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September 11, 2026The Stranger and Beethoven’s Tango
Selah Dance Collective returns to the historic Lobero Theatre for an evening of dance, live performance, theatricality, and bold contemporary storytelling.
The program brings together two distinct works: Beethoven’s Tango, featuring internationally acclaimed tango artists Fernanda Ghi and Alfredo Minetti, and the premiere of Meredith Ventura’s newest contemporary dance work, The Stranger.
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.
One evening. Two worlds.
The Stranger
Choreography by Meredith Ventura
Performed by Selah Dance Collective
What does it mean to belong to a society whose rules everyone seems to understand except you?
Inspired by Albert Camus’ The Stranger and set against the intricate architecture of Johann Sebastian Bach's music, Meredith Ventura’s newest work examines alienation, othering, social performance, and the unsettling consequences of refusing to behave as expected.
Rather than literally retelling Camus’ novel, The Stranger uses it as a point of departure.
Across a shifting landscape of characters, rituals, relationships, and social encounters, the dancers inhabit a world obsessed with appearances: how grief should look, how desire should behave, how bodies should move, and how a person is expected to prove that they belong.
At the center of the work is an outsider whose presence exposes the fragile rules holding that world together.
The result is a strange, theatrical, and at times darkly comic performance in which Baroque order collides with contemporary absurdity.
Drawing from Camus alongside the theatrical worlds of Samuel Beckett and Kurt Vonnegut, The Stranger asks what happens when social conventions become choreography – and what becomes visible when one body stops following them.
Beethoven’s Tango
Featuring Fernanda Ghi & Alfredo Minetti
What happens when the dramatic intimacy of Argentine tango meets the music of Beethoven?
Beethoven’s Tango brings together the elegance, danger, humor, and emotional immediacy of tango with a musical world rarely associated with the form.
Led by internationally renowned tango artists Fernanda Ghi and Alfredo Minetti, the work expands tango beyond familiar expectations while remaining rooted in the form’s essential relationship between two bodies: listening, responding, resisting, yielding, and negotiating space in real time.
Virtuosity gives way to conversation. Classical music becomes physical. Partnership becomes storytelling.
For longtime tango audiences and newcomers alike, Beethoven’s Tango offers a fresh encounter with one of the world’s most dynamic social and theatrical dance forms.
About Fernanda Ghi & Alfredo Minetti
Fernanda Ghi and Alfredo Minetti are internationally recognized Argentine tango artists whose work spans performance, choreography, teaching, and the continued evolution of contemporary tango.
Known for their musicality, theatrical sophistication, and deeply expressive partnership, they bring a distinctive approach to tango that honors its traditions while continually exploring what the form can become.
Two Works in Conversation Although radically different in style, Beethoven’s Tango and The Stranger share a fascination with the relationships created between bodies. In tango, meaning emerges through attention, negotiation, weight, touch, timing, and response. In The Stranger, those same social negotiations become unstable. Bodies gather, observe, judge, imitate, exclude, and attempt to understand one another. Together, the works offer two perspectives on the evening’s central question: How do we learn the rules for being with other people—and what happens when those rules are disrupted?
Community & Education
This performance is part of Selah Dance Collective’s broader commitment to making professional dance accessible to audiences throughout Santa Barbara County.
In conjunction with the Lobero performances, Selah is developing educational and community programming introducing local students to contemporary dance and Argentine tango through live performance and artist engagement.
Supporting this event helps Selah continue creating opportunities for young people to experience professional performing arts in their own community.
Performance Information
Beethoven’s Tango + The Stranger
Presented by Selah Dance Collective
Friday, September 11, 2026
Lobero Theatre
Santa Barbara, California
Featuring Fernanda Ghi & Alfredo Minetti and Selah Dance Collective
Artistic Direction & Choreography: Meredith Ventura
An Evening at the Lobero
Sensual. Strange. Theatrical. Unexpected.
Join Selah Dance Collective at the Lobero Theatre for a double-bill that moves from the intimate dialogue of Argentine tango to a surreal contemporary world of outsiders, social rituals, and bodies behaving badly.
September 11, 2026.