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.
