The girl in the polka dot shoes

I am pensive in my technique class today, in the warm sunset-orange room with the elegant triple-toned fileteado adorning the mirror. The same word is emblazoned there in red, white and satsuma colours as is embroidered on our teacher’s black T-shirt in scarlet writing adorned with paw prints, as though Biagi — the lazy, marmelade-striped genius loci of this place, who currently sits licking at a single, discarded ballet shoe — had autographed it personally. La Maleva it says: the bad girl. With her huge round 85% cocoa eyes, curly tendrils of black hair escaping from a loose bun and an earnest half-smile of persuasion, our teacher, however, looks less naughty than angelic.

Unusually, an online discussion is actually on my mind during class. The cybertalk has been of a strange species of tangueras, a species new to me — deftly precise of footwork, yet cold and sterile of heart; women with switched-off motors, like cats without a pur; vampiric, castrating, energy-draining succubi; devotees of a merciless technique god and scorners of the male sex; preying mantises of the dance floor; black widows who chew up leaders and spit them out at the end of the D’Arienzo tanda; creatures of a tango mirror universe where women want men to suffer, not enjoy, their dances with them.

Here in Buenos Aires, I often hear the parallel fiction — strangely similar — of dance floor goddesses and queens. “Don’t be so timid”, one of my male teachers always tells me, “don’t try not to bother the man. Bother me! Let me feel you, let me know you’re there! Use me for your pleasure! Come here and eat me alive!” They are two faces of the same card — the Ice Queen and the Fiery Princess; the debilitating vampire turning everything undead and the sexy red-lipped vamp. “She is a bitch”,  I hear someone say of one of my favourite followers, in a tone of deep admiration: “a bitch of the dance.”

I look around and try, for a moment, to see my fellow female technique students through the eyes of myth. But the labels I try to affix curl and dogear back off as if I had literally tried to stick them to our skin, moistly sweaty in this muggy heat and resistant to adhesive. Every face in class is serious with concentration: many brows wear a tiny frown and a friend’s tongue protrudes a little from between her parted lips like a child’s in front of a reading primer. We walk through forward ochos, focusing on the instructions we have been given. I think about which part of my foot, in its pretty, girly heel, is bearing my weight. I visualise my back opening out, wide as a bat’s wings, twisting in a vertical plane, curling itself around the inside of an invisible oval of air. I feel my hips and instruct them sternly to stay relaxed, heavy and grounded.

There is a ghostly presence here in class: the leader. Despite counting several men — real-life leaders — among our classmates, our teacher speaks always of he and him, the absent partner, ever-present in spirit. “Dancing is about connection”, she tells us, uncurling her arms out to the sides and fanning her fingers through the air in a graceful, habitual gesture of hers which always reminds me of the fluttery arm movements of the corps de ballet in Swan Lake. “And connection is about touch and timing”, she specifies. This is what I feel when he leads me in the ocho; this is what I’d like him to feel; this is how the movement works, together, in the dance. 

Each of us walks back and forth in our own little lane. My attention is so focused inward that I scarcely notice most of my classmates. But occasionally, in my peripheral vision I catch a glimpse of a beginner pivoting through the ocho in an awkward block with no attempt at dissociation (it take generally takes a little while for most students to grasp the concept well enough to even begin the long, difficult task of incorporating the corkscrew movements of our dance into their bodies). And, now and again, I glance at one of the more experienced followers twisting elastically through the movement with ease and grace. This is our training ground, our playing fields of Eton, our classroom, our university, our Oxbridge of the dance. The belle dame sans merci and the femme fatale are irrelevant fantasies: we are the readers, the literary critics here — not characters out of books.

If we have a symbolic representative, it is not Mata Hari or Marlene Dietrich. It is the girl here, in the navy-blue-and-white polka dot Comme Il Fauts. I remember how she felt as a recent arrival here in our southern city. I remember a slight stiffness of right arm, a heavy, intrusive head whose forehead pressed uncomfortably firmly against my own as I led her, a pair of hips which she twisted with over-eager speed as she felt an ocho lead, making it very difficult to differentiate between forward and back directions.

Of course, much of this could have been the result of my own considerable shortcomings as a leader and some of it probably was. But, in the skin-prickling heat and humidity, I remember snapping impatiently: look, don’t lean your head against me; don’t turn your hips so fast. And her shiny-eyed, smiling, open face remained seemingly free of either arrogance or apology and as fresh as if I had made a remark of singular genius or pointed out something she had never heard before. Yeah, you’re right, let’s see how I can work on it. She looked at me with the eager eyes of intellectual curiosity, as though her own body moving through the black-and-white space of La Maria were a fascinating object of study.

And now, a scant half year later, she is sensitive, responsive, twisty and delayed of hip, soft of forehead, relaxed of arm. There’s been no change in personality, of course, no alteration of psyche, no increased emotional, spiritual openness — that I specifically know of or can judge, at least. It’s just physical. It’s just technique. But the physical, to me, has its own dignity, its own beauty and its own meaning. It doesn’t need to borrow: neither from the language of psychoanalysis nor from the clichés of popular culture, nor from the Manichean portrait gallery of  myth. What you feel in her embrace is the body as witness to patient months of practice. The body as work and study incorporated and transformed. A body shaped by service to the tango gods. And today I feel that I don’t need myths. That the physical can be richer and sweeter than the spiritual: more expressive and real. Bitches and goddesses, vampires and vamps, bad girls and whores are flimsy figments of our imaginations. I am much more interested in women as dancers.

Abnormal

“You should come here on a Thursday, to see the place during a traditional milonga”, the tall, lean, stork-like man is telling us. “The men sit here” (he gestures to the short sides of the room and the bar with a sweeping arm) “and the women here” (his expansive gesture takes in the smiling mixed-sex rows of faces). I feel as though I were witnessing an anthropologist lecture on strange tribal customs. “The sexes are strictly segregated and men dance with women. Now, that’s normal”, he says, with a twinkle in his eye at the obvious ironies of this, “we are the abnormal ones.”

The spectacle is still strange to my eye: the motley collection of people scattered around — many of them sitting well back, leaning against the walls or adopting the slightly slouching posture of relaxation. Many tables have ice buckets with bottles of champagne. I spot street shoes on passively unexpressive feet: there are muggles among us. Ordinary, quotidian reality has invaded this first-floor room, usually sacred to the rites of the formal milonga. It is a scene of normality. Men and women mingle. Latecomers simply search for a free seat (my friends and I spot a group of acquaintances and squeeze in next to them on the padded banquette in a ‘male’ part of the room in its usual gendered topography, in which I have never previously sat). It is a Friday night and people therefore want to relax, drink and enjoy themselves. I am so used, I realise, to the formal rituals enacted in this magic upstairs box on other nights that normality appears odd to me. And, out on the floor — El Beso’s familiar small, square floor with its central pillar — there is a swirling, alphabet soup of dancers, mostly in same-sex couples. In the clumsier couples, leaders lunge and lurch around and followers drape and cling to their partners, droopy-headed as five-day-old tulips. But amid the wobbly, stompy unpredictability of the many beginner couples, there is a scattering of fairy dust, a smidgen of tango magic.

Before I can dance with either of the friends I have come with — twin, slender, petite Pucks, soft-voiced and shiny of eye, with matching stripes of hair adorning their chins — it is time for the performance. I feel a sudden craving for a slice of cake at the combination of almost edible tawny colours the performers are dressed in. His precisely fitted suit is a dark chocolate; her dress is the exact creamy shade of coffee ice cream. Her skirts are cut in the familiar swallowtail shape of a tango stage costume with a deep slit just exposing a triangle of beige G-string and a smoothly waxed groin area as she moves. The autumnal palette continues in their dark, glossy hair, the milky brown expanse of naked skin on her back and the rich copper of her tango heels.

Their performance is unashamedly theatrical: with heady dramatic music; sharp, staccato movements; proudly upright postures; huge kicks of her lovely curvy leg; myriad boleos of dazzling variety and serious faces turned outwards towards us at many moments (something I still cannot get used to in escenario performances and which always makes me recoil a little from the intense but unfocused performer’s gaze). From my position squatting on the floor, I can appreciate the neatness of some of the most scrupulous footwork I’ve ever seen in a tango escenario performance and watch entranced as she spins and twirls through the air like a sycamore seed and he whirls her around him, just centimetres from the floor, her beautifully stretched legs like helicopter blades perilously close to the front row of the audience, her body a flat plane skimming the air, a tango hovercraft.

As usual, I watch with admiration, but remain strangely unmoved. I am accustomed, when I watch tango performances, I realise, to complete identification, to placing myself in imagination in the body of the follower and dancing through the music with her in my mind. Watching tango escenario provokes an inexplicable failure of my imagination, a lack of empathy — a queasy sense of the strange.

But, now, the couple has disappeared, a jaunty cortina is sounding and the social dancing can begin again. In this topsy turvey queer tango world, men outnumber women and, in general, greatly outclass us on the dance floor, too. I watch toned male buttocks twisting and turning in tight khakis and jeans; sculpted male torsos in fitted white T-shirts; male heads laid forehead to cheek; male follower eyes closed or deeply hooded, lips parted slightly in concentration. The followers’ faces wear an expression of surrender — in some cases of almost erotic intensity — rarely seen on the male face in tango.

My favourite male followers have an elfin quality: lithe, playful and mischievous. I watch their long, slender legs flicking and curling and tracing arabesques on the shiny wood and in the cold air-conditioned air with delicate gestures which look feminine because of their tango context, but are free of campery or exaggeration. The legs are just the tiniest bit stumpier than women’s legs: ending not in shiny, strappy sandals, but in feet raised on demi-pointe in black split-sole trainers or soft, two-tone, grey-and-blue flat shoes of suede and mesh. These dancers possess an ethereal quality, a lightness, a swiftness, a softness of tread which seems somehow more striking for being expressed through the more massive medium of the male body and highlighted by the relative rarity, for me, of the occasions I which observe men dancing the follower’s role at this level of skill.

I dance a couple of tandas with my gallant companions of the night and then sit eyeing the scene. I seem to have a developed a hardwired heterosexual cabeceo practice which is highly non-adaptive in this environment. I find my eyes instinctively drawn to the olive-haired men who, of course, ignore my looks of invitation, immune to my dancer’s ocular seductions, and even, sometimes, seemingly a little surprised by my endeavours. (I am even slightly startled, later in the evening, when a man comes over unexpectedly and asks me with soft-voiced diffidence if I would like to dance a milonga tanda with him.)

I change my tactics and scan for women. There are relatively few of us and I spot high heels on most of the female feet. I don’t want to lead here tonight: the floor is a boiling cauldron of chaos and I am unusually mentally and physically tired. It would be irresponsible to get into the driver’s seat, I feel, to subject a passenger to a bumper-car ride. But soon I have spotted a pair of female feet in flat shoes and — following the relaxed customs of the place — walk over there and verbally request the first of several same-sex tandas I will dance this evening. “I don’t know how to dance the woman’s role”, my partner apologises in lovely soft-edged French-accented Spanish. I gesture down at my tango heels with a happy smile. I close my eyes and let her steer me — a little tentatively, but miraculously collision-free — around the room to these smooth Di Sarlis, taking sensual pleasure in the softness of her right breast resting against my collarbone and the powdery, floral smell of perfume on her neck.

I dance and watch in almost equal quantities tonight. Especially when I spot a dancer I find particularly enthralling to observe. I watch him taking a swig of champagne and then getting up to dance with the loveliest, twinkliest-eyed of the little male faerie folk. He sports a pair of snowy jeans, adorned with zips, which snugly cling to the contours of his body, emphasising the bulge at his crotch. His bottom is rounder, higher, tighter than those of the other men; his hips are tucked further back and under; his chest is lifted proudly from the solar plexus. There is a captivating dynamic elasticity to his interpretation of these rough-voiced, manly D’Arienzo songs. His dance is rich with tantalising suspensions which end suddenly in dramatic swoops and dips. His partner’s beautiful face wears a half-smile throughout as they whirl though a giro, as they stride their way through a series of sacadas with the confidence of cats. In the second song, they swap and I am treated to the unusual sight (for me) of this icon of the straight tango scene dancing the follower’s part: long-legged and limber, keeping the tango surprisingly clear of decorations. His left arm holds his partner with determined firmness, fingers splaying wide over the flesh just below the right shoulder blade. They match, these two, in name and body. Long of leg and tight of trouser, they are masculine mirrors, walking with the same clean, uncluttered energy, the spirit of homos in a tango incarnation. This is decidedly above and beyond the normal. It’s deliciously abnormal.

Through the tanda glass

There are many things on my mind and they feel, tonight, as though they had been literally placed there like a high, wobbly stack of books balanced precariously on top of the squishy grey cauliflower of my brain. And there are many feelings pulsing around in there, too, a swarm of busy wasps.

 
But not least among those feelings is an impatience to dance which has been mounting for several hours. It has been growing as I stand in the dark, lukewarm drizzle of the bus stop for an entire hour, scouring the avenue for the elusive squared-off blue numbers of the bus which seems as though it will never appear; as I perch uncomfortably on the plastic bar in the centre for want of a seat, holding on to a post for support with a tense, tired arm at full stretch; as I finally arrive at the milonga and cheek-kiss and exchange mumbled names with a dozen strangers at the long table (this will be our only interaction of the evening); as I sit waiting through an interminable series of indecipherable announcements delivered in the harsh, distorted shout of a poor-quality microphone over an echoey sound system; as I listen to the little flurries of clapping as the organizer acknowledges an endless number of professional dancers, milonga organizers and other minor celebrities of our little tango world whose presence here tonight is to be applauded in brief, desultory bursts; as I perch up high in the bleachers like a sports fan, watching the performer’s precisely flicking feet in their lovely mint-green sandals. I want to dance. Now, at last, after another speech which would surely tire the patience of Job and which sounds as though it were coming from amid the dank stalagmites of a deep cave, the milonga is about to continue.  A friend and I are exchanging impatient glances as the familiar, hypnotic repetitions of the cortina sound. I sit on the edge of my seat, feeling the heels of my tango sandals against the hard floor, ready to leap up in response to a cabeceo. But, with deep disappointment, I hear the opening metallic swish of an old-fashioned big band — it is time for the customary tanda of swing. It has been more than three hours since I spritzed my wrists with perfume, slung my double-pouched shoe bag over my shoulder and left my flat for the milonga and I haven’t been out on the dance floor yet.

I pull myself awkwardly back in my chair to make room for a table-wide toast to which I have not been invited, as people stretch past me to clink wine glasses. I feel alone in a city of strangers. I want to dance all the more because I am pensive tonight: tense with unvoiced personal anxieties, achey with unspoken emotions. But, tonight, dances will be a relative scarcity.

I would like to watch the beautiful young professional couples translate the rather tinny sound of this music into the smooth somatic language of tango salón, but my view of the floor is blocked by the crowd at my table. I can just make out the smooth sailing of the dancers’ torsos, the men handsome dandies in their dapper suits, the women in glossy, strappy dresses, their long dark hair pulled away from their lovely faces in French plaits, twists and buns. I watch them approach and recede from each other as they move elastically between open and close embrace, dipping and rising in paradas, progressing around the floor in overlapping circles, as if tracing around the cut-out of a round stencil with their bodies, like a parent creating a nursery wall mural.

But now the opening notes of a punchy Tanturi-Castillo number are sounding and I spot a friend craning his head above his table mates from far across the room. I love the romance of the long-distance cabeceo. Magically — over and around and through the many intervening bodies — his gaze meets mine and I know at once that that nod is my signal and leap happily, eagerly to my feet and squidge my way through to the edge of the floor (waiting for him to collect me at my seat would take far too long in this huge, crowded sports hall).

And now, at last, I am falling down: down, down, down through the rabbit hole, in the company of this skinny-legged March hare. I am no longer thinking about myself, pacing around in my own troubled head. Instead, my reflection is dissolving, the mirror has evaporated into a fine, silvery mist and I step through. This is another world. Like a reader absorbed in a compelling novel, my feelings are no longer my own. Instead, I am carried along by the narrative of the tango: empathising, identifying and responding to the emotions in Castillo’s rough-edged, nasal voice and to the tale told by the bandoneons. I am not I: I am possessed. My leporine companion strides through this song with a lovely urgency. We mustn’t be late for this tea party – quick, drink this sweet, strong tea before the cups are snatched away. We are twin Red Queens, running to stand still, running for the sheer joy of motion.

Oddly, as so often in close embrace, I feel as though the front of my body has disappeared. My senses seem to shift away from the feeling of his chest in the moist wrapper of his white cotton shirt making contact with mine at the solar plexus, the mirrored curls of hands around each other. Instead, I am aware of the play of muscles in his back, which forms the edge of the magic circle which surrounds us and separates us from the outside world. It is the boundary, the skin not of the individual, but of the couple. I am not focused on touching or feeling for its own sake, for the sensual pleasures it can bring, but on communication. I am intent on the message, not the medium, in the same way as, when he talks, I hear — but do not dwell upon — his clipped, lispy peninsular accent in Spanish, focusing instead on the content of what is being said, the words which the voice transmits. In tango, the body is a message bearer, the movement a declarative speech act. I hereby take this tanda.

I wish it were not customary to exchange small talk between songs. I don’t want to break the spell, to return to real life. We squeeze each other for a moment at the close of each number, reluctant to end the experience, cheekbones lifting in a grin, little, brief mmm noises escaping from a happy purring place deep within — or is this just my response? I cannot even tell. I am pleased that he says little between tracks, that he doesn’t flirt or make chit chat, that he lets me grasp him in the embrace again as soon as the floor conditions permit, making the most of our brief time with this music.

But, even so, the experience is over all too soon. The hated fake jollity of the cortina is now sounding in my ears: like an alarm clock waking me from a beautiful dream. My Cheshire cat smile hangs in the air on its own for a moment, the last thing to fade. I leave Alice behind and return, reluctantly, to me.

Cabeceo cruising

For Goran, who was there to witness it

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!

It’s always carnival

Outside, on Avenida Corrientes, a beglittered, bespangled throng is approaching from several blocks away. I hear the gradual crescendo of the loud pulse of drums, can just make out the bouncy, jerky, hip swinging movements of their dance and know that fountains of foamy white spray are arching through the air and soaking spectators: the Dionysian ejaculations of this festival of misrule. Sweat, sour Quilmes beer, dense humidity in the rain-pregnant February air and soapy water are the liquids of this festival and its sounds are relentless drum beats — that, if they were nearer, would make my temples ache and my heart thump with uncomfortable sympathy deep in my chest — and random piercing whistles. But, as we climb the stairs of El Beso, receive our square paper scraps of raffle tickets and pick out milky chewy sweets from their raffia basket, our ears are lulled by the smooth sound of tango. This is our celebration: in this familiar first floor room with its wall of swirly, multicoloured murals; its lamps hung festively with beaded baubles like dangly earrings; its shiny mirrors; its velvety floor-length curtains cut from the fabric of a drag queen’s lounge act cocktail gown; its rich, gaudy moss green and Indian red paints, its mustard tablecloths falling in folds like the skirts of peasant costumes. It’s always carnival.

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.

Dancing it

I feel a few droplets of sweat trickling down over my back inside my T-shirt and a nagging itchiness at my ankle from a recent mosquito bite. Our teacher’s calm, very deep and resonant voice carries over the intermittent buzz of traffic from Avenida Córdoba and the whirring of a shiny silver free-standing fan. This is the part of my contemporary dance class that I love: the music is hypnotically slow and I can really focus on each movement. The human arm, I muse, is so exquisitely long at full stretch, so beautifully expressive as we hinge and twirl its triple joints of wrist, elbow and shoulder.

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.

Good vibrations

I love the faded grandeur of this venue, with its glass awning, the Roman pillars flagging the doorway and the broad sweep of its staircase. And it is atmospherically crowded tonight, as the milonga is celebrating its anniversary. Striped slivers of a triple-layered chocolate and dulce de leche cake, topped with stiff peaks of meringue — sickly sweet to the taste — are being distributed on napkins. And the floor is full for this rhythmic, testosterone-laden Tanturi-Castillo tanda. Even with my eyes closed, I can feel which moves, which sudden changes of direction are panic responses to the unpredictable gambits of the bulky leader in front of us, who is partial to taking several lumbering back steps against the line of dance with shocking suddenness.

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.

The loneliness of the long-distance dancer

“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.

¿Bailarín compadrito?

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.

Leaving a trace

With a soft, pitty-patty maternal gesture, I dust his slimy left palm with baby powder. It is a sticky, rain-pregnant, grey and gloopy 39°C (102°F) outside. His forehead is dotted with tiny pearls of perspiration, as if the rain which hangs heavily in the outside air were seeking a means of escape, beading up through our pores. My two fans, whirring noisily at full power, can only shove the sluggish air around, like wooden spoons stirring thick, bubbly porridge. I slip a thin black and gold disc of D’Arienzo into the CD player at his request and now we are dancing.

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.