La Nuit Blanche

Mariana, 2008

In my five weeks in Buenos Aires, I didn’t take any classes, and didn’t schedule any privates. I took one workshop with Gaston and Moira at Tango Brujo on musicality (which was, by the way, extremely difficult and over my head!). And just danced in the milongas during the nights of my stay.

Coming back to New York, people have been telling me my dance has evolved to another level. Nothing specific… Technique? Posture? Footwork? Embrace? Play? Sensitivity? Connection? In terms of the above, the specifics probably haven’t changed much since I left and (reluctantly) returned to New York. But yes, I myself feel that something has changed.

Looking back to the last few days of my trip, sad that I was leaving so soon, I remember regretting not having taken more classes and workshops… That I could have scheduled at least one private with a celebrated teacher. :-( But Buenos Aires meant more to me than just dancing. Ofcourse, as a tango dancer on her first trip to the city of tango, the first thing I wanted to do as soon as I got off the plane was run, run, run to a milonga. But a huge, glimmering new city and a beautiful man beckoned… one thing led to another, and I didn’t have any time for dancing during the day.

It was the best thing that could have happened to me.

What I have realised in Buenos Aires during my short time there, is that tango is not about the dance. It sounds funny to say it, but tango is not about tango. What I have felt, and what I have understood from being there, is that tango is about being porteño. The dance is merely the means by which a man and a woman can live inside an intensified, heightened state of being for brief moments at a time. That state of existence is the state of being a man and a porteño, of being a woman and a porteña, of being Argentine in the city of Buenos Aires, in a wonderfully distilled form. The expression of (part of) the essence of being a man or a woman in Buenos Aires from its inception all the way through the years till the ever-present changeable Now — that is the tango.

The tango and the world of the milonga were made by something. And that something is the city of Buenos Aires itself, and all of its people, its experience within the context of the rest of the country, Latin America, the world. The experience of the city as an entity in itself — how its unique history has imprinted itself upon the gestures, walk, speech, emotion, joys, fears, suffering, poetry, music, dance, food, politics, geneology, buildings, dreams, life, death, collective memory, historical memory of its citizens — is the stuff that tango is made of. It was essential that I spent time away from the milonga, and inside the city that had created it. If it weren’t for Buenos Aires and its people that define this city and give it meaning, there would be no tango.

After a whirlwind day of spending time with my Lover’s family, his childhood friends, his university professor, with strangers I’ve approached to take their pictures leading to random conversations in broken castellano perched on the window-sills of cafes, with the gentlemen waiting for friends on the streets of every barrio, with the kids who helped me on the colectívos, with the shop-girls on pop music and fashion in the boutiques of Palermo, with the tiny old woman who stopped me and asked me to help her ring the buzzer of her daughter’s apartment, with the candy-men on weaving chocolate in the artesanal workshops, with the waiters at pizza parlours recounting the stories behind the pictures hanging on their walls, hanging high up from the lamp-posts with noisy students watching a parade of Okinawans celebrating the 100th anniversary of their immigration to Argentina, with the newspaper men swearing at the Bolivian demonstrators on Corrientes, the scent of the leather chairs in the cinema San Martín, the shade of pink on the old cracked walls of ancient local cafes, the light of the afternoon sun seeping through the blinds and onto my Lover’s nakedness as we made love in the wintery afternoon, the sight of mysterious hands of old women crouched on the pavement selling spices, the careful hesitation of a fruit-seller handpicking strawberries for me from his basket, the 6-year-old gypsy-boy obediently posing for me, his shining eyes patiently upon me as I set up my tripod to take his portrait…

After all that, I would spend a few hours at a milonga late at night… and I would finally understand. The city had touched me — seeped into me — and its touch manifested itself upon me in every way, including my tango.

I am not, and never can be porteña, because I have my own history, my own childhood imprinted upon me that cannot be changed, my own language I revert to when I talk in my sleep. But while I was there, I was being enfolded, embraced — lovingly — by Buenos Aires, and I was swooning in the sweetness of my first reception. That is what changed in my dance. That is what I brought back with me. That is what New York is lacking — what is absent in the tango and the milongas of the city I call home. That is what is (already!) fading from my dance. That is why I am still in mourning!

A little manifesto:

Art is not a world democracy.
There is no Right or Wrong in art.
Although there is Good Art, and Bad Art.
Then, apart from talent and movement, good or bad, there is also History and Experience. Which make up the Soul of a work of art.

Sure, there is a universality in Art, as in the Tango, which is the reason it is so appealing to the rest of the world, crossing enormous cultural boundaries. Themes like love, loss, injustice, beauty, the dispossessed, melancholy, longing, pain, lampposts, trumpets… in the form of a lovely song…  These things exist across the entire human universe.

However, a love song in the form of a tango, with those particular lyrics, with that particular melody, sung in this particular language, spoken with that particular accent? That is what makes this love song an Argentine love song, this is what makes it porteño. And the same goes for the dance, in the way it is danced in one particular city.

Many who have never been to Buenos Aires dance tango very well. A few of them are incredible dancers. But the soul they bring into their tango is not Argentine.  The city is not a part of their history. It has no place in their experience. It is absent from their dance, simply because they have never been there.