Is the Tango romantic?
Maybe not so much.
“But, but, but, … it looks so romantic, so sensual, sexual.”
How it looks and how it feels are not necessarily the same thing.
I defer to my favourite quotable tanguero, Carlos Gavito (1942-2005): “When you dance with a partner you are close and the dance is very suggestive, but it is not personal … Close is what the music inspires you to become. The embrace looks personal, but what we are actually embracing is the music.”
This is perhaps a peculiar quote from someone who with Marcela Duran, headlined the steamy “Forever Tango” extravaganza for many years.* But as Gavito would be the first to point out, that was performance tango, not social dancing. It was intended to entertain, to tell a story, to infuse the dance with layers of pathos and sexual innuendo and emotional tension. “You can dance like that on the dance floor,” says Gavito, “if you want to look like a clown.”
*(Check out Tango Forever performances with Gavito and Duran on Youtube. Great entertainment.)
The Inner Dance
The intriguing element about the Tango is that it presents itself as a suitable medium for expressing and experiencing a broad range of relational dynamics. Much of this is encapsulated in the lead/ follow dynamic with improvised patterns that require sensitivity and attentiveness at all times to your partner’s positioning and energetic response. In addition, there are other subtleties such as shared or solitary axis, ornamentation, stylistic variances, open and close embrace that all add to its complexity.
But this is the mechanical structure of the dance, that which engages our bodies, what we are taught and what people see. It does not determine what the couple is feeling on the inside. It forms a container for the inner dance – for whatever emotional engagement the couple wants to infuse into their dance – but it does not determine it.
We only get out what we put in. To get more out of our dance we need to give as much attention to the inner dance – what is going on inside on a feeling level – as we do to floor craft. Real connection – the inside dance – is fluid, not structured or overt. It requires the couple to bring to the dance relational skills of attentiveness, acceptance, responsiveness, curiosity, vulnerability, creativity – the same skills that we find necessary to sustain a relationship in the real world.
Dance as Play
We should not be surprised that there is a feedback loop between how we relate on and off the dance floor. This is the same dynamic that we find in schoolyards around the world. It is called play. Dance is play. The only reason we don’t readily recognize it as such is that as adults and we take things so damn seriously.
Play is absolutely essential to learning life skills. Play teaches us the relevant skills required to master important life-lessons and tasks in a safe, low-risk environment so that when the real thing presents itself we are up for it. Play familiarizes us with the dynamics and intricacies, creates body memories and neural pathways, all the while being fun.
Structured play is called a game. Games have rules and outcomes but are not to be taken too seriously. After the game, winner or loser, you forget about it, everyone is friends again and you are off together to do something else fun. Again, something instinctive for children. Adults more easily confuse what happens in the playground (the football field, the skating rink, the dance floor) and real life.
The Intimacy Game
Tango is a highly structured game that plays at intimacy – an intimacy game. To paraphrase Gavito, it looks personal (read: intimate, sexy, sensual) but in fact is not. It only pretends to be. This is its appeal and intrigue. There is touch, closeness, sultry movement, romantic music. It all feels so edgy, so much like the real thing. But it isn’t. There is no deep emotional connection, no risk of a broken heart or betrayed confidence. There is a flirtation with all these riskee dynamics but none of the consequences.
Social etiquette in a milonga reinforces this model of play. There is to be no exchange of phone numbers, no going home with your dance partner unless you came with them. After every dance or tanda, we get to thank our dance partner with whom we were passionately in love only a moment before, walk back to our tables and forget their name, (if we ever knew it in the first place). We then instantly become engrossed in calculating who our next partner will be, or maybe whether we will order a coffee or tea.
In my beginning days on the dance floor, I mistook close embrace as a sexual overture. It felt like I was having a romantic encounter every dance. As a responsible adult, i.e., someone who had forgotten how to play, I took these feelings seriously and attempted to manage the experience: do something with it, fix it, get rid of it, (a typical male response to a feeling of any sort). My options were to get excited, fantasize, feel guilty, apologize, question my marriage. Given the fact that I would have maybe a dozen dance partners by the end of the night, the experience quickly became overwhelming: who should I be dreaming about, who should I be keeping phone numbers for, who should I be sending valentines to? I needed a social convener and a therapist just to manage my dance card.
Of course, all of this changes when we remember the Tango is a game, (as is all dance.) We get to explore what the real thing – intimacy, romance, connection – might feel like in an appropriate context, and then walk away and forget it. Or, we can revisit the feelings later in a detached setting and dissect and analyze the relational dynamics layer by layer.
Tango Mystique
Such is the mystique of Tango. It is a ruse, a deception, a tease, an intimation. It suggests much more than it reveals. It is a veil through which we peer wistfully but never pierce. We dance around the edges of the heart’s core, tracing our fingertips lightly over the laced frills of passion, caressing the silk of melancholia with our manicured technique, wrapping our arms around the power of sensuality, yearning, imagining.
But we never go inside. We remain cordoned off from the depth connection by the rules of the game.