This upstairs room is atmospherically dark: the mood lighting adds a flavour which is intimate and louche. The row of upholstered booths along one wall reminds me of a diner — but not the kind where cheery aproned waitresses with name tags place crispy strips of bacon and eggs-over-easy in front of chubby men in parkas. It’s more like the kind of joint I’ve only seen in American movies: a sports bar with a huge, high flat-screen TV, where lonely men and hookers drink shots of bourbon. Amid the darkness, the main points of light are the bottles lined up behind the wooden bar and a large, silent projector screening unwatched black-and-white images from tango films and performances: our soft porn.

The people cluster in the booths, with their shoe bags littered underneath; at the tables strewn with half-drunk green litre bottles of beer; they sit with their backs to Avenida Córdoba, which is dark and quiet at this hour; they squat cross-legged beneath the neglected film screen on a wooden podium. They perch on high stools. They hover in the doorway: tantalisingly occupying a liminal space between  the world of dancers and potential dancers and the cold white lighting of the toilets, the lonely staircase and the escape route to the outside world.

Some people are talking quietly to each other, but most eyes gaze out at the lovely spectacle offered by the floor: couples twining and untwining, high-heeled feet tracing beautiful patterns on sticky wood and in warm, heavy air. The dancers’ faces almost universally wear expressions of deep, committed, heavy-lidded concentration. The dense, humid atmosphere, semi-darkness and the slithery motions of our dance make me think of a giant aquarium.

It’s not always easy to get dances here. The standard here is high and the dancers correspondingly risk averse. I spot not one beginner or intermediate level dancer here. This is the deep end. Rubber rings and floats are not allowed and there is no lifeguard. It’s sink or swim. Tonight, as usual, women heavily outnumber men. The wooden platform beneath the video screen is a smörgåsbord, a chirashi sushi of beautiful followers. Their silky hair gleams slightly in the places where the light falls on them, like glistening fronds of seaweed, or mermaids’ tresses. If you are a leader, the pickings are rich. Partner choice seems to have a strong element of serendipity here. I watch some of those women out dancing in the course of the evening, swimming gracefully around the floor and their leaders, stepping elegantly over male legs in paradas and letting boleos flick through the air with long, loose legs. But others sit gazing at the floor for hours, partnerless for no reason I can easily divine, except that night’s karma.

El Yeite is a manic-depressive milonga, for me. Some nights, it is as sweet an experience as the name of its venue, Azúcar. Some nights, the place is a tango Tardis: its blank unassuming facade hiding a rich world of beautiful dancing within. It can be a time-travelling machine in which our southern city’s 6am arrives with startling swiftness, a planet subject to its own rules, where time runs faster than in the real world and where a dozen tandas pass in the blink of an eye.

But, on a bad night, I feel like a barnacle stuck to a rock, unable to move while the beautiful music of yearning I long to dance to washes over me in waves — or like a piece of stray jetsam, washed up in a corner, left to rot in the sun at low tide.

Ordinary cabeceo is hard to achieve here in this dark-cornered space, so I choose a mobile version. I am a nocturnal ocular hunter. I am a shark: not a Great White, but a much more humble predator, lower down the food chain, a Modest Little White Shark hungry for good dances. I stalk the room, choose my quarry and position myself carefully within optimum cabeceo distance: a delicate manoeuvre. If I get too close, I will seem aggressive and intimidating and my prey may shy away (unless the leader is a good friend or someone who I sense or know is relaxed enough to be open to a cheekier approach). But if I am too far away, on the other hand, visibility is reduced and other people may block my sight lines. And then, I use my eyes. I look.

The reactions are varied, of course. Some men slide their gaze over me and away or stand watching the floor with the fuzzy-eyed, introspective look of ocular self-defence, a look which creates a tiny bubble of safety around them. I cannot enter the field of their gaze and our eyes must meet before our arms can embrace. So I look away from them. And then there are those who, as soon as they catch my look, give me an instant, businesslike nod which has me scuttling to meet them on the floor, squeezing past people with the sideways motion of a crab. But many hold eye contact for what seems like a long time. I look; they look back. The eyes are not the windows of the soul here: they disguise as much as they reveal. But then, just as I am about to break the gaze, they nod, raise an eyebrow, gesture at the floor, often asking do you want to dance? I have pretty teeth, dear, and now I show them, pearly white, baring them in a broad smile. I would love to, I say. And then we dive into the miniature ocean of the dance floor, submerge ourselves in the music and, ah, how good the water feels, how lovely it is to swim here!

I hover by the bar, scanning the already-crowded room anxiously and am greatly relieved when the organizer, Susannah, pursing her lips to offer me her customary moist kiss on the cheek, leads me by the hand to my usual front row seat. The place is packed. The women are four multicoloured rows deep and the men are a deep dense clot by the bar.

Cabeceo is not a game for amateurs tonight. Tonight, I need my strongest, most forceful eyes. I use the cortinas to scan the room, to attempt to make brief, flickering eye contact with my favourite dancers in a kind of teasing pre-cabeceo. And then, as the opening notes of the tanda sound, I choose my adversary and stare, face puckered in concentration, imagining two red laser beams emanating from my pupils and piercing cornea, pupil and lens, darting through the vitreous body with the determination of an Exocet missile, or an egg-seeking sperm, travelling along the ganglions of the optic nerve and penetrating the male brain.

It’s not easy to tell who among the crowd is looking in your direction and this is equally true whether you are male or female but especially true for me, since I seem to have a perverse predilection for myopic dance partners. There are many moments of frustration, many tiny discreet ocular dramas. At several points, I think I have made eye contact with a friend and a tiny farce plays out. I nod in vigorous assent; he points to his chest and mouths Me? with questioning raised eyebrows and then he turns to look around at the men close to him, in uncertainty as to who is the object of my gaze and finally shrugs his shoulders in resigned frustration and settles back against his seat, partnerless for that tanda. Or perhaps it wasn’t me he was looking at all; I can’t be certain. At various moments, I signal a firm, chin wagging assent and then wait in suspense as the man approaches our table, uncertain as to whether I was really the object of his cabeceo but unable to look in anyone else’s direction until the ambiguity has been resolved.

One of my favourite partners is buried deep amid the cluster of men at the bar. He bobs up and down onto his tiptoes, tilting his head to look towards me through the thicket of dark-haired, goateed dancers in front of him and we exchange an elaborate pantomime of craning necks, half smiles and eyebrow wiggles. He maintains constant eye contact for extra reassurance as he makes his way to the floor, twisting his neck towards me as he walks in an unconscious parody of the dissociated movements of our dance. But, by the time he reaches the corner of the dance floor, Enrique Campos is crooning sweetly of a Uruguayan girl whose blue eyes could tame the fiercest of gauchos and the local gauchos are already in swirling motion. My friend stands shifting from foot to foot and we exchange little pouts of frustration as he is forced to let the entire lovely Tanturi song go undanced before he can finally squeeze past the dancers to my chair.

Miraculously, my hard-core, triple-X-rated cabeceos seem to work somehow in the end and I dance all but two of the long evening’s tandas and every tanda I dance is at the very least pleasant and most are lovely (only partly by design, I stick with tried and trusted partners all evening). And, somehow, the tandas seem all the sweeter tonight for the serious ocular swordsmanship many of them cost me.

I love to dance on a really crowded floor, at least on one like that of El Beso, where most of the leaders are well trained in floor craft and dance with space-conserving, small-footprinted sobriety. I keep my left arm up high and stretch it across the men’s shoulders with my elbow discreetly folded in. I close my eyes and feel miraculously protected, cuddled and safe. Like a little girl at the fairground. We rotate and pivot through a thousand giros and ocho cortados: each couple spinning in their own place and circling the room, twin planets orbiting the room’s central red pillar, close to the others, but each in our semi-circle of space, like the cars in the waltzer spinning around their individual magnetic tracks.

I love to dance with teeny tiny steps, to concentrate the music down into the subtlest of movements, to let my feet come alive with little taps, miniaturising the back boleos into tight, low semicircles that flick around the heel of my own standing leg, snatching little flirtatious rubs against my leader’s feet, punching out syncopated rhythms in the dancer’s morse code of rapid weight changes on the spot. I love to surrender to the illusion that my partner and I are the only ones in the place. That this floor as smooth as a baby’s bottom is ours alone and that the DJ in her dark eyrie is playing this silky Di Sarli track purely for our personal pleasure. There is the delicious moment of slight surprise when I open my eyes at the end of a track to find that my partner and I are densely surrounded, with the other men so close I sometimes imagine I can smell their sharp, old-fashioned colognes. Occasionally, the women’s skirts brush against my bare legs. At moments like this, tango feels like a true bacchanal: an experience both of highly personal coupled bliss and of a shared ecstasy, a contagious, collective happiness.

But finally, in the last half an hour of this evening, the floor is freer and offers an inviting playground in which to bound around to a joyfully energetic D’Arienzo-Mauré. It’s the last of four tandas I’ve danced this evening with a favourite partner of mine. He has spent much of the night at the bar, sipping wine and flirting twinkly eyed with a succession of pretty women. And perhaps it is the effects of the alcohol, perhaps the carpe noctem atmosphere stimulated by the happy knowledge that both Monday and Tuesday will be public holidays, or perhaps he has been infected by the carnival spirit, but there has been a progression in his dancing as the evening continued: in which whatever was lost in precision was gained in a delightful puppyish enthusiasm. We have been unleashed at last, the floor is ours and we chase each other’s tails in playful giros and race around the room with big lolloping strides.

And now, all too quickly it seems to me, it is time for the final tanda. This orchestra is sacred to an absent friend of mine and I dance with him in spirit, channelling him for inspiration from afar. I want to burst the grape of the evening against my palate and squeeze out the last heady drops of pleasure before oblivion and Lethe claim me for the night.  My free leg has liberty to meander and play now and I lift it in more dramatic gestures to fit this dense, theatrical, almost camp orchestra. I want to put every bit of passion I feel into these final twelve minutes. Transnochando, Berón is singing, staying out all night, like a drunkard, like a party animal, like someone who doesn’t know what awaits him or where he is going.  

Like a reveller, a mummer, a devotee of Saturnalian rites, I stay out all night to celebrate my own personal tango carnival.

The hands should stay relaxed. Don’t form them into a ‘dancer’s hand’, he tells us, not like this. He fans his fingers slightly, displaying them carefully in the air like a five-stemmed ikebana arrangement. They need to be organic, relaxed, natural, but alive. He wiggles them a little with the lazy pleasure of someone waking refreshed from a siesta. As I extend my own arm, I visualise myself filling out the space, cell by cell, diffusing through by a kind of magic osmosis, from shoulder-blade to fingertips.

But the second half of class is dedicated, as usual, to a choreography. And it is as though I have shrunk back from this delicious expansive sense of inhabiting my full body and am now just a little voice in my own head, a ghost in the grey jelly, tangled up in wisps of protoplasm. I am counting in my head and have reduced the music to a mere series of beats: six, seven, eight. Wait, do I turn here on my left or my right foot? OK, this was the part where we fall to the floor, but what came next? Oh shit, I can’t remember which arm leads in this spiral. I feel frustrated. The music doesn’t wait for my clumsy cogitations. I am chasing the beat like a child dragged along by the hand of an impatient parent: tripping over my own feet and breaking into little flustered runs as I try to keep up with the fast-paced adult stride. I can perform the movements, just about simulate the  positions and the actions required. But I cannot yet really dance it.

In tango, I rarely dance choreographies. Sometimes, in class, there are head-scratching moments as my partner and I attempt to recreate a figure: the leader enters with which foot? when was the sacada? where does he do the enrosque? But tango is a minimalist art form, just a few slender stems in a vase. Our vocabulary is small, though wonderfully rich in recombinative possibilities, and it is precisely that which makes it so easy to infuse each familiar movement with feeling, to be present in each moment of the dance. In the back ocho, for example.

I have danced a thousand, a million back ochos of so many kinds: self-conscious and exposed under my teacher’s hawk-eyed gaze; accompanied by an analytical internal dialogue while Ella Fitzgerald croons unheard in the background during my daily solo technique practice; responsive to micro corrections as I practise with my partner; fodder for critical reflection as I scrutinise them on the tiny screen of my camera – so that’s what’s going wrong; I need to pivot more here; to correct my posture there. And then there are the others, on the dance floor: they can be mechanically awkward at times, of course, in the arms of an inexperienced leader, off-balance, clunky, blocky and rushed. But, mostly, they convey a smooth liquid sinuosity. A snaky river. A walking sine curve. A flesh and blood Moebius strip. A lovely twisting and untwisting sensation which I feel I could never tire of, not if I danced a hundred thousand of them a day.

Before I discovered tango, I think my body had never experienced that combination of a twisty torso with gliding, pushing, pivoting feet. And now it has become not only sweetly familiar, but I even experience a somatic nostalgia for it when I have not been dancing for a few days. On the smooth surfaces of linoleum-covered kitchen floors, the herringbone wood of art galleries, the polished pine of high-ceilinged corporate reception halls, I find myself painting imaginary semi-circular lines, moving backwards through space with a strange twisty motion, to the bewilderment of pinstriped businessmen in London and the glances of quick, amused recognition here in Buenos Aires (ah, bailás tango vos).

Like a religious rite, the back ocho gains in significance from the mere fact of its repetition within a meaningful context. There is a sweet ease to the movement — a hard-won effortlessness which is the fruit of many hours of solitary wobblings in my tango sandals. It is a work in lifelong progress: my back ocho, the platonic ideal vaguely in my mind, the perfect way of pouring my body through this winding pathway. But at the same time, it is incorporated deep enough in my body’s repertoire of physical responses to feel intuitive, natural, right. And that’s what lets me dance it.

My partner and I have reached the point of maximum tiredness in this long evening of dancing: later, our sails will swell with the proverbial second wind, but for now our dance has taken on a wabi-sabi aesthetic. Moments of slight wobbliness, brief seconds of uncertainty, of lack of coordination, small mistakes that we smile at and just step through and past. Luckily, in tango, you are always in motion — even during the pauses you are in suspended motion — so you can smooth over those unevennesses, glide past those shaky instants. Our dance is not technically perfect. But what is more important here and now — in this long, rectangular upstairs room with its lovely smooth floor and soft half-lighting — is what others might call connection. But since I am an atheist, a sceptic and a rationalist in this, as in most things, I prefer to think of it in other terms.

With a few of my other partners, I can directly feel the effects this chaotic floor has on their embrace. The stresses provoked by the poor floorcraft of some of their fellow leaders are directly, somatically expressed in a slight but unmistakable stiffening of the leader’s left arm, making my own right arm ache a little under the pressure, a renewed grip on my hand, a tendency to press and twist my wrist back against which my fingers sometimes ineffectually squirm in natural self-defence against any uncomfortable torsions. But none of this happens with him. His arm remains soft and relaxed throughout. I rarely think about our embrace, in fact. It’s like listening to a native speaker giving a talk. There are no grammar mistakes, no strange and awkward collocations, no unfamiliar idioms translated literally from a foreign tongue. The medium has an effortless transparency which allows me to focus entirely on the message. And the message is in the music.

I don’t know, of course, from moment to moment, which direction he will choose to step in, whether he will walk the one or two steps forward which the limited space allows, whether he will open up the embrace and let his legs wrap around each other in the elegant tangle of an enrosque as I walk around him in a giro, whether he will use a rare, delicious semicircle of free space in a corner to change direction so that my foot flies up in a lovely boleo. But I do have a sense of when he will be pausing in soft suspension, when he will move slowly, when he will accelerate, when he will be stepping, moving, leading and when waiting, savouring the moment. Because, like me, he will take his cues from the song we both know so well. The title, Pocas Palabras (few words), seems strangely appropriate to our dancing. A hint is enough for good communication; a word to the wise; pocas palabras al buen entendedor.

I unleash my free leg in a thousand teeny-tiny decorations: taps and flicky movements around my standing foot, tiny rubs up and down against my own ankle, designed to occupy minimal floor space. My free leg reminds me of a well-trained dog walking off leash on a city street, scampering around its master in little canine exploratory detours, stopping to sniff a urine-soaked lamp-post, to pick up an abandoned plastic bottle with its mouth, to bark at a passing poodle. But then, when we get to the road — when we are ready to move, to take a step in the dance — my free leg is obediently waiting by its fellow. Like a good dog stopping at the curb to cross the road at his master’s signal and glued to master’s heels.†

And, as we stride along, around the floor, around each other, into and out of each other’s space in the fluid walk which is tango, I try to pick up on the exact dynamics of his step. I can feel his body making the necessary micro preparations for an acceleration here and I know that he is planning to depict the fast syncopated beats with a little corrida. And here I feel his torso gently getting ready to halt its circular dissociated movement in a parada and with happy confidence I let the meanderings of a violin which has suddenly risen to prominence late in the tango be my guide as to when and how to step over, luxuriating in a brief leg caricia on my way.

To dance musically, I sometimes feel, little more is necessary than to be fully listening. There are the signals from the leader’s body and the signals from the music: a double set of instructions to inform my dancing. Something which can be frustrating on those rare occasions when I am unlucky enough to dance with someone who is not paying attention to the impulses the music is giving me, who is not aware of how my body is likely to wish to respond. But tonight I do not feel like a servant of two masters. Instead, I have a wonderful sense of rightness, of predictability. My ear can tell where the next beat will fall. And my body can feel how his body will move. Nothing is startling, brusque, totally unexpected.

The tiny delay between message and action makes for a deceptively effortless sense that I am reading his mind, that he is somehow intuiting the feelings this tango evokes in me, the way my body longs to move to it. But it has nothing to do with the full moon tonight. Or the fact that we were both born under the hippie-dippy sign of Aquarius. The journey that led to this place began instead with oscillating air travelling through tiny, perfectly formed hammers, anvils and stirrups, stirring microscopic hairs like wind moving the stalks of a miniature grassland. And it ended in nerves and muscles, in the push of feet against floor. So that’s why I prefer not to think of connection. Instead, in the incongruous setting of this beachless city of noisy buses, I am envisioning open-topped convertibles, surfer dudes and chicks and kitschy Hawaiian shirts. Good, good, good good vibrations. 

Here’s one of my favourite couples dancing to this song and keeping those good vibrations happening:

†Disclaimer. Please keep your dog leashed in real life when cars are around.

“I long for your embrace,” he writes. Words which to the non-initiate would probably evoke the heaving bosom of a Victorian heroine on a divan, fainting from the constrictions of lace and whalebone, driven to hysteria by the hypocritical restrictions of a tightly-circumscribed femininity. But I know, of course, what kind of embrace he means. The asymmetrical loop of arms wrapped around each other, left leader and right follower hands entwined isomers. We are mirror image twins. Or rather, twin eggs forming separately but simultaneously, swimming together in the tango womb. Starlas & Kilians in spirit. Twin children of tango.

.         .         .         .         .         .         .         .        .

You danced with him? Ah, how lovely! Lucky girl! Really? He is one of my favourite partners. And Troilo, my favourite orchestra. . .  Oh yes, him, I remember exactly how his skinny ribcage felt, his breastbone against my body. Luna Llena — I miss that place! She and I have a connection that would be strange outside the tango world. A connection through a kind of Woodstock of the dance; a tango free love fest; we are connected through having been blissfully enwrapped in the same sets of male arms, sister wives in the pleasurable polygamy of tango life.

.         .         .         .         .         .         .         .        .

I want to turn these tap dancing fingers into elegant stilettoed feet. To shift from watching videos to being in the film with him: to fold my reading-glasses away, confine them to their glossy case, close those eyes instead in tangotonin-fuelled pleasure.

‘xoxo’ he writes at the end of each chat. I want to convert those ‘x’s into the twin nestled semicircles of ochos, the ‘o’s into the lovely lofty loopiness of back boleos.

.         .         .         .         .         .         .         .        .

Dancers form a large, internationally-branching community. And yet, also, an intimately small one. A self-help society of addicts? A secret freemasonery built on the esoteric rites of the close embrace? Occasionally, it feels as if there is an instant link, a joy in finding a fellow devotee of our impractical art. And we are all connected in one long, curly, twisted, tangled chain of dance connections.

I wait here in Buenos Aires, at the navel of the tango earth. A friendly spider at the centre of this world-wide web. Spinning my sticky threads of words. Sometimes it seems that everyone comes here eventually. Drawn by the siren call of the tango in its trafficky, polluted, graffiti-scrawled, dogshit-strewn, chaotic and beautiful hometown. Curious to experience the tango taxon in its centre of diversity, the subsaharan plains of homo tanguero. They come here and for a while some of them are gently held in my eager dancer’s arms.

And then they are gone again. Out of the realm of the physical. Far from the sticky summer porteño heat, relating strange tales of ice crystals, snowmen and frozen pipes. Reduced to black letters on a screen. To photos in Facebook, images of congealed dance that speak their names at you if you hover over them with a cursor. People shrunk to pixels. I miss them. Dance requires a warm body, not the chill blue light of a monitor. That is its blessing — and its curse.

Guest post by Derrick del Pilar (Poesía de Gotán)

Sometimes, when I’m out on the pista enfolded in the firm yet supple and responsive embrace of a skilled woman, and I feel that instead of dancing we are soaring and striding and shining, I start to think lyrics to myself. Not always the lyrics of the song that we are dancing—invariably, when I am on a high, I hear in my head the kind of tango lyrics that Borges preferred: “When I’m dancing tango, I’m such a badass that when I stop for this parada, they feel it on the other side of town.”  “This is how you dance tango: when I lead an ocho, it’s as pretty as any painter’s filigree.” “I like to strut around, I’m so cool when I dance.” “I’m king of the bailongo at Lo de Laura, Lo de la Vasca, trailing all these dreamy dames in my wake.” “Ain’t no one better than me at these twisty tango poses, at stealing their hearts on a whim.”

Borges once surmised that perhaps all men who repeat a line of Shakespeare become Shakespeare, just for a moment. I do sometimes believe that if I silently repeat the lines of the compadritos, those roguish, posturing, over-compensating bon vivants who invented the tango, that I will somehow become one of them on the dance floor, no matter where I am: the streets of Tucson or Eugene or Portland or San Francisco outside will meld and flow and reshape themselves into dirt streets on edge of the pampas, the clocks will spin back seventy years, to a time when the world was at war but Argentina was not, when across Europe people huddled in basements and hid in attics fearful of bombs and tanks, but in Buenos Aires, they packed the cabarets and embraced each other and danced to the new music of their city’s orchestras.

Whatever clothes I am wearing will morph into finely tailored wool slacks, a waistcoat and double breasted blazer in smart slate pinstripe will materialize around my torso, a white shirt and crisp tie, smart patent leather wingtips on my feet. My laptop will transform into an orchestra, the table where it rests a stage, and behold! El gordo Pichuco himself will sit there, eyes closed, chins throbbing as he coaxes noises from his bandoneón like no man can, Fiore will stand in front of the orchestra, singing “I’m that same old tango, born on this city’s edge!”

And so I think those lines, and I strut around, and I feel pretty good, and my partner smiles after the tanda. “I love dancing with you,” she says as we head to the table in back for a nibble of sweets and a gulp of water.

Hours later, I am watching a video recording on my computer. Someone wearing my clothes, my shoes, my skin, is dancing at that milonga with one of my favorite ladies. Who is this strange, awkward pod person who has taken over my body? And what on earth is he doing? Hasn’t he heard the advice from a dozen tango teachers (keep your feet close to the floor, project your foot, walk from open to open, flow through the step), hasn’t he paid hundreds of dollars for private lessons? But that weirdo in my body, he skips around on the beat and points his left thumb up as though he were a drifter trying to hitch a ride.

Where is he, that king of the cabaret? Maybe, I realize with a bit of dismay, he was never here, not inside this body. Words, however brash and boastful and seemingly timeless, cannot substitute for actions—mantras must be accompanied by postures and exercises and effort. I cannot merely strut around the milonga, thinking grand thoughts and dreaming dreams of the old compadritos, or perch haughtily behind my computer, directing the dancers with my tandas like a priest at mass (sit, stand, come together, separate, pause, pray, worship, dance). I have to put in the hours at home, spinning around my axis on my standing leg, working my core to turn my upper body first and then pivot my lower body over one weighted foot. I have to put in the hours at the práctica, refining and polishing the embrace, trying that enrosque again and again and again until it works, until my legs wrap around each other but my feet stay on the floor, until my body does not wobble.

He resists, of course. My inner boastful windbag (ventarrón), my secret Don Juan, my true and not so hidden alter ego, the fancy young playboy (niño bien), pretentious and stuck-up. He thinks that his dancing is fine, he has delighted plenty of ladies on the dance floor, even some professionals, even some milongueras. He thinks (he knows) that at the next milonga, if he merely puts on his best three piece grey wool suit (sucking in his stomach to button the pants—the dry cleaner must have shrunk them), polishes his shoes to a gaudy shine, and lip syncs to every song that’s playing, he will be for a moment that kid of bygone days, the one who seems so young and thin and fresh, crossing Corrientes forever in the photo he keeps on his desk, reduced to monochrome for that aged effect.

But I know that during my next tanda at some dance studio milonga, if I cast a wandering eye at the floor-length mirrors as I go by, I will see myself for just a second as I really am—a bit softer around the middle than I recall, not yet old, but a bit worn perhaps, not yet the dancer of my dreams—reflected in the mirror of that crazy cabaret.

I feel less like a dancer than like a doctor. I am taking a history, making an examination. Taking my time, like a conscientious diagnostician. My left arm encircling him, my right hand curled around his baby-scented left hand, my torso gently touching his. My body is my stethoscope, my thermometer, my ultrasound. I am frowning slightly in concentration and relax my facial muscles consciously. I am not so much dancing as listening. What am I feeling? I am searching for symptoms: Gregory House in a tango embrace. He is lifting me a little with his left arm so that my legs are stretched and my feet are not quite stable, unable to firmly tread the honey-coloured slats of the floor. His left arm is tense, but the left hand is a slippery elusive fish. And now, in the giro: why does it not feel quite right? What precisely is happening? How will I describe it? I focus intensely on the sensations: first, in my torso, as though I were endowed with X-ray vision and could see past the superficial contact of T-shirt touching T-shirt to the muscles and ligaments deep inside. And then try to imagine the parts I cannot feel physically: the feet in their soft flat lace-ups, the round male hip bones, the double-horned iliac crests.  I need to trace the movements back in time to where they were born. Back to the first muscular preparatory twitches, to the fiery starbursting synapses of the cerebellum. I feel like a detective at the scene of a crime, Poirot searching for the revealing detail. What is missing? Where did this go wrong?

I begin with something simple: a correction to the embrace. I stand and demonstrate, my arms around a ghostly leader built of sultry air.  I reverse my arms in the instant sex change which tango permits and encircle my student’s slender body like a leader. Don’t hold her like this; here, this is what she needs to feel. His earnest state of mental concentration is physically palpable in the soft receptiveness of his body. Then we are walking, a tad awkwardly at first — every few bars I make a few little adjustments, gently stroke his shoulder downwards, twine my fingers around the elusive slip-slidey hand, voice a soft reminder. And, by the end of class, I can definitely tell. It’s become more natural, more incorporated. I feel as though I have somehow imprinted something upon his bodily memory, a somatic signature.

But teaching is never one sided. And in tango, so much of pedagogy is modelling. Demonstrating — look, here’s what to do. Moving your own body and talking through how and where and why you activate which parts of your anatomy. But there are subtler ways to be a living example. I am musing on this as we descend together in the cramped, hot space of the lift, as we shudder to a bone-shaking halt on the ground floor, as I release him out into the saturated street air. I realise that not once did he express, by look, word or gesture, the least frustration at his own physical shortcomings, the least impatience when my explanations did not yet make sense. For one hour, I saw someone look at his own tango progress with the shiny and eager eyes of intellectual curiosity. With objectivity and patience. A model student in a literal sense. I hope he left a trace.

My fellow students and I are watching with quiet concentration. This is what we are looking for: the subtleties of this somatic communication; the physical intimacies of the dance which bypass the verbal and run deeper than the superficially erotic. Diving past the layers of sexual orientation, the rigid restrictions of hetero and homo, deep down beyond the selfish demands of our genes, the complementarity of mitochondria, far from the localised ache of sexual longing, the sticky, odorous frictions of lovemaking, there is something else.

Something both more constant and more universal. A delight in the living body. The softness of a responsive torso against yours as you twist together in the dissociations of the dance. Whether that torso is flat, and you can sense the delicate bones of the rib cage pressing against you in their branching lines; or whether you feel the spongy cushioning of subcutaneous fat moulded into the oval structures of breasts. The line of a foot tracing an airy circle through a boleo. Hipbones — circular or elliptical, snakily narrow or fructiferously wide — satisfyingly heavy under the demands of gravity. The loopy psoas muscle lifting a leg. The curved arch of your foot in a high-heeled shoe and the curved arch of a palm in your hand. The domino stack of knobbly vertebrae in its beautiful sibilant shape. The crinkly skin of the perineum. The plated shoulder blades sliding viscously down the back. The Adam’s apple nesting in the throat. The eyes shut in order to feel the impulses of the other’s body. And a joy in the body which is pre-sexual: which comes before the sexual both in time and in priority. Because, before we can mate and reproduce, we need to be alive. And the dance demands this of us: that we focus on physical sensation, on embodiment, on corporality.

I am dancing with the handsome young teacher now. And he places a corrective hand on my back, manipulates me like the gentlest of masseurs. “Let me feel you”, he says, “yes, this is where the movement is born”. Focus, feel, concentrate; I am here; can you sense that?; good, lovely! yes, that’s it! He suddenly presses me against him in an affectionate squeeze. Mm mm mm mm mm, he vocalises in a descending scale, and then his lips are stamped with moist emphasis against my cheekbone. I am a vehicle. An agent. And the loveliness of the bodily communication, of the movement, has passed through me. Bei mir bist du scheen. 

And this is what I am looking for in the dance. Not to control, to force, to shape. But to somehow access something much bigger than I am as an individual. To harness, to hitch a ride on, to flow with, the natural patterns imposed by the structures of the homo sapiens body, by the gravitational constraints of our marbled blue-and-emerald planet, by the physical laws of our universe. To take a profound pleasure in my own physical being and to try to connect with that of others. Tango need not be sexual. But it can be sensual in the extreme.

But it is not just the camera. Everywhere I go, I can sense it. I am the dunce of every class. Movements that should be smooth and flowing feel strangely artificial, spastic, cramped. I see myself in the mirror, below the studio’s name which arches across the glass in brightly coloured swirls of fileteado. A squat figure: awkwardly broad of hip; buxom as a soap opera barmaid; with shire horse calves and a blancmange for a tummy; with a rubicund face slick with sweat; frizzy tendrils of hair whipping my face in the breeze from the fan; and anxious, self-critical eyes.

The slender 9cm heels of my tango sandals seem more fragile than usual, spindly stalks that cannot support my weight. My eyes are drawn irresistibly down towards the shiny wood of the floor, my arms flailing, elbows drawing back like a chimpanzee’s. My hips feel bulky and massive, but yet magically resist gravity, as if I were suspended from the ceiling by two invisible strings attached to my iliac crests, manipulated by a sadistic puppet master. My feet are both unfemininely large and yet tremblingly unstable. I feel like Quasimodo thrust awkwardly from the wings into the fluttery-armed corps de ballet of a production of Swan Lake. Focus on your perineum, the teacher instructs. Do I even have one? Is there anything inside there but solid wood, rags and dried kiln filling? Pinocchio in tango heels.

Even in my yoga class, I feel oddly disembodied. Everywhere I turn my focus, there are tensions, stiffnesses. And I feel it so strongly as I dance. I am lumpen, ugly. That flexed ankle, that jutting trochanter, that rounded back, that droopy head. They dishonour the spirit of tango. The elegant, beautiful, graceful, flowing spirals of our dance. I am unworthy even to gather up the crumbs. “Wow,” my teacher tells me, “you are tense. Relax your standing leg. And stand up straight. What has happened to your back? Don’t hunch like that. Stop looking down. Oh no. Don’t turn in a block like that. Initiate the ocho from your upper body, start the movement in the opposite side of your back. No, no! Don’t use momentum. You look like Jim Carrey in The Mask.” (see 0:36-0:47, below)

She recites words I have heard a thousand times, patiently explaining and justifying everything while I squirm with impatience at this lecture as familiar as a catechism, the tango teacher’s litany I could recite as easily by heart as the lyrics of one of my favourite tangos.

I am the oldest person here, by a good ten years. And by a good 10kg the heaviest. Yet I feel like a lost little girl. Tango is a queasy, heady rollercoaster ride for my ego. And I have plunged down to one of the lowest points, where cold water splashes against the sides of the carriage I am riding. But no, we don’t want to dismount. I hold the metal bar against my stomach with one hand and stretch out the other, cold coins clutched inside. Let us go for another spin, another stomach-lurching fun fair race. Me and my constant, faithful tango partner: my bruised and battered, coddled and spoilt, praised and censured manic-depressive of a partner. My tango dancer’s ego.