Amal Choucri Catta embraces the magic of Argentina Cairo Opera Ballet Company, artistic director Erminia Kamel, Cairo Opera Orchestra, conductor Ivan Filev, presenting Tango Reve, Pas de deux and Bolero Ballet, Cairo Opera House Main Hall, 26 and 27 April, 8 pm and 3 and 4 May, 9pm A series of white scaffoldings, reminiscent of unfinished constructions, made up the backdrop of the tango dream at the Cairo Opera House Main Hall. The ballet performances had been planned for two nights in April and two further nights in May: they were the sequel to five ballets presented during the last few weeks, starting with One thousand and one nights and including Zenobia of Palmyra, Zorba, Bolshoi's Nutcracker and Armenia's Gayane. This time, however, we were given a mixed bill of sensuous tango, followed by a lovely "Pas de deux" and concluding with Ravel's famous Bolero. They were outstanding performances. Cairo Opera's ballet company undoubtedly deserve a special award of merit for their relentless efforts in maintaining a brilliant ensemble and putting forward magnificent soloists of both sexes, marvelous stars and an excellent corps de ballet. This last show was a carefully chosen, remarkably performed spectacle of three different kinds of dance, beginning with a series of tangos under the title "Tango reve", with Astor Piazzolla's tango compositions and choreography by Joseph Russillo, the France-based American: an extraordinary artist with extraordinary ideas. It starts and ends with a young man's dream of tango. As he lies asleep centre-stage while Piazzolla's playback music swells up, he is reawakened with a lovely damsel, unobtrusively inviting him to the dance. But suddenly they are not alone; other couples have appeared on the scaffoldings. Going down the different stairways, they unite on stage -- which is when the tango story really begins. They have, symbolically, come from different parts of the world to be united in Paris, or elsewhere in Europe, where pre- and post-war tango played an important part. The Argentine dance had, indeed, come to Europe with World War I and reached vertiginous heights with World War II, during which time, in Egypt, it was considered the most romantic dance during, usually taking place in the salons of villas and palaces and exclusive music halls. In those bygone days, young and old loved the famous "Comparsita" or the "Tango de la luna", and teenagers turned starry-eyed when they heard the haunting melodies. But times have changed, and so did the tangos, mainly Astor Piazzolla's. Born in 1921, he died in 1992: he was a famous tango composer and a renowned player of the bandoneon, an Argentinean accordion which, instead of a keyboard, is played with buttons, producing single notes, easily discerned in most of Piazzolla's compositions. Tangos have become increasingly erotic, their movements visibly lustful, as is the case in Russillo's choreography, which did, however, have its humorous moments. His vision of the tango dream is a trip into history, with all the evolutionary transformations of the dance during the last century and until this very day. At the end the star-dancer goes to sleep and dreams again, centre-stage, while the curtain falls. A pleasant, at times even fascinating spectacle, if somewhat repetitive: costumes were generally lovely and sets rather interesting, mainly when the moon came shining onto the scene and the skies turned orange in love or dismay. However, the game of light and darkness should have been more aggressive, or at least as aggressive as some of the dancing sequences. The dances were brilliantly executed by each one of the 19 dancers. Audiences loved the entire show: their applause never stopped. Members of Cairo's Opera Orchestra entered the pit during the interval to the joy of youngsters and adults who were not quite happy with Piazzolla's play-back sequences, though they were of a remarkable technical quality. With Maestro Ivan Filev conducting, the second part of the show opened with the Black Swan's "Pas-de- deux" from Piotr Ilitch Tchaikovsky's four-act ballet Swan Lake, performed by the impressive Mexican duo: Blanca Rios and Harold Quintero, soloists of the National Dance Company of Mexico. Rios gave us a fascinating odile from the ballet's third act, as she succeeds in duping Prince Siegfried, who takes her for Odette, the white swan. It is one of the most dramatic sequences of the ballet and Rios has all the convincing power, the captivating enchantment of the seducing temptress, just as she has all the brilliance of a superb Prima Ballerina. her "Pas-de- deux" with Harold quintero, and her perfectly executed Soli were extraordinary. Which also goes for Quintero, who was particularly applauded for his fabulously high jumps and his generally astounding dance performance. The two ravishing Mexicans returned in red costumes with the Pas-de-deux from Leon Minkus's three-act ballet Don Quixote, ending with Kitri's wedding. Rios also danced the lovely solo with the fan while audiences were shrieking their delight. Among the Pas-de-deux sequences we were also given "Gopak", a lively Russian folk dance turned into a colourful solo, brilliantly performed by the young Ali Mahmoud, soloist of Cairo Opera Ballet Company. He was followed by a "Pas- de-deux" from Cairo Ballet's production of Le Corsaire, with soloists Katia Ivanova and Ahmed Nabil, two marvelous stars of Cairo's Ballet Company. The third and last part of the show was dedicated to Maurice Ravel's one-act ballet Bolero, originally choreographed by Bornislava Nijinskaya, composed for the dancer Ida Rubinstein in 1928 and produced at the Paris Opera in November of the same year. It was originally set in a Spanish tavern where a gypsy girl begins the dance on a trestle table with slow, seductive movements, while the music consists of a constant and obsessive repetition of the theme in C-major, almost throughout, in an unvarying rhythm and a gradual Crescendo. While being originally written for a ballerina and one partner, later transformations added a larger number of male performers. Such was Maurice Bejart's in 1961, as well as our very own Abdel Moneim Kamel's: 24 male partners were added to the show, heightening the mystery and the suspense and capturing the savage flavour of the whole. The mood on stage was as captivating as the mood in the main hall, where the audience was breathlessly concentrating on what was happening on stage. Spellbound, they were suddenly swept into reality when the star dancer and all her men dropped in a great fall as the curtain closed. The performance was fabulous: as the prima lady and her partners were taking their bow, audiences gave them a standing ovation. Joseph Russillo tells Youssef Rakha about tango, classic dance and Cairo "The first thing is that I worked a lot with tango when I was a young dancer, before I started my ballet company. I studied tango, and I entered into the word championship of tango in Madison Square garden in New York, and I won the championship. Years later I went to Paris to work and to live, and I met Astor Piazzolla, the composer, and he made a ballet for me called the Passionata, in Italy, and we made a big tour with it in Italy and in France. Of course working with this great composer of tango is the best in the world. It's been a wonderful challenge and an honour to work with this man. As time went by after all these years -- it was about 15 years -- I woke up one day and I said, Oh, I'd like to do tango once again, because I love the music, but I want to do something very different and to work with a ballet company, something that brings all the techniques together, like dance with a big D. I mean to bring classical dances, modern, jazz, many different forms of dance into tango. And after I worked here last year, with the [Cairo Opera Ballet] Company -- I did The Rite of Spring, by Stravinsky -- I met the dancers, we worked together, and I thought this company has a lot of personality, and the dancers need to learn different forms of dance, different ways of working, and for me it's a great experience working with them, and this is how I brought tango to Egypt. It fits very well with classical dance. Of course they're very different things. This is very different from tango like you would see it in a ballroom or Argentinian tango. The technique is still Argentine tango mixed with different forms all together, and for me it's very exciting to see. I think it's exciting to see for all kinds of people, to see the dancers working with a different form but drawing on their classical experience. Yes, they have taken to it..."
