However uncertain these days were, they were—by far—my best in tango. Some barrier had broken. Sure, I wasn’t nearly half as good at tango as the cool kids, and they were still a close-knit clique of friends with histories and jokes I’d never be a part of, but I went to their milongas and I slept in their fifth bedroom and I danced with them and they were kind. When I turned up, they greeted me with hugs, saludos to the cheek, a conversation. Edward made a new habit of treating me to sumptuous meals I could not afford, multiple-course tasting menus at places that took reservations until after ten. I wore one of my two clearance rack summer dresses over tights, and we laughed our way from amuse-bouches to mignardises. Marty and I talked through half our tandas, catching up on what we hadn’t mentioned in our emails. The New York tango community, I realized, was generous, and I was part of it. At a milonga anyway, I never lacked for company. This was my corner bar, my social club. I was a god-honest regular.
Without the trappings of accumulated stuff, ineligible men, and unfulfilling jobs, New York was kinder, too. I had hours to spend staring at the blinking cursor, and hours to dance. I danced my way to winter, into familiar sore-soled bliss. It seemed my only limitation was my body, imperfect and angular, but evolving, getting sturdier by the day. I wanted to quit my head, live only physically. Empty what I could to paper, keep the rest at peace. I stretched my arms above the yoga mat and stamped my feet into the floor. I tried to be fully present, not just on the dance floor—the owner of my axis and my every step—to walk slowly and with purpose, and to breathe. In each asana, I found new aspirations: I would be a warrior. A crow. A balanced tree. It was the same with dancing: I wanted to be great and sexless, self-sufficient. Holy and ascetic. An ecclesiastic bride of tango. I swore off men—particularly tango men (including a lanky Italian airline steward who had two dozen roses sent to me at a milonga). They were sirens trying to lure me off my boat; my mother could be right about the men and wrong about the dancing. And the dancing was the mast to which I’d lashed myself, resolving to get better, and maybe even—one day—strong.
Adam offered me a roommate discount for private lessons. I took him up on one or two, and met him at You Should Be Dancing, the daytime home of Tango Café, in the quiet of the dim and massive room. I brought us lunches from the bodega salad bar at the corner, and we sat on stools, ate half of them, then danced.
Adam was another leader in the school of less is more. He was small featured, pale and freckled, and born and raised in suburban Ohio. Like Dennis the Menace, he was all big eyes and crooked teeth and boyish mischief. He took my hand in his and led with slight and subtle movements, expecting force, expecting me to move with full intention in whatever manner he suggested. Close and open were no longer choices to be made but qualities through which the dance might pass. He reeled me in and out like fishing line—the trick being to maintain my axis—and led me to my single favorite moment in all of tango dancing: the return to pure closeness when a leader pulls you back. He invites and you accept. You reaccommodate each other and continue on in close embrace.
Adam sent me to his partner, Ciko, the former architect who’d awed me when I’d seen her dancing with Silvina Valz. Ciko was six inches shorter than I, but strong. She wore wedge sneakers with duct tape wrapped around the toe box when she taught. Watching the liquid way she moved while following, I had not expected so much steadiness or sheer might. She took me in her thin brown arms and led me, diagnosing weaknesses and teaching me to zip my core muscles like a corset. She was everything I aspired to be then: femininity and force in perfect balance.
We worked on generating power, and then we worked on smoothness. We turned and turned and turned until it felt least jarring to her, until my steps were level and my molinetes stopped careening from their circle track. “Yes,” she’d say, when I got the balance between taut and fluid right. It was our all-girl academia, and she my chosen milonguera maestra. She could tell me, with her body, how I ought to adjust mine—to make me feel how a follower should feel in a leader’s arms. “Round, round,” she’d say, breaking the stiff plane of my shoulders until my lat muscles were down and my wings curved in the embrace, as though she were a beach ball that I held. With her mismatched earrings brushing at my collarbones, she guided me. “Better . . . ,” she’d say, in her soft Turkish inflection. “That was better.” She stopped and started songs from portable speakers plugged into her phone on the floor. She gave me stretching exercises meant to loosen up the spine. At the beginning of every lesson, we rolled together, laughing, as we twisted, slumping our limbs against the dusty floor. And at the end, we hugged.
I’d like to say I was thereafter looser and more generous, making inviting circles with my two long, bony arms. Not just pushing back, but opening, to create that magic vacuum column between me and a leader wherein we might merge and beam straight up into the tango heavens. Certainly I tried. But tango study is progressive; one never ceases drilling the most basic skills.
It didn’t matter that I wasn’t great and probably never would be. I was good enough. I had a place within the hierarchy of the tango circus—somewhere beneath the gods and monsters doing aerials between the rafters of the tent, somewhere above the plebes. I stopped apologizing for every mistake.
Chapter Twenty-Five
“So what do you do?”
I was at the Brooklyn equivalent of a cocktail party; thirty or so friends-of-friends stood awkwardly in the corners of a bar roughly the size of a meat locker, clutching Sazeracs and trying to make small talk above ear-walloping music in the dark. This had always been the dreaded question. “I’m trying to act,” I’d say. And they would answer, “Well, what would I have seen you in?” And I’d say either, “Did you happen to catch the one about the circus act used car salesman? Written in verse?” Or, simply, “In an apron, in the upstairs bar at P. J. Clarke’s.” When I had a real job, it was almost worse: “I do marketing for a nonprofit,” which sounded perfectly legitimate. “Which one?” my interlocutors would ask, and I would answer, and they wouldn’t recognize the name, and I would bite my tongue to keep from saying, “That’s okay. It’s badly run by a sexist bigot and I’m only marketing coordinator because they fired everybody else and I’m afraid of confrontation.”
That evening, stumped, I stared into my drink. Good question. The short answer was: nothing at all. In the morning, I wore rubber gloves and cleaned my ex’s parents’ opulent apartment, all the while worrying I was making their lives awkward, abusing the complicated privilege of that gig—being their maid without them treating me as such. Midday, I did yoga and made breathing noises like the ocean. Afternoons, I sat deep in the library, either cramming review math for the GRE or writing and revising application essays. In the evening, I danced tango. That got an interlocutor’s attention.
“Like, professionally?”
“No.”
In my eagerness to set fire to my life, I had forgotten about cocktail parties.
Undeterred, I tunneled ever deeper into the tango tar pit—damn what anybody thought. I signed up for FeralTango, a six-month registration-only boot camp. This was hardcore technique taught by Sara and Ivan, a married couple from Zagreb and Mendoza, respectively, who focused mostly on body mechanics and the physical limitations of each student in an attempt to turn civilians without ballet training into proper dancers.
Ivan was short, slick, and pouty, but preternaturally talented—like an extremely agile mink. Sara was more professional, with an encyclopedic knowledge of anatomy. She would watch you walk around the room and scrutinize your foot bones. “You’re leaning backwards,” she would say. Or “You’re collapsing into your forward steps.” She was also perhaps the fiercest female follower I had ever seen for attitude and sheer physical power—dense and muscular, showing off the domination of her stretches, her intense control.
FeralTango was expensive—nearly two hundred dollars per month—but I’d been saving, and the instruction was invaluable. They spoke like physicians—about
the psoas and the clavicle, the first and fifth metatarsal, the piriformis and the ever-elusive core. Every millimeter of the foot was called upon. By isolating every segment, every muscle, Sara and Ivan devised a system to identify every way a body could approach a tango step. Often, it seemed, they found the trickiest means to explain the most straightforward ends. It was a system of totalitarian simplicity requiring invisible arduous effort, coiling and recoiling around a center spring. Their methods took you so far into their anatomical vernacular that you almost lost your sense of what they meant to say. But what they taught was unavoidably correct—obvious once you understood it, albeit occasionally impossible to do.
The major concept of FeralTango was something called the membrane, the force field between the couple. Each step involved manipulating it. For Sara and Ivan, all movement went in multiple directions, like yoga: down into the floor, up through the body trunk, into the center of the couple, and out across the room. Every forward step was initiated by a backwards summons of intention to generate momentum, then a push through the arches of the foot, the legs following the torso, the front foot like a shock absorber, then a pulley system to bring the body back together. Backwards, it was the same, inverted. The leader would engage the lady with what they called “directional push,” treating her center like a billiard ball. He targeted geometrical coordinates and moved toward her with specific force to move her a specific way. A Sara-and-Ivan leader could control each increment of movement. This was tango for math geeks and bankers, tango for investment strategists. Many of their students became a little supercilious—so turned around within the FeralTango framework that it was sometimes hard for them to dance with anybody else.
It was exactly what I wanted—a project, endless and profound. Some intangible repository for my monkish devotion, a gauntlet through which I’d goad myself, moving my boulder ever up the same unyielding slope. And so I spent two evenings a week in a low-rent studio with a buckling, bowing wooden floor, turning absurd circles with a partner, sweating and grunting, trying to approximate what I’d seen Sara do so gracefully—while she barked orders in my ear.
It took me quite some time to comprehend the difference between technique and style. When I first learned the eight-count box, I thought, oh yes, that’s tango. I learned the box was wrong and thought, well, this is tango. I learned that there were only three steps—six, if you counted each in both directions—and that was tango. Then I met Sara and Ivan, whose instruction seemed to scream that everybody else was wrong.
But I was done assuming there was one right answer and that I needed someone else to tell me what that was. There was a difference between learning what was expected of me, and developing the skills to execute and choose. It seemed to me the best of tango dogmas were the same. There was only one technique, one toolbox, one way of moving that made movement tango. Enzo’s “waiting for the train” and “waiting for the bus” analogy was just another way of saying “change your weight from foot to foot.” And Mariela’s “use the heel” refrain was just what Sara meant when she said we must engage the back foot to push through to the next step with the front. The fundamentals never changed: maintaining axis, moving the upper and lower body in opposition, staying in alignment, not relying on our partners’ arms for stability—leading or following, stepping precisely, and keeping the movement ever circular in turns.
Beyond that, the smallest move was taught a thousand ways. As tango anthropologist Julie Taylor wrote: “It is up to the woman how she moves her body . . . . You could decide to make your legs cry, or laugh. A leg can weep.” It matters where you put your foot; it matters more how you place it there. That was style; and there are as many styles as there are stylists. I could study technique with Sara and Ivan and still not dance as they did. Their style was their style; mine was mine. And that was good, because their dancing always seemed contentious. It looked like sparring. But it felt like hot knives through butter—or at least, it should.
I valued that physical rigor. I wanted my dance clear, corporeal, stripped of excess and emotion. To feel the fire of the music in my muscles, uncomplicated by the rest of me. Sara and Ivan’s methods were invaluable for this. While Ivan tiptoed and scowled, Sara stood squarely in the center of the room and made me responsible for myself in tango in a way I hadn’t ever had to be. Like Adam and Ciko, expecting me to power my own rocket in a shared orbit, Sara trained her followers to take almost nothing from a leader. There was no ignorancia sagrada; ignorance, sacred or otherwise, was not an option. If I wanted to dance in Sara’s world, I had to be a dancer—not merely a follower who danced back.
Sara rejected the popular axiom that every follower’s mistake was but the product of a leader’s imprecision. “The woman’s role,” to her, demanded more. A leader should hew to his partner’s level, but beyond that, he bore no further responsibility for how well she danced. “He does his work,” she said. “I do mine.”
That work was moving. The “directional push” exerted by the leader was more directional than push. He set the coordinates; she got there under her own steam. She did not rely on him for turns or pivots, pushing off against his hand to boost herself around. Sara could swivel into the floor like a heavy drill bit, entirely in control of her own force and speed. “Ladies, do your work,” she’d say, like a proctor telling her examinees to keep their eyes on their own tests.
A lack of progress was due only to a lack of practicing. If a leader prevented us from moving properly, that was no excuse. We had to find a way. Balance, integrity, and execution—our tools were all we had.
Learning tango typically requires modern feminists to willingly suspend indignity. At first, we bristle. We take a leader’s proffered arm in spite of a reluctance to be “led.” Then, perhaps, we cotton to the merits of ceding control. Gender roles aside, it’s nice to be exempted from decision making. Nice to trust someone to navigate us safely through the throng. Maybe then we get complacent, and forget ourselves. The world is tiring, so very tiring—how nice to sink into the role of la sonámbula, the sleepwalker, guided safely through the darkness in suspended animation. Lord knows I’d been seduced by that.
Sara took it on herself to wake the sleeping beauties of the tango world.
Tango, to her, wasn’t one plus one equals one. It was on our own and yet together. There was no talk of submission. The dance was not a love affair, of any length, but rather a debate. A reasoned discourse. If one partner shouted, blathered on, or wouldn’t let the other get a word in edgewise, then that particular exchange was futile and uneven. The mistake followers too often made was meekness, muteness, doing just as they were told.
Sara taught me to speak up in my dancing. Not to demur. Not to, say, muffle my voice or speak into my lap. My work was moving. Even if a leader gave me nothing. Dancing for myself and by myself, rather than in reply to being led. I should not alter my technique for anyone, no matter how a leader seemed to drown me out. If I did, my dancing suffered, and it would be my fault for relinquishing control. If I didn’t like a leader’s conversation, I simply didn’t have to talk to him.
I started to apply this unforgiving framework elsewhere in my life. I was where (and who) I was by my own choices, my own steam. If I stepped ungracefully—if I erred, I was to blame. And oh how I had erred. So eager to close my eyes and trust someone to lead me better than I could myself, I’d yielded valuable ground. So eager to be loved, I’d lain there in the dark expecting someone to make love to me. I’d given myself over to the caprices of the tango currents and the tango cads, and let both carry me away.
Men lead and women follow. There are plenty of exceptions to this tango rule, but generally, the gendered lines are clear, reflecting—it must be said—the workings of a much less equitable world.
Back in the old Buenos Aires heyday, if a young man wanted to get a girl, he had to learn to tango. He went to the academias and danced with other men, established leaders keen to practice. He followed first—for months or years—feeling
the echo of the lead before his own attempt. Only with the soundest skills would he be admitted to his first milonga. Women, who for many years were a minority, were forced to hone their craft with family members, in the privacy of the home. At the milongas, of course, they reigned supreme. This system was both worshipful of women and dismissive; it presupposed that leading was more difficult and thus the chore of men—even as it sought, above all else, to show the ladies a good time. Men fancied themselves patriarchal peacocks, and the girls a flock of plain brown pigeon hens just waiting to be wowed.
Call it chivalry or call it chauvinism; the custom has endured, often simply because of differences in height. In many ways, it is more difficult to lead. Not only is a leader liable for his dance, but he must also know the music well enough to plan it in advance, and equip his partner to react in time. He must skipper their shared boat across the counterclockwise sea of other couples. Could a woman shoulder this responsibility? Of course. I’ve never met the teacher or professional who couldn’t—often better than the boys. Is there some deeper reason, then, why men are given tactical control, and women left to make the best of what is offered? No. Just the thicket of oppression at the heart of human culture. Just centuries of men calling the shots. But this is tango; this is the architecture of the dance.
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