Gateway

I saw an open door, one that I hadn’t looked at before; I went through it. I was strolling on the main commercial street of the city where I’ve been living for decades, a street that I thought I knew in every detail, but the church that I entered this morning was entirely unknown to me. Like in some returning dreams, the church had several levels, with the street one more simple and the one upstais the place where the action really was. I found myself in the middle of the New Year morning mass, it was warm and lit by candles, with music from an organon and soprana, with people kneeling, praying, one of them in deep prostration. The transition from the world of the shops and loud gregarious crowds happened without notice. 

Tango has been like this for me. This is something that many long-term dancers know: you enter a building, boring, apparently able to host to no adventures, but suddenly you hear the music; the rush and deeper breathing, you know you are in the right place, the pleasure starts mounting from the lower body to the fast-moving heart. The many undescript buildings you’d never have looked at if they hadn’t happen to be at a tango address. Remote neighbourhoods of cities you visit for some reason and when you have a free evening you start chasing the dance, neighbourhoods you’d never visit otherwise, never be aware of, even.

Tango at its happiest happens to me when I enter through its doors without any expectation, ready for whatever is waiting to unfold. When I allow myself to be kidnapped into its embrace which, with its aura of enabling rules and conventions, is the space for impossible-to-anticipate beauty and intimacy. If you are finding this today, Happy New Year! And whenever you read it, may you come across many open doors that can take you, unwarned, to the best of possible worlds.

Why dance? (2)

Tango has taught me about the gulf between appearance and reality. There, I met artists whose art remains (forever I think) unknown to all but those with whom they are embracing on music, and many ordinary people who have an extraordinary skill that nobody would guess who doesn't know their dancing selves. About five years into it, I was walking to a milonga in a foreign city; a block away from it, I walked past a man, neither short nor tall, quite large, middle aged, so grey and plain that, I told myself (why? why then?): "before he fully disappears from my visual field I will have forgotten him forever". And because of this thought I remembered him long enough to recognise him in the milonga. We danced, barely talked because he could only speak a language that I didn't. But his embrace, his gift of a structured space in which I could dance freely, how he gave me the music, how his feet always found mine on the floor, and the way he put me in unexpected places, effortlessly, imprinted this man in my memory, with longing. I had many encounters just as spectacular, each of them different from the rest.

Confusion

Because each of us finds in tango what we need, what we look for, what we are, and these things are so diverse that between them they seem to cover the entire range of human experience, I assumed that everyone must possess the ability to love tango - when given the right opportunity. I was wrong.

Birthday Waltz

Gipsying around Europe for work, I dance tango whereever I happen to spend the night - if I am lucky to be in a tango-city. Now I am in Salzburg, where milongas are few and far between, so last Thursday I ended up - by pure luck - in the most atmospheric pub of this lovely town, where apparently people who love traditional music gather every week to play their instrument, chat and party until the small hours of Friday.

I ordered a beer, noticed again thatin Austria it is still possible to smoke everywhere in public houses, and continued to watch people. Salz-burgers are easy-going and smiley, and life here has the same sweet pace I know from other cities in Mitteleuropa, no rush, as if we didn't have agendas and dead-lines, as if we were going to live forever.

Everybody was warmed up, music was flowing, when one of the organisers said that two of the local guys were celebrating their birthday ("Geburtstagskinder", they call them in Salzburg, as they do in Bavaria). Suddenly the tunes turned into waltz, and for the next half an hour the Geburtstagskinder danced in the middle of the pub, their partners changing every few minutes - and announcing it was their turn to waltz with a short clap of hands.

Later, I asked about this and it turns out it is an old-ish tradition for celebrating birthdays or other events - in this part of Austria as well as in Bavaria. It is called "Abklatschen", from the hands clapping.

Tangueras and tangueros, does this remind you of anything?

Short story

If tango is a language, or a conversation - as people often say it is - then it is not like me saying something and you replying, etc., but more like me starting with a letter, you continuing and so on until we have the whole word, and then we add another one, and another one... until we hopefully have a sentence. If we are very lucky and patient, we get to a paragraph. There are couples who dance together for a lifetime. They are the ones who bring into the world entire novels, working their way through many drafts.

Why dance? (1)

I dance, these days, in order to be better able to listen to the music. To feel part of the orchestra.

Change of perspective

Soon after I started dancing, I was amused to see how much tango is like life. Today, I sometimes note that life resembles tango, and this worries me.