“Every work of art is an uncommitted crime;” every tanda of tango is an unhappened love affair.
每件藝術品皆未犯之罪；每曲探戈皆未戀之情。
Dressed in boots and jeans, with a large black shoulder bag hiding my treasure of the night, I parked the borrowed Dutch bike in front of a protestant church embedded in a quiet Amsterdam neighborhood, its silent reflections shining in a small canal. Two local pedestrians passed behind me on the street. And suddenly, they were drawn to the church gate and yelled in surprise. The Dutch that escaped their mouths sounded like sonorous bubbles that burst in hissing. I guessed as much what they must be saying: “Holy ##, they are dancing in the church!”
Yes, De Duif – the Dove – traditionally hosts the last evening milonga for the TangoMagia festival, Amsterdam, a whole week event before the New Year. With a mature-looking Jesus in golden halo and scarlet robe spreading his hands awkwardly from his shoulders in blessing, the wooden gates were thrown open, revealing a second glass gate, through which shone brilliantly-lit chandeliers, their reflections on waxed wooden floors, women’s bare shoulders, flying skirts, and their bejeweled long necks, and a DJ station perched brazenly to the right side of the altar, where on a righteous service the priest should be bestowing his sermons onto a flock of docile lambs. Now the lambs were dancing, in paired close embraces, to the sermon of Di Sarli, Biagi, D’Arienzo, and company. A big grin widened across my face as I bounced up the stairs. After breezily waving my milonga ticket to the counter, checking in my coat, hugging a few of my favorite leaders, I waited for a break of the music and waltzed by the edge of dancing couples to the cellar bathroom below the altar, stopping only to steal a photo of a forlorn-looking Maria holding the Baby standing atop the staircase, in front of whom a woman was changing her shoes, oblivious to the precinct holiness. A few minutes later, I emerged in a sheer teal dress with the lower back bare, matched with long tresses of earrings and a silver pair of Comme Il Faut heels.
Dancing in a church was my sacrilegious dream coming true. An atheist (or agnostic, if pressed to be absolutely logical), I am always fascinated by religious spaces. I speak in subdued breath in churches and temples, walk in awe of the imposing magnificence around me, and meditate in reverence to honor the men and women of the past who did such great deeds to inspire other men and women to their best selves. Yet, walking across those perfectly lacquered or waxed or marbled floors, I often fantasize swooping across them in the smoldering embrace of a charming leader, to a very different music than the solemn Handel. Now, a fantasy came true.
In the break of dances I glanced at a medium-sized, youngish middle-aged Dutch man among the crowd, wearing a black shirt with a big, shiny holy cross embroidered to his left chest. A friend told me that was a priest. Another fantasy came to me: perhaps, if Pope Francis was an erstwhile aficionado of the tango, a tango-dancing priest from Amsterdam may one day become the Pope?
Or he doesn’t need that, as tango itself is a religion. It is small wonder that many recent converts talk of their discovery of tango with such a passion as if it saves their souls. My feet tapped to the enchanting beats of D’Arienzo in freedom and in alliance with the sisters and brothers around me, like a collective prayer.
“Eine Raupe sitzt in der Sonne auf einem betauten Blatt ohne zu essen aber die Sonne zu genießen.” (“A caterpillar sits in the sun on a dewy leaf not to eat but to enjoy the sunshine.”)
So describes a newly acquainted friend of my presence on a festival.
That beautiful little poem makes me smile. More than ten years ago, a college roommate also said of me: “You’re like a cicada, you know, living on the dew” – in Chinese folk legend, cicadas drink the wind and dine on dew. It is somehow soothing to hear oneself being described in similar metaphors after so many years, by such different people, under drastically different circumstances.
I always live on the edge of epiphanies. It creates a strange tension between the head-in-the-clouds look on the surface and the intensity palpitating inside. And the perpetual sense of unbelonging chases me everywhere.
But on the floor of Wuppertal, perhaps just when this friend made his observation of me, while I was observing the crowd, it suddenly dawned on me that tango was about belonging – belonging to this moment, belonging to this embrace, belonging to your current self.
And only then, the caterpillar becomes a butterfly.
So I smiled to an invitation and fluttered with silky wings, in the embrace that carried me like a breeze. And when the music stopped, I became a pensive caterpillar again, sitting in the afternoon sunshine.
Humans are born to love and to be loved: without the love of our parents we won’t survive; without the love for beauty and for knowledge we won’t grow. Love breeds interdependence: our happiness relies on the well-being of the beloved and on maintaining an intimate relationship with it. Love inevitably leads to the sense of loss: objects wear; parents die; a romance turns into melodrama; or, in the rare (if not nonexistent) cases of unflagging passion through life, death will be the ultimate deal-breaker. The strongest love forebodes the cruelest heart-break.
Buddhism therefore preaches the doctrine of non-attachment. A Zen master, we are told, trains his/her heart to become a clear pond, which reflects the flow of the ten thousand phenomena without disturbing its own tranquility. Love would happen; love would fail. We should let it rise and dissipate like clouds in the sky.
This version of love resembles the model of tango. We are connected to a partner only for the short interval of a song. When the music stops, we kiss each other’s cheeks and remain perfect strangers. We are not attached to a single partner, since what we love is not this particular person, but the dance per se.
Yet this appealing model is flawed. It is in the natural order of things for a lover to be attached to the existence (and availability) of the beloved. A pond reflecting the passing clouds is not in love, since they do not enter an interactive relation. The consequential loss and sadness become then a necessary part of the contract that we have signed with life. Refusing to be attached reveals in effect a fear for loss. Such a negative psychological motivation problematizes the choice. Perhaps it is just rationalized cowardice.
Tango is a metaphor for relations, which cannot replace genuine human relations. We may fall in love with tango, and may fall in love through tango. These remain two very different things. The truly brave steps forward to break the unspoken boundary isolating the two fiercely atomized modern individuals. As long as we still want life and love, we must brace ourselves for the loss of both.
I remember how tough it was at milongas, for school-girls like me, sitting in a free-economy marketplace that was the City. I could not choose. I was chosen, often by older male who were eternal “intermediates.” They led me to series of ganchos and boleos – per force, if necessary. I was keenly aware of my enslavement, as I was bound by a tango passion, not free in choice and not free in movement.
My fellow dancers, sound familiar? Except for some lucky few, we all go through this tormenting phase of being beginners, begging for mana. We are driven by a belief that greater tango power leads to greater tango freedom. In terms inspired by Isaiah Berlin: it’s in the positive freedom of being free to choose: we dance with people we want, instead of waiting to be chosen; it’s in the passive freedom of being free from encumbrance: we can move with elegance and grace, regardless with whom and where. To reach that state of bliss we grind our teeth and practice ever harder.
Yet the case is never so easy. Tango is an interactive dance. I sometimes see fairly good dancers, men or women, prefer to sit by the side and do not engage in cabeceos with strangers, afraid of refusal: they feel not confident enough to cabeceo the best dancers, and feel condescending to dance with lesser ones. As a result they just chat and dance with friends they know. They declare to be perfectly happy with that. Which is fine, but they are missing the point. Being free from encumbrance does not mean denying the very existence of encumbrance and hiding in your safe zone. One goes forward only by acknowledging one’s vulnerability. There is no journey without exposing oneself to hazards.
I also see rather good dancers, intoxicated by their power of choice, their ego visibly ballooning with the frustrated, longing glances that are secretly casted over them from all angles. Yet they are equally missing the point: if one’s sense of freedom comes solely from the exercise of choice, then it is also dependent upon others’ adulation. In other words, if it is given, it can be taken away.
There are also very good dancers who increasingly settle in their comfort zone. They only dance to a certain style of music and a certain type of partners. They are the kings and queens within a nutshell.
True tango freedom comes from the submerging and sublimating experience with the dance and with your partner. It comes from within, by embracing your true self, with all its power and weakness, and is shared with an intelligent, beautiful human being held close to your heartbeat. It is not perfect; it quite often must be compromised for your partner and for the context – other dancers around, who have an equal claim for freedom; a strange rhythm or beat, which demands your attentive listening. By opening up, acknowledging our vulnerability, fallibility, and interdependence, this dance may be becoming free.
Sometimes I genuinely wonder if any other social dance creates a migratory flock like the tango people. We rush across the European continent for weekend events, workshops, festivals, marathons. We fly to Argentina, the southern tip of the globe, just to dance in those sometimes sultry, seedy milongas. Back in the States we drove or rode to the City on weekends like a bunch of schoolgirls that we were, giddy for a tango escape into the huge variety of human specimen. Now wherever I travel to for serious business, I will make sure to pack a few flimsy dresses and matching stringy shoes. And when I pick my destinations the local milonga quality and date are meticulously checked out, pre-determining whether I would like this place or not.
And since tango is a relatively rarified hobby with a small, but fanatic, group of practitioners, you end up with numerous, brief tango encounters. The dominant majority of these 20-minute partners will be quickly forgotten. But sometimes the immediate connection was so beautiful that those tandas just stay in your mind, being relived and re-relished, for perhaps years to come.
Yet the world is immense. Like drops of water we are lost in an ocean of mankind. Without tango we may never have met. When I think about that, I no longer lament for the brevity of the encounter.
Every genuine tango dancer, at least once or twice in his or her career, must have pondered over this question: should I really devote so much time for tango? Is it worth it? Or, in the case of a busy schedule or a jealous spouse: tango or work? Tango or family?
These are false choices. Life is not lived in duality – if lived at all, and not utterly sold for gain.
Tango is a necessity since man must dance. In primordial times our ancestors danced on tribal sacrifices to express their devotion toward gods and spirits. Dance therefore marked a ritual space in which movements were no longer quotidian or functional. Instead, they possessed aesthetic forms that claimed the rights to be viewed and further were encoded with meaning. They unified members of the tribe in a collective harmony, since they and only they danced the same language and understood it as well. Eventually, there is tango. In the ritual space called a “milonga,” man and woman embrace, breaking the social boundaries separating two bodies that do not, could not, or would not otherwise engage. They are ritual brothers and sisters. They move in trained spontaneity. Such training sets a distinction between the uninitiated and the initiated, and further establishes an invisible meritocratic hierarchy among the practitioners. It resembles, so to speak, a Catholic church with no pope, but many cardinals and bishops with their sleek hair and sinewy bodies.
And there are self-styled mavericks and revolutionaries too. Their unaligned legs, askance heads, and frenzied steps betray a passion that wants to break the silent, solemn precepts. For them, there is no choice either: tango is their only license of living; the rest is pretense.
And I? I live in between.
I’ve been trying to write a blog post “Power, Trust, Grace” in the last few days, but found myself unable to. True tango power comes from the stamina to reduce external flamboyance and to feel, internally, one’s own axis of existence. I am not there yet. Not quite. So instead, let me talk about the Tango Eros.
Hollywood has successfully sensationalized the erotic image of tango. Little black bonnets, hot red lips, cigar smoke, naked backs and legs, and, of course, that unexplainable, eternal stem of rose, its ownership changing from clenched white teeth to clenched white teeth. Even spicier when it comes with guns and espionage! (Think of True Lies [1994] and Mr. and Mrs. Smith [2005].) The genuine connection in no-movement no one cares. The audience enjoys a vertical love-making. In Shall We Dance (2004), Jennifer Lopez’s breasts rose and fell like a sucking cub from a lady-lead tango dance with the married handsome Richard Gere. Their bodies, glistening in a fine membrane of sweat, were wrapped in the soft-glow of golden lights. They chuckled a little in the end like exhausted lovers do.
True tango dancers avert tango shows – at least not the type targeting the general public. In no other dance there exists such a huge gap between the tonsured and the laity. For us monks in the monastery of tango, the Tango Eros is not erotic. It’s a hungry spirit.
At times I find myself longing for the embrace of some ones with whom I shared particularly beautiful tandas with. The dizzy feeling of moving in perfect symphony to the music, marking syncopation with little freezes, ornamenting a string of rapid notes with small steps that stirred ripples on the surface of a lake, and waltzing across the floor like two flying cranes in an intricately entangled courting ritual. The embrace does not break between numbers and we hold each other in stillness after the music stops.
Eros flies where there is this constant yearning for beauty, unity, and perfection. In Plato’s Symposium, Socrates retold a story of Eros that he heard from a woman, Diotima. His mother is Need, his father is Source. As a result Eros was born as a beggarly and cunning daemon, commuting between heaven and earth, forever seeking the Beauty. Yearning breeds infliction and pain. Its desire cannot be satiated. Its ultimate end lies just beyond reach. The Tango Eros, thus understood, symbolizes an eternal hunger.
(photo: on the New York Harbor deck below the Brooklyn Bridge)
Yes, I have long been a foreigner. But perhaps it is more precise to call myself an étrangère – a “stranger.” A “foreigner” implies a perspective of the “locals” or “natives”; a “stranger,” however, is someone “estranged” from one’s native habitat, by force or by choice. One can be a stranger on one’s fatherland. Les étrangers are people dreaming of and seeking a hearth. There are those dancing few who find it in tango.
On the tango floors of New York, many foreigners dance: Chinese, Koreans, Japanese, Indians, Germans, Russians, Romanians, Turks, Columbians, Venezuelans, and of course, Argentinians too. Many Argentinians I knew there began to dance tango only when they were in the US of A, since it reminded them of a familiar scene at home, where papa and mama clutch each other and move to the outdated beats from the last century. For the alien inhabitants in a monstrous metropolitan, tango provides a pseudo sense of intimacy. You hold a fellow stranger so closely that you can even hear her heartbeat; you move with such harmony that she follows like an echo or a shadow of your thoughts – with the sure certainty that at the end of the dance each safely parts and disappears. They gather and dissipate like swirling, fallen flower petals carried by a gust of wind.
Perhaps it was because of New York, that sense of rootlessness and unbelongingness is in my mind deeply associated with this dance. Whenever I say “tango,” the word conjures up a magic image of a people wandering, meandering, waltzing, endlessly and solemnly toward twilight, in each other’s arms.
Tango is their gypsy ballet.
Internet offers a virtual confession booth, which is a well-studied fact. What we feel hard to tell to close friends, we confide to perfect strangers in chat-rooms and on blogs. Being an atheist (I believe in atheism, though agnosticism would be more logical), I have no priest to tell. So here I am, ready to part with the fear, shame, and doubt on and by the tango floor pent up in the last few years.
I have ugly legs, as my long-legged mother always said. Ever since I was a child she dressed me in long skirts and wide pants, so as to cover up my natural deficiency. When I was twelve, I had a golden skirt so pretty that I occasionally dared it despite its knee-length. It was a bit worn two years later and mother gave it to a countryside cousin. In college I began to keep long hair. And long dresses. I walked through the season of blossom like a phantom of melancholy. I locked myself up in the boudoir of romantic novels and classical poetry.
When I started to learn tango in the brightly lit Carls A Field Center, the biggest fear was about my legs. Should I wear dresses above the knees? I eventually did, and braved skinny jeans in my daily life too. Then my teachers began to tell me that I too often stepped on the outer sides of my feet and my knees didn’t close. I nodded but thought: oh it’s because my legs are not straight. I overcorrected. I stepped on the extreme inside of my feet and kept my knees extended so as to minimize their distance as much as possible, and tried to remain in control. Then I was criticized for being stiff and not using my whole feet. I insisted my overcorrection. Too often beautiful people don’t know the extent a person with natural deficiency needs to go!
And of course there were those necessary harassments, monkey tricks, and rejections a beginner went through. When you outgrew some ancient leaders who love young meat, you must resign to vegetate in frustration by the floor, watching fantastic people dancing too. And when you did dance, you worked your legs so hard that, even when you were laughing, at the back of your head you knew that you were making a fool of yourself. Superior dancers were looking in amusement and in disapproval. You thought in desperation: but that’s my limit! Maybe I should just give up tango. A monastery is where I belong.
Even though I did begin to dance better and to receive compliments, such feelings never went away. Worse: the deeper I sink into the habit of tango, the more I doubt if such time and effort should be better spent on worthier projects, such as an overdue article, a novel, reading Kant, or, let’s say, learning piano. I realize that it’s the typical struggle of an addict.
Yet I live in small epiphanies, one at a time. And 2013 is a year of small epiphanies.
The first came in Budapest, New Year. I begged to have a private lesson with Mariana and Dimitri, right before their performance in the milonga. They gracefully agreed. When Mariana, a ballerina with slender limbs, told me to close my knees, I blurted out: but I don’t have straight legs! Somehow they started laughing. Dimitri pulled up his pants and showed me his legs: he’s bowlegged! And he was the champion of Latin dance in Greece! So astonished, I laughed too. Somehow all these years of anxiety on my body-type evaporated. It’s not about the body-type. It’s all about the technique. And yes, it’s high time to relax, baby.
Mariana taught me to think of the extension of my legs from the diaphragm, put my heels on the floor, and walk like a proud ballerina. It was the beginning of my departure from the tanguera complex of negativity. The following enlightenments on technicality in Buenos Aires I need not tell. In Salon Canning, I even mastered the art of cabeceo – a deep look into another person’s eyes to show your interest in dancing with him, an exercise that demands brazen confidence. It was not natural to me. But when I finally conquered the fear of a rejection to do so, a miracle happened: that wonderful leader leaning on the bar grinned and nodded back.
Another epiphany was the moment I finally told my “folks” that I danced tango. Tango had been a secret that I kept from my professional circle for years. The sexually overcharged image of tango doesn’t fit into the puritanical academia. I wouldn’t be taken seriously if I let people know my moonlighting as a tanguera. Yet on my way to Argentina I visited my alma mater and was obliged to tell the purpose of this journey with stamina. My professors who so far had only known me as an earnest student of poetry and philosophy were surprised – but with pleasant curiosity, not with the condemnation or disapproval that I had feared. For a brief moment I felt liberated: the two halves of me finally joined.
I still separate two facebook groups and make sure that tango-related content is only viewable by “the tango people.” We are a secret cult, with shibboleth and a set of elaborated liturgy. Only people in our church shall know that tango is about breaking boundaries – regional, cultural, and physical. (Oh yes, and that’s why dancers who only dance with people from their community amuse and annoy me.) Perhaps I will never become a Zen-master in tango, wearing an air of superior wisdom. Nor do I want to. But I will try to let go: trust the person dancing with me; trust my body to be its tranquil and graceful self.
P.S. This blog seems to have incurred some misunderstanding among my friends. But you don’t have ugly legs, they protested. Perhaps. Maybe. But this blog is about self-perception, not about the “truth” – which is relative. I also always consider myself a medium-size woman of medium height, though scientific measuring always tells me wrong.
I developed that complex of physical inferiority since when I was a teenager mother had been hard trying to cover up my legs with her fashion choice. Of course she didn’t mean to shame me. She would be mortified if she could read this blog. It’s just the way Chinese women dress: they cover up their sub-ideal body parts. Swimming suits sold in China are mostly one-piece with layers of ruffles. My mom still covers her collar bones because they are too bare and her upper arms because they are too thick. Neither is true. When I first came to America, I was shocked to see girls sporting tight T-shirts and skinny jeans that, to put it mildly, reveal their sizes. Yet what confidence! And it was beautiful. I began to embrace my body. Nowadays I wear bikini in pool only. I still don’t consider my legs to be pretty but they are how they are, and it’s just the truth of me. The fact that I can say it aloud means that I have already – if not completely, then largely – put the baggage of fear, shame, and doubt behind. And this blog is really about liberation – a keynote that somehow gets lost in translation. I will proceed in my next blog to discuss “power, trust, and grace.”
A Caterpillar's Tango Diary 