It is deeply sexist. But potentially reclaimable as the vestige of another time. The worst of tango’s trespasses against our sex are much more recent, the convention having long outlived its raison d’être. Nowadays, men lead because that’s how it’s done—by force of habit, rather than some deep and decorous respect, however condescending. This isn’t true everywhere; there is a thriving queer tango community, where all gender lines are arbitrary and dancers are free to choose their roles—often swapping lead for follow in a single dance. Anyone, dressed up any way they like, can lead whomever else, be they gay, straight, bisexual, transgender, genderfluid, queer, or questioning, be they androgynous, butch, femme, or a little of all three. All avenues are open to expression. There are heroic professionals out there. Silvina Valz taking the lead in vest and flats or strappy heels. Leaders like Berlin’s Astrid Weiske in her silken tailored shirts. Rebecca Shulman and Brigitta Winkler, who formed an all-lady tango company called Tango Mujer. Martin and Maurizio. And all the others who make tango a better, freer art, safe for everyone beyond the binary.
When I first signed up for tango class, I had no idea that new order existed. In my studio, there was no questioning. The men started leading on day one of Basic Section A. New followers like me had to abide their lack of skill, and improve in spite of it, until advanced enough to dance with better leaders. If followers outnumbered leaders in any given class, we sometimes had to skip a turn when changing partners, and stand between two couples, skiing in place on our own. It is the beginner’s plight that’s cruel, not following itself. Maybe everyone—of any gender—should be made to learn to follow first. For weeks, or months, or years. Just like the old days. Maybe without following, a body cannot feel the implications of the lead.
The cool girls of the Robin Thomas crowd all learned to lead, and the men to follow, albeit later on. To internalize the structure at the heart of tango, you ought to learn both roles. I once asked Robin to teach me. “Okay,” he said, and tucked himself into my arms. “Now move.” He talked me, roughly, through two steps and the cross before dismissing me to practice that until perfection. I remember feeling flat and potent on my feet, almost burdened by the possibilities. Should I move the queen’s rook or the bishop? I didn’t want the cognitive burden of the strategy, the steering. I didn’t want to think with anything but my body on the floor. I was in awe of those who did, and sought my share of lady cabeceos, reveling in their softness, their delicious skill.
While the idea of subverting the gendered orthodoxy at the heart of tango continually thrills me, I was also grateful for it. After four years of women’s college theatre, building sets and hanging lights, and binding breasts—my own and others’—to play both male and female parts, I was no stranger to the idea that we might all benefit from blurring lines. That gender needs no roles or rules. But when I came to tango, I was twenty-five and terrified of men. If I could have learned to dance with women, I might not have bothered with the other half of the adult population. Not least because I can’t imagine Astrid Weiske ever taking it upon herself to suck my toes without consent.
Though I didn’t understand why at the time, I didn’t want a choice of avenue. If I’d had one, I might still have chosen the outdated and unfair. I wanted gentleman-and-lady, he-leads-and-you-follow. I needed to choose contact with bristled cheeks and unforgiving chests, those cisgender aliens with furry forearms that felt like livestock to my untrained hands. I needed to know what a man’s touch felt like, to decide whether I liked it, to imagine how my own might feel to him. On the dance floor, at least, we could, safely, relate.
If we ignore the veil of sex that surrounds tango, what we bring to the embrace is this idealized vision of who we’d like to be inside our own private vacuums of desire and expression: our sexuality without the sex. Tango can never quite be gender neutral, but it can be gender pliant. Gender fluid. It is a game of opposition.
Take the parada. That single moment holds the key to the dynamic at the heart of tango. There is nothing there but jazz. The needle catches in the groove. The pauser has become the paused. The dance is just a circle, changing course. For every time the leader lunges forward and the follower steps backward to receive, the leader opens up an empty space, inviting occupancy. The follower, in some cases she, accepts the invitation, but the leader, in some cases he, must follow the follower, wherever she or he has moved. At the very nexus of tango technique, leading is following.
Tango is a playground of paradox. Yin and yang. Geometry and sensuality. Melodía y compás. It is violent and tender. Humble. Swaggering. Insolent and deferent. The leader and follower both are free to experiment with all the conflicts they contain. Tango is Jung’s union of opposites, and Heraclitus’s wholes and not wholes; brought together, pulled apart; sung in unison, sung in conflict; from all things one and from one all things.
Still, in every dance, there is a leader and a follower. One proposes, one decides. One tracks, and one interprets. As Silvina Valz would put it, “As much as you will find both in both, the roles should be very clear.” If not, there’s simply too much noise. “As much as they are intertwined, they need to be defined.” For better or for worse, these are the mechanics of the dance. One partner will propose “the trip,” the other will “accompany”—with all the rights and responsibilities each role entails. “And if you don’t like that aspect of this discipline?” she adds. “Don’t do it.”
Silvina takes enormous pleasure leading, but she prefers to follow. “When I lead,” she says, “I feel the freedom of the musical interpretation, one hundred percent for me.” She listens to her follower, but is wholly free to sculpt the song the way she hears it. “I am the musician,” she says, “the first one.” The follower is her instrument. Listening and moving are the same to her; both come from the music. Following is different; a leader hears the song his way, and she will hear it hers. As a follower, she listens to his listening. Sometimes a leader will have a lot to say, and on those occasions only—should he be worthy of the gesture—she may defer to his interpretation. Otherwise, she will impose her own.
Perhaps there’s something deeply masculine and feminine at the center of the dance—perhaps there isn’t. Both energies are and must be present. We all contain both, by degrees. Tango requires both. There is power and there is deference. Opposites align. Sometimes the follower goes around the leader. Sometimes the leader goes around the follower. Sometimes they go around each other.
Take Sara and Ivan. Ivan in his machismo could insist on Sara’s absolute submissiveness, but she would never stand for it. His bravado, her defiance—both are just another part of their particular conversation. When his lead becomes unclear, she tells him just what he’s done wrong. When he is snappish, she snaps back. And though Ivan is capable of all sorts of impressive footwork, Sara has the deeper understanding of the dance. She paints with movement, varying the color, quality, and quantity of light. Together with Ivan’s lightning strokes and stabs of pigment, they make art.
This is what Silvina means. The follower is not a canvas onto which her leader splashes paint. She wields a paintbrush too. The canvas is the space between them no one sees.
Because the roles had been presented to me as they were, I followed. I listened first when male beginners got to speak. Listening, however, taught me what it was I had to say. Eventually, technique taught me how to say it.
Other women come to tango more secure in what they want—some to somnambulate, some to seduce. Some to rehabilitate a broken heart. Some to use their sex and their stilettos to lord their power over men. Some to simply twirl in the dark. Still others, confident in femininity and feminism, have no need for tango; the embrace offers nothing to them and the music leaves them cold. No two women are the same.
I’d needed to fumble from one end of the spectrum to the next, then claw my way back to the middle, where I felt at home. I needed to be touched—within those safe and preestablished margins. The “woman’s role” was not a prison to me;
it set boundaries, koans for me to riddle out and, ultimately, transcend. Following gave me secret freedom. From Silvina, I took strident softness. And from Sara, sovereignty—of body and of aim. I was where I was. I was who I was. I could blame no one but myself for tossing me around. Not Peter Pan, not Enzo, not the Mogul. Not my landlord, my childhood, or my boss. Not even New York City. I bore the responsibility of living, dancing well, and putting in the work, but this was power: every step I took was mine.
The irony of following, for me, was that it forced me to take the tiller of my boat. No matter how difficult it had been to share an axis, to lean into a stranger’s close embrace, in such proximity to unfamiliar flesh, and let him (or her) move me, it had been more difficult to dig my way out of that blind reliance, to find my axis and negotiate how I might move—both coupled and alone. Alone was hard. Coupled was harder, and confusing. Within that duality, though, I got to play. I got to be demure and deranged. I got to play the shrinking violet and the violent bloom, different in every dance until I finally realized the kind of dancer—and the kind of woman—I wanted to be.
Chapter Twenty-Six
i turned twenty-seven on a cold and cloudy Friday, not quite winter. I went to an early yoga class, took myself to lunch, walked through the Village with a cappuccino. By some magic, the city smelled of woodsmoke, very faintly, and I remembered Buenos Aires, trying to conjure back a time before I learned this dance. I couldn’t. I went to a shop instead, and bought myself a dancing dress, then walked east through the gloaming to meet friends for ravioli. On the way, I bought myself a massive chocolate cake. I’d take the leftovers with me to the Uke later, to share.
The more I learned, the simpler my dance became. A leader’s touch no longer startled me. I was not afraid of men. I spoke to them and danced with them, and sought nothing in their tandas save the “supernatural joy” that all the maestros say tango inspires. I was ready for the single most important concept in my tango education.
Back when those first porteños put their arms around each other—when the lines of candombe came together into pairs, the double cylinders of waltz and foxtrot frame were welded into one pillar of touch—something special had transpired. Two bodies shared a single equilibrium. This is the contract at the heart of tango: we will make one body for the duration of this song. It is not so simple as one plus one is one. Sara was right. We do not sacrifice ourselves into the couple; we form the couple to make tango. Gloria and Rodolfo Dinzel, contributing founders of the tango renaissance, put it this way: “Between one and two, three is born.” And that is tango. Because the dance is pure improvisation, it is altogether new, unique, alive for the three minutes of a song, then it ceases to exist. Whether any given tanda is a love affair, a conversation, or an outright war, it “consummates itself in its own creation.” The canvas crumbles into nothing as the dancers part.
We know other dances by their form: a pattern of steps, the beats on which to step them—by what is being danced. But we know tango by its manner, by its hows. If you learn tango hewing to the form, you’ll miss the dance entirely. “Form,” the Dinzels say, is “produced as the dance proceeds.” The manner is the thing. And that takes two; that takes connection.
Like the fifteen Yup’ik lexemes for “snow,” or the four words for “love” in ancient Greek, there ought to be a dozen definitions of “connection.” It can refer to anything from the physical fact of fixing your chest to another’s chest and listening for cues, to Sara and Ivan’s membrane, to the idea of a particular rapport between two dancers, to being so deep in the music that the dance floor disappears, to opening your eyes after a tanda only to feel as though you’ve been asleep and dreaming in a timeless, private world. It’s the catchall that describes the best of tango—from the corporeal to the divine. Without it, at its most rudimentary, there can be no transferring of weight—and thus no dance. And with it, at its most mystical, all things are possible between two people and their bodies and the music and the floor—total communion, total melting, total flow.
Connection was a term I’d heard so often it had almost lost its meaning. But after years of dancing, connection is the well that never parches. The last source of surprise. There are parts of tango I will never access as a white woman, an American, living in this sleek and terrifying age. The muscle memory of a nation. The recollection of the movement in the blood. I did not grow up listening to tango in the living rooms of my forebears; I will always hear the music differently for that. To the extent that poetry is national, these lyrics and Lunfardo aren’t mine. They were not written for me or about me. When I dance, I borrow. Gavito once said that tango, as a dance of immigrants, has no nationality. “Its only passport is feeling, and everybody has feelings.” This is true and false. My freedom to take from tango what I need is luxury, no matter how reverent my pillaging. Maybe we are all just playing dress-up, donning our imaginary cloche hats and fedoras to walk la Calle Florida to Corrientes. Perhaps we dance and see ourselves in sepia, faded by the old-time smog of soot and steam. Or maybe we imagine we can own our tango, independent, as a purely physical pursuit. We can’t. We take one step and place ourselves in conversation with another culture—whether we are there to desecrate or pay tribute, to build something deeply personal that can never quite be ours. Connection, however, is for everyone. It cannot be exoticized, or bought or faked. It requires only honesty, humility, and willingness to let yourself be held.
I had come to tango so completely disconnected—from myself, my body, and the possibility of touch. (My mother would likely add “reality” to that list.) Now I nestled into other bodies nightly, offering my torso and my temple, my left arm, my right hand. Unflinching, as my breasts brushed against a male body, as my face fused to his. I could be held by anyone, hold anyone, and it was little more to me than shaking hands.
Which is not to say that tango had desensitized me. It deadened me, perhaps, to insecurity and inhibition, and asked me to suspend my sight and smell only to open wide my other senses and listen like a root thirsty for sun. The embrace becomes a normal act because what follows is exceptional. A kind of trance. A shared communion. The total dissolution of your differences.
Marty and I were like this, as familiar as lovers to the other’s form. I knew that certain steps would cause our knees to bonk together, or our chests to pull apart. I knew that others would unite us perfectly, at full height, and I would drape my arm around his shoulder just the way he liked, and feel his jawline tighten to a smile. This is what our bodies taught us, once they’d spoken. It was intimate, but not romantic. Stirring, but not sexual. We shared a thumping passion for the dance, great mutual affection, and respect. But just as often, our dance was ordinary. Plain connection, the kind two people need to dock themselves together and start dancing, is a necessary prerequisite of tango. The deeper kind is something else—and very rare. Silvina considered it a luxury, a fragile “magic in between both people,” wherein they read each other’s very breath. We can’t pretend that it is possible in every tanda; this magic is blind to skill, to preferred partners, to any strenuous attempt to tease it into bloom.
It is the sum of everything we seek in tango, the fifteenth lexeme, or the ideal word for love. It is what keeps us coming back. All that anguish for three minutes’ worth of joy. But too much joy—the kind that turns your body into warm salt water and makes your organs quiver and your skin blur with the light. I could count the times I’d felt it on one hand: my first volcada, the magic All-Night dream of Enzo, my last tanda in Baltimore, and a moment or two with random strangers with whom I did not exchange a single word.
Marty felt it once, with me. It was a regular RoKo night, an end-of-the-evening Di Sarli set, sung by the immortal Alberto Podestá. Right away I knew that tanda to be special because we hardly moved. It wasn’t amorous. Marty held me and we walked. Occasionally, we turned, tranquil and unflustered, like well-oiled hinges of the same enchanted door. We paused. Something was different. We did not speak between t
he songs. By the third, his eyes had glassed with tears. He will tell you that he shuddered, that he prayed I wouldn’t notice. But our embrace held steady, heavy enough to sink through quicksand, diaphanous enough to float to sky. At the end, I took one look at him and felt the instant need to vise my heart to keep from bursting. He stumbled off, and I sat out “La cumparsita.”
We speak of this occasionally. Marty says it was the first and only time his own dancing brought him to tears. It was also a gift, from him to me—that he could show me the transcendence I had wrought in him for those nine minutes, that I could cause that, I who had felt such paroxysms of grace myself, but only ever at the hands of swarthy leaders to whom I’d given so much power. I didn’t need a man to breathe the dance, to create something so beautiful and then, by rights, destroy it. For a few months, I was la bruja, the good witch of Marty Nussbaum’s tango, and I carried the dance like Di Sarli’s “sentimental reason”: como una garra, hincada en la carne viva de mi emoción. Like a talon, driven into the live meat of my soul. Though I felt a little bashful, and didn’t quite know what I’d done to earn it, for those nine minutes Marty had abandoned all the acrobatics and athleticism to which he constantly aspired, and put everything he had into a single step. “No sacada, no colgada, parada, volcada, soltada, or empanada,” Marty joked. The simpler, the better. “You can take the simple,” he said, “and sanctify it, elevate it, make it holy.” We could put down our magnifying glasses, he seemed to say. We wouldn’t need them anymore.
Marty’s magic tanda didn’t change the way I danced, but it changed me. I realized I didn’t need a leader to transform me. I was yoga-strong and tango-strong and I was writing. I started to believe that, even if I could not see why or how, I might have something to give.
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