6-28 July 2006. Romes annual summer dance festival changes venue again and finds hospitality in the gardens of Villa Doria Pamphilj in front of the new Casa dei Teatri. As always the festival, directed by Marina Michetti, offers a programme that combines crowd pleasers with the new, and a few incursions into traditional dance forms. The programme presents the Argentinian Ballet Concierto in Don Quixote with Inaki Urlezaga. This is the Roman publics first chance to see Urlezaga who is being hailed as the new star of Argentinian ballet which boasts other charismatic and beautiful male artists such as Julio Bocca and Maximiliano Guerra (11,12 July). Then is the turn of the Compagnia Nazionale Raffaele Paganini in Coppelia (13,14 July), the excellent Aterballetto in Wam and Cantata, choreography by Mauro Bigonzetti (17 July), the Balletto dellEsperia in Butterfly and Anima di Seta, choreography by Paolo Mohovich (19 July), the Florence Dance Company in a performance entitled Genius!, with choreographies by Keith Ferrone and Igal Perry (21 July), the Compagnia Tangometropolis in Tangometropolis with choreographies by Pilar Alvarez, Claudio Hoffmann and Marij Alvarez (25 July), and a grand finale with the Compaia Antonio Marquez in Noche Flamenca, choreographed by Antonio Marquez. Marquez is a former member of both the Ballet Nacional de Espana and the Ballet Espanol de Madrid. He launched his own company in 1995, and its mixture of Spanish classical dance and flamenco provokes criticism in flamenco purists, but Marquez is a stage animal with charisma to sell as well as a genuinely sensational and extremely well trained performer. His shows are invariably exciting and with a good dose of narcissism, he brings the house down when he appears in front of the curtain, stretching his arms soulfully, spinning in place and sinking to a knee in a millisecond (27, 28 July 2006).