‘Beethoven’s Tango,’ ‘The Stranger,’ and ‘Paradoxical Ballerinas’ come to Santa Barbara Lobero

Santa Barbara dance lovers may remember Malena: Between Two Worlds, a joint production by Nomad Tango and Meredith Ventura last year at The Lobero, when champion tango dancers Fernanda Ghi and Silvio Grand joined the powerful, contemporary dancers of Selah to present an exploration of freedom through two contrasting dance styles. The two companies will return this September with a dual presentation: Beethoven’s Tango and The Stranger. 

The Selah website describes the production: “From the intimacy and tension of Argentine tango to a surreal world inspired by Camus, kabuki, and the theater of the absurd, the evening explores how we encounter one another — and what happens when someone refuses, or fails, to perform according to the expectations of the world around them.”

Beethoven’s Tango, created over two decades of artistic collaboration between Ghi and Latin Grammy–nominated, pianist-composer-anthropologist Alfredo Minetti, explores the conflicting inner worlds of agony and creativity, inspired by Beethoven’s struggle between the urge to create music and his growing deafness. The story is told through the lens of three forces that inspire, protect, and challenge the artist: The Muse, who represents the promise of creation; the Angel, who offers guidance and protection to overcome the artist’s internal doubt; and the Duende, the shadow-being who demands uncompromising authenticity and pushes the artist to the depths of creation.

Ghi and Grand tell the story through the intimate language of tango, in collaboration with Minetti’s original music, played live on stage by Minetti and Richard Scofano, Latin Grammy–nominated bandoneónist and composer.  Two champion tango dancers plus two Latin Grammy–nominated musicians performing together equals a passionate, compelling, not-to-be-missed performance.

In contrast with Beethoven’s Tango, The Stranger is an abstract expression of Camus’s novel in which choreographer Meredith Ventura explores themes of alienation and “otherness” in society through her juxtaposition of humor and the grotesque, set to the precise, mathematical music of Bach, remastered.

Ventura approaches her work not to tell stories, but to ask questions. In The Stranger, she asks, “What happens when you other other people? What happens to you when you are othered? She explores this theme in the court scene, when the talking hands of faceless jurors, dressed in black, pass judgment on the social outcast Meursault (the Stranger), not for his murder of an innocent man, but for his failure to feign grief at his mother’s funeral.

Ventura’s companies, Selah Dance Collective and Novus Contemporary Ballet, will fill the stage with 20 dancers plus lyra, silk, and rope aerialists. Many of the dancers will be costumed all in black, in the style of Kabuki Theater. Like shadows, black-clothed dancers will lift others, who appear to defy gravity. 

An extension of Ventura’s earlier works (Palermo!, Disco Elysium, Slide on the Razor), which explore the absurd contradictions of society through the lens of Radical Cabaret, The Stranger confronts the absurdities of a justice system in which blame is emphasized over empathy. With a large company filling the floor-and-air spaces, new partnering techniques, a movement lexicon developed for this piece, and Ventura’s impeccable musicality, The Stranger will make you cry, laugh, and be amazed.

The show opens with a short film directed by John Behring, Paradoxical Ballerinas, which explores what happens when ballerinas leave the formal stage and venture to dance in unusual places. Based on his photographs of ballerinas from Selah and Novus dancing in unlikely places — in a cemetery, crossing Park Avenue, in a desert, inside a painting — the photographs will be exhibited at the Art & Soul Gallery in Santa Barbara, December 3-20.

The idea for the exhibit grew out of a chance experience Behring had when he saw the Selah dancers performing under an awning at La Cumbre Plaza during a rainstorm. Seeing ballerinas at such close range, as opposed to on stage, woke up in him a tremendous respect and admiration for their incredible athleticism.

Rodney Gustafson, founding director of State Street Ballet and co-director of Nomad Tango, said, “The transformative moments created through artistic experience are ones that truly give substance to our own humanity.” 

This is going to be a fascinating, compelling, not-to-be-missed concert. Tickets are available through the Lobero Theatre. VIP tickets provide access to the reception after the show. Prepare to be transformed!