Entranced by a dance

Tuesday, July 10, 2007 | 6:58 a.m.

What: "The Embrace of Tango"

When: 8 a.m.-5 p.m., through Aug. 3

Where: Jessie Metcalf Gallery, UNLV's Tam Alumni Center

Admission: Free

Information: 895-3893

A particularly engaging photo in Catherine Angel's "Embrace of Tango" shows a woman in a dark dress embracing her partner, her hand flat on his back.

It's 3:58 a.m. in a dance hall in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and their bodies are tightly connected. Her face is pressed to his. But she is somewhere else, somewhere other than Nino Bien in the early morning. Her vacant, distant, sad and solemn look says so.

"It's a really complex photograph," Angel says. "She is so solid and secure. But there is a look and it's not exactly despair. It's otherworldly. She is so lost in whatever that moment was to her. The possibility of whatever life is to her is there."

It's as if this image captures her whole life. Her past, her present. Her heartache. Her triumph. Her joy. She was transparent.

Although seemingly voyeuristic, Angel's photographs on display through Aug. 3 in the Jessie Metcalf Gallery are not designed to capture the intimate lives of others shuffling across wood floors in Buenos Aires dance halls. Rather, they are Angel's attempt s to capture her experience of tango through others.

"The photographs are really an expression of what it feels like when I dance tango," says Angel, a Las Vegas photographer and UNLV professor. "This dance does not lie. I am how I dance tango."

It's pretty heavy stuff for a woman who has been dancing Argentine tango for only two years. But Angel, a former ballet dancer who grew up in central Florida, says she is lured to the dance in all facets of her life. She is hooked. She's been to Buenos Aires four times. Even in Las Vegas, there are discussions about how tango should be danced in the social Argentine style that developed in late 19th-century Buenos Aires.

"I wanted to see for myself. "

What she found in Buenos Aires were assortments of traditional dance clubs known as milongas that catered to different crowds - hip, edgy twentysomethings, middle-aged couples of the middle class and those much older.

What you see in her images is uninhibited emotion: bodies holding each other, dancers listening to music as they drift into another world, making a connection to life that goes beyond the walls and sounds of a dance hall.

Normally Bueno Aires dance halls are brightly lighted, but Angel manipulated the images to create the deep golden hues and soft lights in darkened rooms as a way to capture the intensity.

Angel, who teaches art, normally shoots black-and-white large-format photograp s . She didn't set out to photograph the dances; she didn't want to be intrusive or remove herself.

Then one time she pulled out a point-and-shoot camera and realized she had something.

She returned with a digital Leica and shot in black and white, but found it was too nostalgic for a dance that she sees as being in the moment. The solemn dance is what you see through Angel's lens.

A photo taken at 5:32 a.m. of an empty dance hall, vacant chairs and tables , captures the room haunted by memories, love, loneliness, movement and shadows.

In the images there is an older couple, in motion and slightly blurred. The light falls on them like a painting. Another image portrays a woman with her eyes closed, feeling love as she holds her partner close.

The bodies shuffle across the dance floor like spirits.

The exhibit includes lyrics, most from the 1940s and '50s - the golden age of a dance that began mainly in the bordellos , particularly among African and European immigrants who had arrived alone in the port city. The songs are about lost love, longing for home, for community. Tango is where Angel goes to find herself.

"I'm dancing the same wooden floors that hundreds and thousands have danced on not just with man but with history," she says. "If they are emotionally open and you are emotionally open , you know who that person is. One night I danced with a man in his 70s and I felt like I knew him then and when he was in his 40s, 50s and 60s.

"Hopefully I am open, vulnerable and transparent in my energy."