The tango exists in the popular imagination as a sleek, sexy, intimate dance. Hollywood has helped. Films like Easy Virtue, True Lies, and Scent of a Woman all feature spiced-up tango numbers, as of course do episodes of Dancing With the Stars and So You Think You Can Dance. Barack and Michelle Obama went viral after cutting a rug with two tango partners during a 2016 state dinner in Buenos Aires. But the theatricalized popular conception isn’t necessarily true to the traditional form.
“When you see the actual dances between two people, they’re having this quiet conversation between their bodies. It’s very respectful,” she says. Lessons and coffee at the Ritz Tango continued until 2010, when Niedas and D’Antoni shuttered its doors. But Tango 21 continued to host milongas at restaurants and nightclubs, and Niedas and Sung were part of the team that brought Astor Piazzolla’s tango opera María de Buenos Aires to the Chicago Cultural Center in 2011. (Chicago Opera Theater went on to give the work a fully staged production in 2013.) And in 2014, Niedas and Sung founded the nonprofit Tango 21 Dance Theater, which in the three years since has staged an original production annually. The company is a ragtag assembly of dancers, actors, musicians, and singers, many of them current or former students of Tango 21, others former collaborators, and most of them working day jobs.
Fri 6/2-Sat 6/3, 7:30 PM, Madison Street Theatre, 1010 W. Madison, Oak Park, 708-524-1892, tango21dancetheater.com, $25.
