Tempo Dance Festival 2007 is over and out for me (there are some more shows but I have headed to Canberra to the IADance Medicine and Science conference – other perspectives spilling out from our ever burgeoning art form). And what a great time it has been with a plethora of performance generating healthy and intense conversations in foyers and studios alike.

And what an excellent show to finish with! Corporacion Tango are a group of Argentinean dance artists, primarily dancing to the music of tango but extending well beyond the vocabularies and intentions of this old dance form into what can only be described as experimental. How they got there is speculative, Does the demand of keeping the art form alive (and kicking) mean that the choreographer(s) traverse competition spectacular with theatre performative to arrive at another exotic mix?

In this one off Auckland show the tangos became less sexy, more determined, exquisite even, particularly in witnessing the ease of their dancing partnerships. Yet at times throughout I felt as though there was a skin separating us, a performing distance that dislocated the spectator from the dancers. I missed the live musicians on the stage and there was no set at all to promote, embellish or distort the unravelling evening. A fantastic array of lighting possibilities, not entirely attuned to each sections titles, heaven, earth and hell became a distraction; a play of their own at times.

Beautiful clarity in the dancers legs, bodies, arms and heads retrieved the necessary detail to a series of thematically bound pieces. Clever interplay between couples, trios and quartets became the event’s narrative rather than a more usual rendering of courtship encounters. The audience stood at the end of the evening and the most beautiful section was repeated, in perfectly formed pools of light, beautiful precise dancers in tune with each other, lovely choreography and dancing, reaching right out into their audiences imaginations and feelings. I guess I had wanted that from the very first moment when the curtains went up.

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