Most tango obsessives have a list of epiphanies they’ve experienced while travelling the path. Top of my chronological list is that moment in my first tango class when all my ideas about tango suddenly gave way to an actual embodied experience of Tango.
I was lucky of course. My ideas about tango at that time were too nebulous to offer any real resistance. As a child I innocently sang along to Tom Lehrer’s Masochism Tango and enthusiastically learnt all the words to Hernando’s Hideaway. I probably also watched Morticia and Gomez tango on television, but can’t remember doing so. Many years later while looking in a university library for something completely unrelated to tango, I stumbled across and subsequently read Maria Savigliano’s Tango and the Politcial Economy of Passion, an act that I engaged in almost as innocently as singing along with Tom. Apart from that, nada. No Tango Lesson, no Assassination Tango, and definitely no Scent of a Woman.
Anyway, in late 2004, about eight years after finding Maria on a shelf in the Baillieau and promptly forgetting about her, I walked into my first tango class looking for - love?
Kind of. At the time I was in one of those are-we-or-aren’t-we-having-a-relationship scenarios with someone I’d met around three months earlier. Years before he’d done a lot of ballroom dancing, and wanted to get back to some kind of dancing other than ballroom. So we did a handful of salsa classes together - platonically - which bored the pants off him.
Well, I said, what do you want to do instead?
Tango, he said, without missing a beat. Argentine Tango
My friend, you see, is a capital ‘R’ Romantic. At that time he also had a much stronger idea about what tango was than I did, having seen an old Argentine couple tango together at a dance studio almost ten years earlier.
Like that, he said. I want to grow old with someone, just like that.
One year, and many tango lessons, practicas, and milongas later, it was clear to both of us that we weren’t going to grow old together, just like that. I lost the man, but kept the tango.
Another eighteen months, and seems that I’ve reached the where pilgrimage to Buenos Aires is inevitable.
I say inevitable, but the decision was by no means straighforward. As I get older it becomes correspondingly harder for me to be innocent in the face of cultural complexity.
Of course it’s entirely possible that I’m reading too much into this Buenos Aires thing. The cabeceo is just a way of asking someone for a dance, right?
So much for the back story, on to the adventure!
