Dancing queen.

• Author: Durbin, Paula
• Position: DANCE - Ana Maria Stekelman and her company, Tangokinesis

With her urban chic, trim figure, and vermillion and gold streaked hair, Ana Maria Stekelman looks ready to tango. She is, in fact, a dancemaker, and she fuses the concert idiom with the traditional moves of Argentina's most celebrated art to stunning effect.

Among her works are the expected suites of couples in thrall to classics by Carlos Gardel, Enrique Santos Discepolo, and Osvaldo Pugliese, and there,s plenty of Piazzolla. But Stekelman's relentless pursuit of the tango's possibilities has also pushed her to try composers as seemingly removed as Gershwin and Vivaldi. Her "Tango y Fuga" mixes Bach's music with the popular "El Choclo." "Operatango," "Concierto para Bongo," and "Tangos y Valses" are hybrids of a different stripe. "CotillOn," a tutu-ed spoof of grand pas de deux relies entirely on excerpts from classical ballets. And "Tango Brujo" unfolds against a Manuel de Falla score.

Since Stekelman launched her company, Tangokinesis, in 1992, she's been in demand. Movie-goers know her choreography from scenes in Spanish director Carlos Saura's 1998 film Tango. Commissions include Buenos Aires' Teatro Colon and numerous European venues. Last March, she collaborated with Argentine director Afredo Arias on the rock opera Dracula in Love, that opened in Rome. In August, Tangokinesis starred in a Stekelman-Arias spectacular in the gardens of Versailles outside Paris. This past October, her most recent work, the full-length ballet "Adios Hermana Cruel" was premiered by Julio Bocca's Ballet Argentino in Buenos Aires. North American audiences got a good look at Stekelman's work in concert when Bocca and company toured her "Boccatango" last February and March to some twenty cities in the United States.

"She is marvelous, one of the great choreographers of our times," said Bocca, the star some call the world's top male classical dancer, after the company's sold-out performance on Valentine's Day in the Music Center at Strathmore Center near Washington, D.C. "I've been working with her for years. I like her style, her personality, and her facility for translating her intentions into movement. She knows how to work with the tango so that it never loses its popular flavor."

Stekelman began dancing at six and by fourteen was a professional in the company of her teacher, Paulina Ossona. Artistically, she is a disciple of Martha Graham, with whom she studied from 1963 to 1964, when Juan Carlos Copes, today the tango's most revered icon, was thrilling...