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.

Why dance? (1)

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

Intimacy and beauty

Tango has waited for me at thirty, confirming Troilo's prediction. And it has been, for the past three years, the matrix of my life, structuring it beyond reasonabe. Why tango, they sometimes ask me, and the best answer I come up with is that tango is a unique blend of intimacy and beauty, like I have not encountered elsewhere, never so intense and reliable. Perhaps, making music with somebody else - a violin and a piano - can be as intimate and beautiful as dancing tango; this is out of my reach. A few conversations have been like that - but these are even less reproducible than "tango moments".

But, unlike music and conversations, enjoying tango at its fullest calls for a kind of basic moral ability which I believe is itself elusive: to accept, perhaps even to love, people, for what they are at a particular moment. There is no way you can dance tango and ignore your partners, they are too close and you are too dependent on them as they make your dance possible. Sometimes I try to do the ignoring, ready to pay the price of a mechanical dance, but I believe not even then it is possible to entirely shun knowledge of the other.

This tender acceptance can perhaps be cultivated, but there is nothing to guarantee it. Sometimes I become misanthropic.

What hooked me to tango at first was its most obvious and glowing side, the intimacy. But what keeps me going is beauty.

Memories from my first encounter with tango

Dancing, the life of my body. I am in his arms and my senses are slowly retreating from the world. At last I cease hearing anything: I do not hear the music because the music is now within me, within us, in the moving connection of our bodies. I do not see him – he is too close; I see nothing and because I do not need them anymore, I eventually close my eyes. We are moving like two blind people. At first, I feel the skin of his neck, the nakedness of his foot, his hand gliding on my back, but these sensations disappear gradually. The limits between us become irrelevant, like the limit between the mouth and the nose, or between the breast and the chest – and are thus increasingly difficult to perceive. I am sinking into myself, now it is a different myself, entirely surrounded by his-myself, tenderly separating me from the rest of the universe. There is only one event within my new self: the dancing.