Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, M¡longa, review

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's new show M¡longa is a wonderfully inventive reinvention of Argentine dance.

Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui was born in Belgium to a Flemish mother and a Moroccan father, and is a teetotal vegetarian. An Arab who doesn’t eat meat and a Belgian who doesn’t drink beer, he has always considered himself a thoroughbred outsider. Yet this sense of apartness has in fact long been one of the dance world’s greatest assets. It has propelled him on a lifelong quest to explore foreign cultures, immerse himself in them, find out what links us all.

And given that tango – which perhaps above all other dance forms is all about complex, wordless communication between partners – it was perhaps only a matter of time before this supremely humanistic choreographer turned his attention to Argentina’s greatest export.

M¡longa (silly typography aside, the word for both a tango party and an earlier dance style) is a very beautiful show indeed, a perfectly judged 90 minutes straight through, and Cherkaoui’s best for some time. Having walked us via huge video projection along the backstreets of Buenos Aires, where tango began in the 1890s, and set up an air of easy conviviality on stage, he goes on to play with the art form in all manner of wonderful ways, dissecting its movements, tropes and moods, and reassembling them in all sorts of new and riveting configurations.

With a superb, five-strong band stage-left playing a fusion of tango staples such as Piazzolla’s Libertango, along with elegant and inventive variations by Cherkaoui’s regular composer Szymon Brzóska, partners dance back-to-back, one man with two women, five couples as one, three men together. Thanks to a splendid and almost never intrusive contribution from video and set designer Eugenio Szwarcer, cardboard cut-outs come alive, one couple is transformed into a vast kaleidoscope, another multiplied into a bubbling crowd of performers. As reported by the Telegraph.