Tango and Serious Fun

I am an Argentine tango dancer and teacher and have been so now for more than three decades. People dance tango for lots of reasons. For some, to go out dancing is to have fun-fun. And what a great way to do it. It is social dancing. You get to schmooze with folks, connect with others, and move, all in the same evening. Truly, it is a great time.

But some of us take Argentine tango seriously as well. We are not against fun-fun and we are not party-poopers. But we think more like a fine artist or a jazz musician. We want our experience when dancing to reach the highest plane of experience that the art form offers. That’s the point of studying, training, and practicing: we become more skilled, more informed, and more aware, so that we can go more deeply into the experience.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre talks about this. Here is a quote by him that I lightly paraphrased and modified but that still remains difficult (sorry about that):

By a social practice I mean any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which the goods internal to that form are realized in trying to achieve the standards of excellence that are definitive of that activity.

  Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue

With all art forms there are the technical and conceptual challenges that define the form. If you are a representational oil painter this means learning how to mix and use the paints and mediums, to develop eye and hand coordination in order to draw what you see, understanding the relationships between form, color, and composition, and so much more. If you are a musician, there is the hand coordination skills of playing, knowing how to read music, tuning your ear to nuances of pitch and rhythm, and so much more. 

With an improvisational art form — like tango dancing, like improvisational jazz — the training is meant to support the experience. And the experience means to access the goods internal to that form. This is what I mean by serious fun.

Now, regarding Argentine tango, what are the goods that are internal to that art form, to that social practice? As I see it, there are three: creative expression, flow and connection. 

Creative expression

The deeper you go into any worthy art form the more fulfilling you will find your creative expression. This is true of Argentine tango. Also true of painting, of playing music, of writing poetry. The great art forms are treasures of human invention because of the way they enable you to deepen your human experience.

Tango is improvisational and relational. Improvisation happens in the moment, choices are made on the spot, never premeditated. Your training as a dancer enables you to have mastery over a large vocabulary of movement. As your dance develops you will have more movement possibilities, more musical possibilities, and greater emotional expression. But don’t forget that tango is always a two-person creation, a product of continuous, two-way communication.

The spirit of the dance can be playful or dead serious. I was dancing once with an older, famous milonguera and she said to me between songs, When I dance, I dance like it is the last dance I will ever do. When you dance with her, you know it will be intense. If you want to meet her at the level where she is at, you will have to bring it!

Flow

There are two aspects of flow. The first is purely physical. It is the pleasure that goes with moving gracefully. You don’t have to be an athlete or a dancer to know about flow. If you ever held your hand outside of a car window when you were a child when driving fast and let your hand swim up and down, you found the experience and feelings of grace and flow. That is what we strive to develop in our tango training. How to move gracefully. 

But actually, flow is more essentially mental. It is about mental focus. What meditators talk about as absorption. Some tango dancers talk about trance. Psychologists have studied and written about flow states.

(A flow state) is the state when people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter

and

Intense concentration, perhaps the defining quality of flow, is just another way of saying that attention is wholly invested in the present exchange.

    J. Nakamura & M. Csikszentmihali in The Concept of Flow

Mental absorption, flow, requires inner quiet. We want the centers of our bodies to be silent. We want all of our attention to turn to our partner, to our body’s movement, and to the music. There is no extra bandwidth for distracted thought. No place for extra or unnecessary tension or resistance. Flow happens through your open awareness. This is what becomes the conduit for your feelings. 

Connection

So what is it that feels good about a hug? Why does it feel good. Why does even a hand around your shoulder or even a pat on the back feel good? And why is a handshake not heartwarming, but a hug is? I am sure you’ve noticed that some hugs feel better than others. Some people are really good at hugging. You can also tell that some folks are uncomfortable when hugged.

But an embrace goes beyond a mere hug. A hug lasts like ten seconds. A tango embrace, a four song tanda, ten to twelve minutes. We can dance as close as we want in tango. It is a social contract. Each person should only consent to the closeness that is acceptable and comfortable to them. But dancing closely, with the bodies in contact, that is the culture of the dance as it comes from the dance halls in Buenos Aires.

When you dance that closely connected, the dynamics of the dance change. You have to modify how you use your body. Technique changes. It takes practice and training.

There is the world of emotions that arise when we are that close for those long minutes. Do you know that the word emotion means in motion? At first it is shocking and scary. Maybe we have to deal with sexual feelings. They come and go. But when you are fully present and you genuinely like the person you are dancing with, what remains is warmth. 

Have you ever danced when you were sad? After a break-up or after a fight with a friend? If you dance over the years, you will dance after someone close to you has died. Or when your tanda partner is grieving. When we embrace in our sadness and loss, what remains is warmth.

All of this is to say that at the center of the tango is the connection between the dancers. This is what is most exceptional about the art form. The experience of combining art and music with a human embrace is mind blowing. This is the place where your experience of humanity, of your own humanity, expands. 

Always though, your technique must be good enough. That takes work. And you must get good at bringing all of your attention and presence of mind to your partner. Do that and you will enter the silent center of the dance. There lies the infinite expanse of human connection, a fathomless depth of shared experience and shared feelings. And joy. As they say about tango:  four legs and one heart.

. . . . .

We have a culture here at Tango Northside. People sometimes wonder: Why prize close embrace as opposed to open? Why dance in a smaller, tighter space? Why practice and train? Why dance to traditional music? Why ask people to develop their dance sequentially through our foundation classes? The answer is so that you can access creative expression, flow, and connection — to find what makes tango seriously fun.