Friday night at a big tango festival. My expectations were low but I needed to get out of the house. I was not anticipating the kind of tango that begets blogposts.
I spent the evening running into old and new friends, chatting. At one point, while I was looking for a friend, a man stepped in front of me and offered a nice cabeceo. I hesitated, and then decided to take a chance. He was friendly and competent. At the end of the tanda I said “can I ask you a question”. “Sure”. We stepped to the side.
“This is not a criticism. You have very nice technique. But you only took steps. In the whole tanda, you didn’t even lead a cross or a rebote. Where is the rest of tango? And did someone teach you to dance like this?”
Before he could answer we were interrupted by an announcement: the last shuttlebus was leaving. I needed to be on it. The conversation continued as I made my way around the room to my bag. He trailed me as I kissed friends goodbye. He knelt next to my chair as I changed my shoes.
He had his phone in his hand showing me his teachers with whom he’d been studying for 10 years. He told me that “the rest of tango” was unnecessary because “it’s all about connection”. I said “all tango is about connection but it’s nice to move my legs”. He said “all of that is commercialism”.
Given my shock and the rush I was not in a professional interviewing stance. I screeched back “but those are old moves! you don’t see any need for ochos or giros in tango?” He was frustrated and impassioned, so he got to the point. “You’re Catholics. We’re Protestants.” He repeated this line several times as I thanked him, reiterated that I wasn’t criticizing him, and ran to the bus.
I find his mantra equal parts bizarre and chilling.
One cannot pronounce nor hear this statement without reference to centuries of violent conflict.
We do have our problems in tango. Not everyone can figure out how to dance to contemporary music. And some people refuse to wear the expensive shoes. But this hardly merits religious war.
I know he didn’t come up with that line. Like the young guy in Berlin who hissed “it’s a milonga, not a sporthall”. These amateurs are parroting divisive ideology promoted by professionals – the people who should be upholding standards of community and cordiality, not promoting strife.
The epithet is not only a dramatization and escalation of our differences. It proposes to institutionalize interpretations of the tango legacy, what some have heretofore called “styles”. Such escalation is not funny. It proposes to formalize our divisions, to reduce our interactions, to corral us toward separate futures.
The accusation of “commercialism” also reminds me of one of fundamentalist Islam’s complaints about the west. These are very heavy terms to be throwing around in our beautiful community. Of course tango is commercial. The teachers and DJs and event organizers are trying to be solvent! He was using the term as an epithet, an assault on peers who have taken up a hobby to express themselves and move their bodies.
I reflected on the unusual passion with which the man followed me around the floor during my preparations to depart. Normally a dancer like him would be busy looking for his next female, not for conversation with any of us. But he was sufficiently impassioned that he followed me. Was he proseletyzing?
Did he cabeceo me to proseletyze?
On the bus I found the friend I’d originally been looking for. I had been searching for him because his favorite composer was on the turntable. “I was hoping to dance with you.”
“Oh, I couldn’t dance tonight.”
“Why.”
“Today I did the workshop with [famous maestros]. They took us back to basics. Just standing. I was so destroyed that I couldn’t dance tonight.”
My friend has been dancing for a long time, and is a competent and pleasant dancer. He paid good money to be told he couldn’t make a step properly. I’ve heard this story many times.
The practice of degrading, infantilizing, and demoralizing students is the Argentine strategy to keep the money flowing. That’s commercialism!
It’s true that we could all dance better. The neo dancers look sloppy. Everyone (including me) wants them to look better even if it’s none of our goddamn business what other people do. (And it must always be noted that sloppiness is a sign of level and there are sloppy beginners on every floor regardless of what music is playing.) But telling people to stand still, or not to use the repertoire of tango is an abusive response to our disappointments. Good teachers empower their students with actionable instruction. If the instruction doesn’t work, it’s not the students’ fault and they should not be the ones to be excoriated.
Furthermore, I have to point out again. I predicted this mess when in 2010 the “social tango” people sought a dance in which the follower need not be trained. This allowed the levels to drop everywhere. The neodancers solved this problem by saying “anything goes” and the conservatives by eliminating repertoire.
The famous maestro who demoralized my friend happened to have been the performer of the first show I ever saw in Buenos Aires. A show that inspires me to this day to improvise with ambition and abandon. I do not know why he has changed and why people are willing to settle for a dance that is so much less.
When I arrived in the dance hall at 22:00 I felt a rush of excitement and love for this community. When I left at 04:00, I was crushed with disappointment for what it is becoming.
Performance en Practica X, Junio 2008. Gotan Project, Paris Texas.
