriousness by four classic tango couples and a wild-card contemporary couple, who try to either meld in or challenge the milonga (that’s the name for a tango dance club). I believe that ‘interrogate’ is the right sponsorship-attracting word — and indeed it’s because there are 11 partnering theatres and organisations backing the show that we only get a few days’ viewing of it on a world tour the size of Michael Flatley’s.

Cherkaoui does things to tango couples that Relate would not recommend.