Dance of Myself

It’s Saturday night, December 8, 2007, the beginning of summer in Buenos Aires. I weave my way through dewy crowds on the broad, traffic-free Avenida de Mayo. The Belle Epoque Café Tortoni is packed with tourists but I stop for a cool drink of agua mineral con gas. As I slake my thirst, my eye is captured by the way the Tiffany lamplight refracts through the glass of water, casting a liquid shimmer on the table. I see a perfectly oval diamond tiara with a crystalline flame dancing through it. My mind is forever excavating surface reality for artifacts of meaning. This one does not go uncollected.

Nor can I ignore that today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception—a Catholic celebration of the Blessed Virgin’s having been born without the stain of original sin.

Back amid the energy of the street, it’s worth noting that the various "rebirths" of de Mayo were not stainless, or bloodless. In June, 1955 a faction of the Navy bombed a demonstration there, killing 364 civilians. The continued presence of the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo recalls the brutal "disappearing" of thousands of innocent citizens between 1976 and 1983. Also, on this same asphalt, once gathered the descamisados, or shirtless ones, the staunch supporters of Eva Peron. A few paces away stands the Casa Rosada, where Evita and Juan sprinkled palm kisses on their supporters along with shrill promises that they would continue to steal from the rich to even things out. (Two days later on this same street, Argentina’s first elected “Presidenta,” Christina Ferdinand Kirschner, a Peronista, would take office from her husband, Nestor Kirschner.)

Tonight’s gentry are not shirtless. They are dressed in light cotton, loose, floral-design attire, flowing scalloped skirts, and soft-soled leather shoes for tango dancing. This crowd is passionate, not about politics, but about its homegrown folk dance, Argentine tango. The music pours from speakers, some of it performed live, some of it orchestrated by DJs. Thrilled by the same Golden Era (1940s) tangos I’ve heard a thousand times, I slip into my own pair of sturdy heels for street dancing. I’ve spotted at least one familiar tanguero friend, Carlitos. Even though he is quite humid with perspiration, we embrace full-body and dance a few numbers.

This is a milonga under the stars. Milonga, an African word for gathering place, is the name for the venue where tango is danced. It’s also the word for a type of tango music with a very rhythmic African-derived beat. Africans, brought as slaves, contributed to the early evolution of tango, with their hypnotically percussive canyengue and candombe rhythms.

It’s now sixteen months since I arrived in Buenos Aires for a two-month chilling-out after my life went south. I was supposed to stay two months. I have yet to leave. Tango has been my personal, completely unexpected, and unlikely Dance of Myself. It is no less poetic than Walt Whitman’s song of himself, which portrays his journey into an awakening. No less dramatic than Carlos Castaneda’s forays into non-ordinary reality, except that music, touch, and movement, not a hallucinogenic plant, induce my states of seeing things differently.

 No one knows the exact derivation of the word tango. Some say it shares a root with drum. I like to think it also shares a root with the Latin, tangere—to touch. Tango, tangas, tanga, tangamos, tangate, tangan.

 Starlight, and music molecules, radiant particles, move through my partner and me. Perhaps with the right pair of eyes you can see the crystalline flame rising off our warm bodies up to the heavens where stars encircle us like a diamond tiara. We smile from deep within and pose for a camera, sweaty skin to sweaty skin. My leg winds around his waist in a classic leg wrap. I’m wearing a pink tank top and tight blue jeans.

Stop the music, hold that pose, freeze that frame for just a moment. An adjacent frame pops up and we see my life as it was before I wandered innocently into my first tango lesson. We see a well-paid editor on a travel magazine who wears loose Annie Hall-style attire, mostly irregulars ordered from Hanes catalogues. Her hair is thick and long, a bit severe. She is physically fit, but if you look closely you see that her body is detached from her head. She smiles through her loco-motion to work, workouts, love, her perfect life. She wakes up drowsy, even after a good night’s sleep. She suffers oxygen deprivation.

Turn the music back on. Let there be dancing.

My long hair, its dead weight, was the first casualty when I let dance and music back into my life after a 12-year hiatus. I started with swing and ballroom and only out of what I thought would be a fleeting curiosity, tried Argentine tango. I began to dress in soft fabrics that lie close to the skin and do not distract me from my partner’s touch. I stripped my life down. Most material things seemed to only stand between me and my next tango. My life got very simple.

I began to live more fully in my body, to feel it connected and inseparable from my mind or soul. All dance is wonderful. But tango is mind-and-body-altering in a way I never anticipated. It is not so much breathtaking, as breathgiving. My life no longer feels oxygen deprived. In Whitman’s epic poem, a “spear of summer grass” sparks the union of body and soul. The same can happen with music and dance. I like to say that you learn tango from the feet up but you dance it from the heart down. That is just one of a multitude of ways that tango differs from every other dance on earth.

Just look at the faces on the people dancing here on Avenida de Mayo in 90-degree heat. Sweat falls with grace in the old tracks of blood.

Sometimes I call it Tango Brujo, this spell that comes over me as soon as I step into the warm envelope of tango’s embrace, no matter who my partner, no matter how skillful he is or isn’t. I learned early on that tango is a language that defies our limited speech. Everyone who attempts tango eventually wanders through this portal into Big Space of Limitless Expression. Therein, each dancer finds her/his secret. They begin to understand tango in a way that no class, no teacher, no video, no book, or written word can impart. They begin to grasp this something and hold it for fleeting seconds. They begin to let go of asking questions about the footwork, or for a correct analysis of the embrace, the way the foot falls or the amount of contra-body movement. Even the much exalted “technique” is forsaken in this moment of sudden, boundless awareness. And they get it: Something divinely, uniquely theirs in the sphere of Big Space of Tango.

I left my stale life in the United States and began a late-life rebirth in the numerous milongas in Buenos Aires and environs. I let go of everything I had learned and gave myself over to the arms and simmering torsos of man after man in Argentina (it has turned into more than three years). When I stepped into the dance circle with each one I went into a reverie that expunged all knowledge. I became a blank slate. And my life was born anew each time with each partner. It was exhilarating to just let it happen, not knowing, not worrying, each time I entered the dance. Each time I came out renewed, lighter, less attached to fixed ideas of reality and material world. I became eager only to dance with every man sitting on the men’s side of the dance hall. My mind was torn down. My whole body was re-shaped and re-formed by this experience, to say nothing of my feet. Nothing under the sun and stars would ever be the same again.

The lessons have come with me off the dance floor. If “We’re only dancing on this earth for a short time,” as the Cat Stevens song goes, then make it all quality time in the Big Space of Limitless Expression. Like here and now on Avenida de Mayo, where I am dancing with Carlitos under and with the stars. A sparkling tiara crowns our heads and a crystalline flame shoots up to the heavens and beyond. This is the mark of sovereigns. Why shouldn’t life be like this for all of us? Tango, anyone?