Tango X 2.

Tango X 2 is more intimate and, if possible, more distilled in stylishness, skill, and taste than Tango Argentino, which swept the U.S. ten years ago. Two former members of that Show, Miguel Angel Zotto and Milena Plebs, are the highly respected stars and directors of Tango X 2.

Their program, which has toured the world following its creation in 1988, showcases just three couples and a superb singer, Roxana Fontan, plus an excellent seven-piece tango orchestra. An enthralling panorama of moods innocent, romantic, and combative unfurls as the program makes its vivid historical way from the closed ballroom positions - with their vertical, quiet, upper bodies - of the first half to the swirling lifts and backbends of the second, accompanied by complex harmonies and rhythms. Individual numbers reveal specific styles such as the light-footed dance of singer and national hero Carlos Gardel or the back-to-front style of the 1940s. Although there are touches of drama, without melodrama, it is movement that carries the message. The costumes have few of Tango Argentino's flying fringes but instead a streamlined, gleaming art deco elegance.

The two younger couples, Natalia Games and Gabriel Angio, and Lorena Ermocida and Omar Merlo, are adept and pleasing; but they are overshadowed by the intense Plebs and Zotto, indelible from the severe beauty of their matching etched profiles to the scalpel precision of their feet. Their footwork was a special pleasure of the intimate setting, where you could really see the lightning-fast beats, the invasion of the partner's space that so deftly suggests sexual interplay, the varieties of contact with the floor such as the caressing brushes. Plebs's feet, as fast as any Balanchine ballerina's, swiveled around each other, bringing a burst of spontaneous applause.

But the couple put their formidable technique entirely at the service of the intense relationship between them that is the heart of tango - the harmony and counterpoint of dialogue, the sortie and response of repartee, the thrust and counterthrust of fencing.