From it’s very first moments, Tanguera is breathtaking. Although, sadly, not always for the right reasons.
      The curtain rises on a six-piece band – pianist, two bandoneon players, a violinist, guitarist and double-bass player. They play an opening medley of tango music; the two bandoneon singing to each other in a love-sick duet so beautiful and poignant, that the whole sorry story of Giselle from France and her fall from grace seems almost superfluous.
      Then the curtain goes down on the band and, for no apparent reason, a whole violin section, drums, sax and synthesiser is piped through speakers as dancers walk back and forward across the stage to show they are European passengers arriving at La Boca, the infamous port area of Buenos Aires. Full of hope for their new lives the singer sings, Tierra de Promision, which means Promised Land. What about the promised band?
      So fresh off the boat from France walks Giselle, full of hopes for her new life. She meets Lorenzo, a nice bloke who works at the docks. He toys with her scarf and her affections but she is picked up by a rich-looking nightclub owner, Gaudencio, and his elegant sidekick who take her away from the port and true love. The hope of a promised land doesn’t last long for poor Giselle who goes from boat to brothel faster than a tango kick. It’s a timeless tale of good guy vs bad guy and more than one last tango.
      (By scene IV there’s still no sign of the band. Although, as some of the music sounds more live than other bits, it’s distracting to wonder if they are, perhaps, playing behind the curtain?)
      Backstage at Gaudencio’s nightclub, Giselle is forced to examine the wreckage of her hopes. Flanked by jaded whores, she stares at her new self in the dressing room mirror: a ‘Tanguera’ who does the dance of love for money. If it’s a cliché to say that Tango was born in the brothels of Buenos Aires, it’s also probably true: women were in short supply, prostitutes were popular, men had to queue in brothels, so to keep the men entertained while they waited, Madams employed professional musicians to play to them. The men danced together, honing their dancing skills to try and attract a nice little neighbourhood girl at the next tenement dance. And where do the rich and influential classes encounter the music of the poor…? Nightclubs and brothels.
      At Gaudencio’s nightclub, things look up, for the audience, if not Giselle. The band reappear and the heavy plot takes a back-chasse for a bit and lets the dancers do what they’re good at. The routines are excellent: choreographed by the award-winning Argentinean tango star, Mora Godoy. Sharp flicking feet, thrusting hips, manly men and hoofing hookers vying to be in charge. Each exchange is a passionate argument of feet, hands and eyes – the passion only just contained by the strictures of the dance form, like the girls in their corsets. The fact that tango naturally lends itself to eroticism is ruthlessly exploited in Tanguera and it’s hard not to feel that the choreography sometimes crosses the line into murkier and more tawdry territory.
      The ‘Special Guest Madam’, Maria Nieves, is a tango star of great repute, and great age, so a flash of her knickers causes an inward gasp. It unintentionally underscores a point about the short life of the prostitute, for which it’s hard not to think, dancer. The young bucks in the nightclub fawn over her but, frankly, it’s hard to understand why.
      That Tanguera was conceived in 2002 and has been on tour ever since and packing out houses from Islington to Shanghai, is probably no surprise if you consider the huge success of commercial productions based on one form of dance, like Irish dancing’s Riverdance. But at Sadler’s Wells, the beating heart of dance in London, it seems a bit of a shame that the simple beauty of the dance and the music is made to groan under the weight of such an overbearing plot and such an overproduced score…. like an innocent from abroad, all virtue lost, selling itself for money?
Amanda de Ryk