DANZ QUARTERLY No 2 December 2005
The Interior World of Tango
By Francesca Horsley
Tango is a dichotomy
It is unmistakably a dance of passion. The couple dance joined at the head; their cheeks or foreheads touching. She, in a red dress with a slit revealing her lithe, shapely but sharply focussed legs and he, slightly tilting forwards and suave in his suit, manfully guiding and sliding her round the dance floor.
It is a dance of introspection. Invisible, the woman and the man engage in a contained but telling conversation. Body to body, personality to personality they give and take from each other. With one ear on the music and the other attuned to their individual chemistry, the shape of the dance is communicated in their sensations and imaginations, indiscernible across the dance floor.
Over Labour Weekend the very popular Lan Airlines International Grand Tango Congress of New Zealand was held in Auckland. Tango aficionados gathered to take part in milongas, workshops, competitions, performances and balls that make up its heady world. Nowadays we are used to communication at a distance through emails and the web; it is extraordinary that so many 21st century couples are as keen to clinch as close as their predecessors in Buenos Aires a century ago.
To guide them through the weekend a number of tango experts from Argentina and America were on hand: Claudia Codega, Esteban Moreno, Cecilia Gonzalez, The Argentinian Gauchos and Moti-Moses Buchboot.
Cecilia and Moti spoke about how they came to tango and their experience of the dance. Although both from very different backgrounds and having danced together only a handful of times, they were wonderfully in tune on the dance floor and in many instances harmonious in their reading of the dance.
When Cecilia came to Buenos Aires as a young woman from her home in the south of Argentina she thought tango was dead and the composers long gone. Trained in ballet and contemporary dance, she discovered the underground world of tango in the early ‘90s and began to lead a double life. “It was like going into the tunnel of time. I had my life with my friends and work and these dancers for me were very weird - dressed in suits, different people with different attitudes.”
Hooked, Cecilia began dancing as much as she could. In ‘96 she started working professionally, teaching and dancing - by then tango was very popular in Buenos Aires, and spreading worldwide. Cecilia now travels internationally, conducting workshops and festivals. “Tango is part of my life and I cannot imagine myself without it.”
Growing up in Israel, Moti learnt martial arts; dance was not acceptable for a young man in its macho society. After completing military service he emigrated to the US, and began classes – ballet, African, Brazilian and contemporary. One day a woman suggested he would look good at tango.
“I thought yes! I checked it out but it wasn’t love at first sight. There was a studio near my home so I could walk to it.” But after attending a tango festival, he danced daily for the next six years.
For a year and a half he took classes. His teacher told him that the dance was not about steps, but about finding your own way to move within the dance. “It clicked; I realised that it’s not about learning another pattern, steps or whatever. At first I went to milongas socially and danced with anybody to test my lead, to see if I could get them to do this or that. Later on I realised that to advance further I needed to work with people who were more advanced. So, most of my learning is from dancing.”
While both would agree it is important to look good on the dance floor, what is more important is the internal dialogue between partners and the music.
Moti: “Tango has two sides to it: the external where we seek to flow from one move to the other with a partner and still look good. However between you and your partner there is an interchange of energy. One of the most important parts of the dance is the music; this evokes nostalgia - this emotional response creates an energy that connects you to your partner. What you are seeking is to blend this energy or conversation, energetically. When I dance the music creates colours for me and I try to find my partner’s colours so I can blend them. It changes between one person and the next because we don’t feel the same and we react to the music differently. Some people will create a block which won’t allow you to connect to them.”
Cecilia: “For me I try to know the other person. Through contact you have a lot of information – you can feel if a person feels shy or very confident. The music creates emotions and memories and they change you, and your partner, who receives this message. So you are listening to your partner and sending messages at the same time. It is very intense. Sometimes you don’t receive or send any message at all and the dance becomes very boring, empty. One day you can have an incredible dance because you are connected in the same frequency - on the other day, you don’t have it. There are a lot of things going on: the human being you face is complex - and you too, so it is very important to be sensitive.”
Moti: “It’s rare but I have experienced group syncopation - maybe two or three times I felt I wasn’t just dancing with my partner, I was dancing with everybody else in room. You didn’t need to look at them but you felt the music together.”
Both Moti and Cecilia are drawn to the nostalgic music which conjures up melancholy images.
Moti: The nostalgia draws you in - this longing for something. It is like an actor, you create an emotional release through the dance and it’s a way to explore your emotions. Personally I am drawn to the darker side of life. I also sing and I tend to pick up songs that are slower, deeper, more penetrating.”
Cecilia: “Sometimes I feel like I am entering into an aftermath of war; they are like memories but they’re not mine. But there are also tangos and milangos that are cheerful. Some people select who to dance with depending on the music – because the flavour of music suits a particular personality.”
In tango the different roles of the man and woman can appear old-fashioned, however
Cecilia compared it to a game, where one is kicking the ball and the other catching.
Cecilia: “This lead and follow is an English expression. In Argentina we say the man and the woman. It is a quality - a role. The best idea is that we move together when we dance. So he will initiate the movement and I will take that movement, I will go with it into my own dance. This will motivate his dance. It is not that I am just doing the correct thing. It’s not one way and then the other, it’s not so obvious. It may be necessary at the beginning to understand the rules, but once learnt, you both dance at the same time. The important thing is to be together.”
Moti: “Yes - the guy initiates the movement but then I have to listen to what she is saying by moving and respond accordingly. She responds to me and it goes back and forth. I might have a little more control of the musicality but I am concerned for my partner – and try really hard not to block anything. I may feel that she needs to express herself, so I will slow down, give her the chance to respond to the music or aesthetically by doing embellishments for instance. I do contact improvisation and it is very similar in the way you listen to your partner and how you react to them.”
Cecilia: "For an advanced dancer, if your partner expects you to dance in a certain way, it’s limiting. It doesn’t matter if you don’t do exactly what is expected. You take their move and do something with it. That’s dancing – and improvising. For the man another woman would do it in a different way, so this is interesting for him to see how each woman answers his own dance. This changes his dance.”
Moti and Cecilia agree that tango can be either a simple social dance or an absorbing, complex one.
Cecilia: “Some people are interested in it as a social dance - with three or four moves they can dance socially; they don’t want more, they enjoy it a lot. Others need more – and there is always more.”
Moti: “The complexity really interests and draws me. So far there seems almost no end to it - you figure out one thing, and you keep dancing and suddenly your body does something that you have never thought about.”
Cecilia: “Or you can just decide to work on the musicality and you will find another world with no end. The more you know, the more you can appreciate it.”
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