The Tango Festival

  I have been to this tango festival many times before but I feared this would be different since it was the first time we all gathered after covid. A mask mandate was in effect for all public places in the entire state and it really sucked but tango dancers are tough and we all adhered to the rules. In the end it didn’t matter, I got what I came for: incredible encounters with strange women, the memories of which will stay with me for a long time, quite possibly forever.

When I say I am hoping for incredible encounters with strange women, I am not talking about sex. Tango dancers are true dancers, students in the art of movement. We are not here to hook up but it does happen. Tango enthusiasts are dedicated to the study of balance: our own and that of our partners. Balance is not just a word to us, it is a metaphor for everything we do. When we gather to dance, we do so with the knowledge that our goal is a shared goal, a communal goal. I dance with constant awareness that I am one person, half of one couple in a crowd of couples and what I do affects the experience of everyone dancing. If I am rude or angry or just a jerk in general, I will poison the stew. A gathering of tango dancers is an incredibly powerful force of nature. If we all strive for harmony, then harmony will be achieved and something more: healing.

Yes, healing.

It is my belief that many of us come to tango wounded in some way. I am not talking about physical injuries, I am talking about hurts of the heart and soul, the kinds of blows dealt by a world that beats us down if we are too proud, that pulls us below the surface if we refuse to swim. In order to live we must learn how to navigate the proverbial River of Life and, in completion of that lesson, we find our mind, body and soul did not make it through the schooling unscathed. By dancing tango we find healing and this is what draws us here to the festival.

Tango is not a simple dance like rumba or cha-cha; it is a South American martial art. It is tai-chi for couples. It is a refuge for the soul, a feast for the mind and therapy for the body. It is the pathway that leads to understanding the greatest mysteries of the universe and answers questions we never thought to ask.

At the festival there are many milongas, the place where tango, and only tango, is danced. At the festival there are many beautiful women but I know from experience that what I seek is not necessarily visible on the outside, it is the inner beauty that I hunger for, the salve for  what ails me. I do not know how to find her so I listen to the wind, I let The Universe guide me to Her. I found old friends and made new ones before I saw Her. She was packed in tight with a gaggle of girls seated in chairs just off the dance floor. Though she was actively searching the crowd to make eye contact and receive an unspoken invitation to dance in what is known in tango circles as a ‘cabeceo’, it took her a while to turn her gaze in my direction. 

Tilting my head slightly while lifting my eyebrows,  I made my intentions clear, she accepted in a likewise manner, nonplussed. Immediately, I walked over to her, reached for her hand and brought her to the corner of the dance floor. As the couples moved about the room in a counterclockwise direction, I waited for recognition from an approaching leader who indicated with a nod that he would allow us to enter the line of dance. This is called tango etiquette and it is one of the many ways in which total group harmony is acheived.

We entered the crowd and became one with it and with each other as we embraced. Her body felt good against mine as we began to move about the room to the music. 

It is said by some that tango is a three minute love affair but it is actually much longer than that. The length of a tango engagement is called a tanda and it can comprise three or four songs, each about three minutes long, so the love affair can last up to fourteen minutes if you are lucky. Actually, luck has less to do with success than chemistry. If you were meant to be together then sparks will fly no matter the odds or the skill level.

When a man dances tango with a woman, he must be aware that there is a storm within his arms; if he is not careful, it may rage out of control and become a hurricane. Though she may appear calm, that can be a deception, one of the many things she is doing in trying not to succumb to all the forces whirling around her and inside of her: she is being held by a stranger, music is playing, she is moving backwards...in high heels and through a crowd; she worries that something may go wrong, that I may crash her into another couple or the edge of a table or off the edge of the dance floor; she worries that I might disapprove of her in some way. With all her senses she searches for answers; she sees the other couples and wonders if they are aware of her and this man, are they indicating anything? Breathing me in she listens to the music and feels my body giving her clues in how I would like her to move, she answers with grace and charm, she moves on her own balance and embellishes my requests with a little flare, a swirl of her foot before moving backwards into the throng.

I am not a beginner, I have been at this dance for thirteen years and I do all that I can to allay her fears. We don’t just move to the music, we dance to each phrase. It doesn't take her long to realize that she is in good hands and slowly the storm subsides, replaced by a calm so gentle it is intoxicating. By the end of the first song we have become acquainted in ways that never could have happened through verbal conversation. I tell her my name and where I am from, she responds likewise as another song begins. We chat for a few seconds more, as is customary in tango, before I take her back into my arms. She comes into my embrace much closer than before and with greater ease: I am a safe harbor for her ship to sail: the spinnaker unfurls.

I can’t remember if it was the second or third song when she began to melt onto me like hot cheese on a sandwich, wrapping herself around me like a warm blanket; it felt so good. She felt safe, we had established a bond of trust and we were in love. I was no longer a lonely man alone in this world, I now had someone. Our hearts joined and our palms began to sweat as we both feared the tanda would end with the third song but we were delightfully mistaken.

It is in love that we find healing. It is in healing that we find our reward. To be the one that heals, to be the traiteur is to know why it is that we are put upon this Earth, to know the answer to the question that everyone asks of Life: Why? My good feeling rushes around my body and into her. As the fourth song plays, our souls share it together and it is a glorious achievement. She is the reason I am here. I came for Her.

We danced several more times before the festival ended. Monday came and I put myself on a plane back home thinking of a poem I had written a long time ago when I first started dancing tango:

Argentine Tango is a very sensual dance.

Sometimes,

 it is the contact between two souls.

The soul is the most difficult part of ourselves to reach

and the most sensitive part of ourselves.

When we dance tango,

 sometimes,

 not all the time,

 but often enough to repeat in hopes of it happening again,

sometimes,

 wisps of smoke

 from the ethereal fire of our souls

 intermingle

 with wisps of smoke

 from the ethereal fire of the soul of our dance partner,

then the song ends,

the dance stops

 and the smoke dissipates.

We walk away,

 affected deeply by the experience

no longer the same person,

trailing a few particles of smoke

from the soul  of our dance partner.

I am home now. I have returned with the memories I sought when I began this adventure to the tango festival.

P.S. Many thanks to DB, you are a star that shines above your beautiful city. Thank you for lighting the way:)

The Tango Connection: Maximum Pleasure With Minimum Effort

           Lately I’ve been helping out at a beginner tango class and find myself thinking a lot about what makes a good tango connection possible. I once wrote about this and likened it to being a trick a dancer uses to connect to their partner in a way that is both physical and mental and, eventually, much more than that. There was quite a bit of blowback on that assertion but I stand by my belief with conviction and would like to offer more of an explanation of why I believe this is so.

Maybe ‘trick’ is the wrong word or maybe the use of that word triggers a negative reaction in adherents to the faith of tango. Use ‘stratagem’ or some other synonym if you must but it is what it is and ‘trick’ is my word of choice. Here is why:

When I was young, in my 20s, I worked as a whitewater riverguide on the Lehigh River. To be a guide on this river meant mastering the art of whitewater kayaking. The Lehigh River is a fairly easy river to navigate and its proximity to NYC and Philadelphia made it a very popular destination for those inspired by the movie ‘Deliverance’ to seek adventure in the great outdoors and ‘brave’ the rapids of this wild and scenic waterway.

There were so many people that we had to put them in rafts without a guide and herd them down the river with our kayaks like sheep dogs funneling woolybacks to the corral at destination’s end. 

Poetry is the use of words to convey maximum meaning with a minimum of words. It is, in a word, art. Art is merely the obvious evolution of a skill, refined to a point where the practitioner achieves the highest result with as little effort as possible. So it is with the art of guiding rafters down the Lehigh River: the best guides devised various schemes to get customers to paddle their rafts downstream from point A to point B in a manner which required very little physical exertion on the guide’s part whilst allowing their charges to have the most fun.

One of our biggest problems was getting the rafters to avoid rocks that their rafts would pin against and cause its occupants to become separated from their rubber boats and force them to continue their journey downstream with just their life jackets for comfort. To rectify this situation and return the customers back to their original configuration, i.e. butts on boats and feets inside rafts, required a maximum amount of effort and resulted in a minimum amount of pleasure for the guide and the rafting patrons, though there were many guides who did thoroughly enjoy the show and may have worked to achieve this particular outcome...but I digress.

Each guide developed his/her own toolbag of psychological machinations to the point where we had the rafters doing most of the work for us: from launching their boats into the river, maneuvering around obstacles, rescuing each other in the rapids, to carrying their boats up a steep set of stairs at river’s end, they did it all. Not to brag(which is what a person who means to brag always prefaces a braggadocio post with) but, for a while, I was one of the best. My customers had the most fun on the river while I had the most fun paddling my kayak down the Lehigh River with them.

I developed a persona, Omar the Blond Arabian, adopted a southern accent, which was not difficult for me since I lived in Georgia for four years as an adolescent, and used psychology to maximum effect: reverse, forward or sideways, it didn't matter. It didn’t hurt that I loved my job and I loved the river and the guests were just along for the ride. Happy workers make the best employees and I was the boss for the day when it came my turn to be lead guide.

One common mistake I learned to avoid was in getting rafters to steer around hazardous rocks in certain rapids. Most trip leaders positioned a kayaker behind obstructions to warn rafters away from it. I found that actually caused more collisions resulting in more rescues than was necessary. It seemed to me that customers tended to steer towards the kayakers; they were strangers in a strange land and headed for the person they assumed was there to keep them safe, e.g. the kayak guide. Eventually, I would place a guide on the side of the stream furthest from the hazard and found that was enough to get the rafts to avoid the obstacle and, consequently, made my day much easier.

Shiny happy people holding hands: that’s the key to the kingdom of pleasure and it is applicable to many of Life’s endeavors today, including tango. 

I love dancing tango and I love dancing with strange women. It is a no-brainer for me on how to make each encounter an enjoyable one. I simply let her know, let her feel, how pleased I am to be in this situation: accompanying her on a beautiful journey through the impending musical  pieces. To her, I am not Omar the Blond Arabian(although I will never not be Omar, she is just unaware of who I am at heart), I am just a guy with a nice shirt and clean pair of pants waiting to dance with her. On the river, I needed to keep away from obstacles to get my charges to have a good time, but, in tango, the opposite is true: I must be close to her in order for maximum amount of pleasure to be achieved.

The trick is to make my partner feel that I enjoy being with her and yet, I do enjoy it, so, maybe it is not a trick, or maybe it is a trick I play upon myself: such is the mystery of tango; who am I to question why I love it so much? For whatever reason why I feel good is not important, the only thing that matters is that my good feeling is conveyed to her, and, upon doing so, she relaxes and allows me to get closer to her. The obstacle here is not a rock in the river, it is the physical distance between us, which we have now eliminated, thus allowing us to have the most amount of pleasure with the least amount of effort.

What I am trying to say, and maybe not succeeding at, but I am not afraid to try, is that making a connection in tango is a skill that can be refined into an art, and that those who can do so, do so to the maximum benefit of their partners. May happiness ensue.

To Lead Tango You Must Respect The Woman

            Last night, while leaving tango practica, I remarked to fellow tanguero who was descending steps to the sidewalk into the cool autumn air, “Another great night of tango and now we return to the world where nobody understands us, what we do and why we do it.”

He agreed.

Tango is a close dance among strangers, something American society has a tough time dealing with in these days of hyper-partisanism, #metoo, pornography, covid and misogyny. How dare you dance so close with someone you barely know...how can you?

I’ll tell you how I can do so and it is this: I dance with a heightened sense of respect for my partner. I respect her body, her balance and emotional state. To be a leader in the dance of tango takes commitment; it is an investment of time and energy in learning how to maintain your own balance, to steel your body against primal urges and to keep your mind clear of everything except the music and your partner.

Back in the day, in the early 1900s, a young man trained for three years before he was even allowed to dance with a woman at a tango event. One hundred years later, the tanguero is no longer a young man, rather, he is like me, middle-aged, but the price of entry into the arms of a woman is kind of the same. It takes three years to learn how to hold a woman; until then, your dance engagements are merely awkward encounters with members of the opposite sex but you still have not danced with the woman, she is inside that shell within your embrace but you have not yet reached her. She is the princess in a video game, constantly imploring you to save her but you have not yet developed the skill to slay her dragons and set her free.

I think as I walk towards my car parked on the street, my tanguero friend and I did not arrive at this practica haphazardly: it has been a journey of years. Speaking for myself, it took me eighteen months just to learn how to walk to the music with a partner, and, as I’ve said, it took three years for me to learn how to hold a woman, to give her a safe space to be on the dance floor in the video Game of Life; after five years, I came to the realization that I was still just a beginner and that was all I ever would be, a novice whose only goal was to keep trying to get better, to understand more clearly and to forever fortify the walls of my safe space for any princesses I may be lucky enough to receive in there.

I know my friend well enough to know that he has been on a similar journey and that he fully understands how well the rest of the world we return to does not understand. So, I will close now with a repost of a poem I wrote long ago about just such a feeling:

               Tango,  

               an exhilarating experience

                making life seem plain.

               Struggling for words,

               trying to socialize,

               I have nothing to say.

               What could I say?

               They’ll never understand.

               They could not understand

                entering another’s soul,

                running free inside of it,

               riding a roller coaster of emotion

               on the melody of a song

               and the touch of her heart

               beating against mine.

Should Women Ask Men To Dance At A Milonga?

Hooray! We’re dancing tango again! After attending several milongas, it is becoming obvious to me that the ladies are anxious to dance and I am getting a lot of verbal dance requests. This brings me to the topic I'd like to discuss today: tango dance invitation etiquette.  If you’ve been dancing tango a long time the answer may be obvious: cabeceo, of course, but we all know that this is not necessarily practiced here in America, land of the free, the place where men and women are almost equal and home to the world’s largest population of contrarians who defy all rules right up to their very last covid-filled breath.

Here is how I feel about women asking me to dance: I am extremely against it…...unless she’s extremely attractive or she's a friend or she is simply irresistible; other than those things, I really prefer to initiate the dance invite with a cabeceo, delivered with the utmost discretion. The use of cabeceo is an art, and, if applied correctly, does not affect the mood of a crowd because dance request rejections go mostly unnoticed.

I must admit that when I was a beginner, I found cabeceo extremely daunting. After I’d been dancing tango for five years, I took a workshop on close embrace. It was a weekend event with milongas after class on both Friday and Saturday nights. Cabeceo was strictly enforced and I struggled with it but grew to like it, then to love it, albeit seven years later. I now find the spoken approach to a dance invite to be kind of rude. However, as noted before, there are exceptions.

One of the nicest things about a good milonga is how I feel afterwards, it is a feeling that can last for days, even weeks. I had a tango dance with a tanguera just before covid hit and the memory of our dance together stayed with me for a year. Now that we are dancing again, I’ve come to know those feelings once more, but there is a glitch: I'm older and not necessarily wiser or maybe less forgiving than I used to be before covid. My memory of the night before is the same euphoria I’ve come to know and love, but a poorly executed verbal dance invite from a tanguera to me invades that pre-dawn sleepy stage of a night’s rest where visions of women dressed in high-heels and nice dresses drift magically across the screen of my dream theater….and it makes me angry. I know it shouldn’t matter but it does. I guess I've become a cranky old man.

I know women are of different minds when it comes to asking a man for a dance at a milonga. Let me try to present their arguments to the best of my recollection:

• The most common defense I hear is that she won't wait for cabeceos all night and will resort to asking men outright if she feels her butt becoming too familiar with her chair. She's put a lot of work into looking great and drove a long way to get here and she'll be damned if she doesn't get some dances.
  
  

• This next one is a brute. She never waits and is most annoying. I will dance with her the first few times she asks but I will put a stop to it before it spirals out of control and she is treating me like her bitch. She is the woman who interrupts my euphoric tango dreams and the reason why I write. One of these girls once approached me before the song was even over, while I was still holding my partner in my arms! I found this incredibly insulting and resolved not to dance with her the rest of the night or forever, whichever is longest.
  
  

• Then there are the newbies who must be forgiven all transgressions because they know not what they do.
  
  

  It is not unusual for a woman to ask a man to dance at other venues: there is little risk to it, three minutes and it will be over, barely enough time to smell her perfume. A tango engagement is entirely different: it is at least ten minutes, you will not only catch a whiff of her perfume, you'll have a pretty good idea of how long it's been since she showered last and what she had for supper. Not all girls are made of sugar and spice; tango teaches a man why the blind man knows he's passing by a brothel.

It is said that, in tango, the man is the man and the woman is the woman: what does that mean? I can't say for sure but I think it has something to do with the roles we are expected to play. For my part, I think I am obligated to be pleasing and respectful. It is also said that tango is all about the woman, so it seems that she can do whatever the hell she wants and us guys will just have to deal with it.

 As always, I write to expose the mind of a man dancing tango. I'm not asking anyone to agree with what I have to say, I am only saying that this is how I feel and I'll bet there's other men out there who feel the same way, too.

Peace, Love, Tango,

sincerely,

The Kayak Hombre