His name was Marty Nussbaum, and we started practicing together once he emailed me his tango bible, a manifesto outlined in a six-page pdf. It was divided into testaments, old and new, describing his triumvirate: Gustavo Naveira, the Rabbi-Buddha; Mariano “Chicho” Frumboli, Patron Saint of Rhythm; and Sebastián Arce, their gracefully begotten poet son. The holy scriptures, as he called them, included in-depth technical analysis and video. Genealogy and creation myth. A story of how the tango world began.
It was a formal invitation: to be his “third alternate” practice partner. He signed it:
The rabbit hole is at your feet, Alice. Welcome to my world.
Abrazos,
Martin
I ate. I grew enormous. I dove in. Here, finally, was a proper initiation to the guild. Here was a man who had devoted his entire life to tango, a man whom I would never want to sleep with, and who, I hoped, would never try to sleep with me. A tango nerd. A pal. I locked my pace in step with his obsession. We met on Tuesday nights at Robin Thomas’s Sangria Practica. While the cool kids chatted in their natural habitat, dancing in their flashy shoes, we were in the corner in our practice flats, doing drills that he’d devised from workshops past. We’d work for an hour or two, and then he’d walk me to my train. He was solicitous, and kind.
In the beginning, we spoke only of tango, which was fine with me. Marty was more obsessed with dancing than anyone I’d yet met. He’d married young, for love, had two boys, and divorced. He was Jewish, except as applied to shellfish. He’d started dancing with a woman he was dating, and kept dancing long after she left. If tango were a tar pit, Marty fell in splashing, then went breaststroking away. He’d sunk, gleefully, into the sticky blackness to the ruin of his former life. He’d advanced in his career just far enough to land a private office where, behind closed doors, he spent his workdays poring over tango clips. He rarely took a lunch break. He swam laps at the gym each day to limber up. And danced. For a while he was so desperate for good tandas that he would analyze the odds, comparing Facebook event numbers on any given night, applying counterweights and probabilities: floor quality, entrance price, proximity to his favorite late-night snacks (which seemed to center on falafel joints and spirulina shakes). He was about a decade into dancing when I met him, and just as underslept. He failed to find the bags under my eyes impressive.
“I’m a milonguero,” he said, “with a day job.” Balance was not among his skills.
I went from being his third alternate to his go-to gal, mostly because I was young and game and patient, and, like him, had no interest in talking about anything but tango. And since he was my only practice partner, I relished the extra time. I didn’t mind not mastering the moves he’d taught himself from YouTube. I was indefatigable, determined, as if every hour I spent there helped me dance my way back to the light. The more I stretched and strived with Marty, the more ascetic my pursuit, and the less I feared that tango was to blame for all the soreness in my heart.
“What’s your tango story?” he asked one night, while we stretched our quads.
“My what?”
“Your root.”
I thought about making the joke I’d made during the cabaret—about how I’d had to take up tango dancing just to get a grown man to put his arms around me, but that no longer felt appropriate, so I answered, “It was a New Year’s resolution.”
“Nice,” he said.
Otherwise, he was all business. Fanatically focused. Frustrated if it wasn’t going well—and high on purely manic joy if it was. He’d land a fourth sacada—an extremely difficult displacement move requiring a freakish pivot backstep into my forward step. Or he’d lead me through one: an over-rotated clockwise swivel, away from him, then backwards into the embrace to break his forward step, our hips in opposite directions—and however shambolic it had been, he’d crow as though we’d struck uranium. He had all the enthusiasm of a ten-year-old with his first remote control car, still unsure how to wield it. He did not take bathroom breaks or stop for water. When I did, he’d rub his fingers together in a display of fiendish overeagerness until I returned. He was anxious to keep going until the lights were flipped, until the studio proprietor came to kick us out.
Except for valses—our mutual respite. Whenever those Biagi 6/8 meters played, we made a pact never to practice, just to dance. He’d drop his shoulders, take my waist, and we would both remember, suddenly, to breathe. To smile. Marty was different then, stately, turning steadily as a painted pony on a carousel. I closed my eyes, relaxed my arms, and turned with him, as the bandoneones and piano chased the strings around in laps.
Marty and I were token squares among the tango hipsters who had built the Robin Thomas empire. While I’d been frittering around the more obscure milongas, lusting after Enzo, they’d been in Olympic training. The men wore wide-legged trousers then. The girls wore tube tops, short shorts, harem pants, and handmade plastic jewelry. Their shoes were purple, leopard, glitter green. I felt like a grey crayon in the midst of all their cheer. They did not abandon friends for tango; they tangoed with their friends. And afterward, they did not retreat to separate corners; they congregated, chatting, keeping Robin company while he spun the tunes. They drank sangria out of cartoon cups. They were my tango idols.
I envied almost everything about them. Dancing, they smiled wryly into each other’s cheeks. There was no “tango face” there, no customary glower. They played. The boys tried out all sorts of moves, but archly, with a sense of humor—and with delighted expletives when those moves went awry. The girls embellished with the music. This was grace—elastic, buoyant, heretical grace: effortless ganchos; never over-led, boleos slicing unsuspecting air; sacadas like hot spoons through hard ice cream. They sweated under the pinkish lights of Dance Manhattan, stretching their long muscles, gossiping and sharing laughs. Their práctica felt like secondary school; they were the cool kids leaning against their lockers, smoking in the halls. They weren’t mean, but they were better dancers.
They all knew Marty, though they rarely danced with him. He didn’t care. He followed Robin for his music, and as long as there were competent dancers along the fringe who would accept him for a tanda, he was pleased.
Marty taught me everything he knew. His tango world was so much broader than the one in which I had been bumbling. It was academic, and inspired discipline, analysis, endless drills. To be good at this, one had to study—and, ever the eager pupil, I was happy to immerse myself in tango school.
Though, traditionally, tango was danced in close embrace, temple to cheek and chest to chest, this is not the only way to dance. The tango I’d been doing was traditionalist, what some might call salon or milonguero style: nothing too big or too fancy for the crowded social dance floor. I’d thus far avoided open embrace, where the follower pulls back and holds the leader’s bicep, and there is space enough to balance a good-sized beach ball in between them. I still equated “open” with “alternative,” the province of the weirdos who danced only in the dank back room of the milonga with that hand-lettered neon poster board guarding the door. It was always darker, sweatier in there, furtive and metallic like a naughty video. I thought they had a fog machine; I was afraid to look. “Alternative” dancers danced to “alternative” music, which usually meant electronica. It failed to move me. It felt thin, without the texture of the rhythms lacing under and above the bandoneón, and there was too much air between the couple, too much negative space. The embrace was wide and planar, the hand contact vulgar and impersonal. I called it “pizza hands,” the palm held flat to steer a lady like a waiter would a cocktail tray. These dancers looked around the room or at their shoes—not at each other as on tango posters. But the looking—any looking—was all wrong.
I’d learned dancing with my eyes shut, and had no desire to open them. So when Marty stepped away and offered me his bicep as our point of contact, sliding his arm across my back until he held me only by my scapula, I warned him off.
“Marty Nussbaum,” I
said. “I don’t do nuevo.”
“I know you think you don’t,” he said. “But you’ll just have to learn.”
He sent me video upon video of Gustavo Naveira dancing with his second wife and partner, Giselle Ann—attached to emails full of complicated verbal pyrotechnics to describe the movement, which was more playful, more musical, and tighter than anything I had seen before. This tango was smart, athletic. All things were possible in this dance of planetary orbits, two bodies in black silk spinning out and magnetizing back together in concentric circles on the floor. Gustavo and Giselle finished each other’s tango sentences and did so with an equality I’d never seen before.
I let Marty lead me farther down the rabbit warren, to Gustavo, godfather of “nuevo.” What I would learn—what I had failed to realize—was that I had been dancing by Gustavo’s rules all along.
To understand, I had to reel back to Buenos Aires in the aftermath of el Proceso. The city ravaged by inequity, with her grand old bones intact, but not much holding them together. Just before the shiny world bank skyscrapers pushed the poor and brown-skinned past the city limits—and this time not to arrabales but to outright slums. Growing numbers of Argentines had begun to emigrate—to Spain, to Italy, to the United States—for opportunity. Newcomers arrived from nearby countries in the Southern Cone, carving out their places in the immigrant city of old. After decades of turmoil and terror, porteños once again began to fill their streets. This was the backdrop for the tango renaissance: The music as beloved as ever—its brightest blooms preserved in hundreds of recordings from the Golden Age. The dance as love-worn as the pattern on an antique rug beneath the dust and tread of time. The people finally unafraid.
Gustavo taught his first classes at the Programa Cultural headquarters in the city center, with his first wife, Olga Besio. Students poured in by the hundreds. A four-week trial class became a five-year gig, and a pair of stars were launched. Gustavo quit his economics studies and went pro, leading the newest tango surge. Meanwhile, the neighborhood centers began to offer tango classes of their own. Milongueros reappeared. Old barrio clubs reopened. Social dancing was collectively reclaimed. The soul of tango was reborn first and foremost where it had always lived—in the clubs and cafés and academias of the capital.
When the high-gloss stage productions hit abroad and started touring, foreigners by the thousands caught a glimpse of real tango and, just like I had been, were suddenly possessed with mad desire to crawl past the proscenium into that dance. Pilgrims swarmed south and joined the throngs of aspirants, clamoring to learn. And so the paradox of modern tango: How to teach an improvised tradition. How to replicate a cultural context that no longer exists.
Ethnographers dogged the surviving milonguero masters to catalogue and canonize their every step. They published tomes of surgical directions—how to orchestrate a figure, how to take a step—complete with photographs of elderly dancers demonstrating in unprepossessing shoes. I read these books and hardly recognize the dance I love, though I understand the debt that tango owes to them for preserving the endangered language of the Golden Age.
New teachers found they could accommodate the floods of students by teaching them el paso básico, the basic step, the pattern Alfredo had taught me in my schoolgirl months in Buenos Aires. Eight steps: a box. A cross, a resolution. It was something that could be replicated, drilled. A teacher would call out the numbers, one to eight. All other movements—the ocho, molinetes, the volcada—were accessed by this grid, choreographed and sculpted from the cross and meant to lead back into it. (On the gentleman’s Two, he takes a second side step, leads her to pivot into backward ochos . . . come together at the Four, cross, and resolution.) Only by this roadmap through the bramble could any sense be made.
But it was academic. Empty. Students might learn how to replicate a figure, but they would not learn how to follow or to lead. They would not learn how to improvise, the molten core tenet of tango. They learned to mimic, not to dance.
Gustavo changed all that.
By the mid-nineties, while researchers were still sitting with their pencils dissecting the embellishments of aging milongueros, Gustavo started getting restless. Asking questions. Rewriting the rules. He founded the “laboratory” at Cochabamba 444, and in so doing, albeit with deep respect, set free the art of tango from its well-guarded nursing home.
His methods—and the methods of his investigation group—Fabián Salas, Pablo Verón, and Chicho, Marty’s Patron Saint of Rhythm—are called “nuevo” tango, though it was never really new. Gustavo and his cohort spent a decade breaking down the dance. Disassembling the machine. Dancing among the bolts and springs until they made more sense apart than they had made together. They talked and danced for hours, days, as so many had before them in the academias, all those years ago. They went looking for the underlying structure that would help them inventory all that could be done in tango.
They were looking for the hidden hinge, the string that holds the pearls. They found it in the turn, the giro, which Fabián says “opened all the doors at once.” The giro. The geometry was planetary: The man around the woman. The woman around the man. The pair around the room. There are no steps in tango. Which is to say, there are but three: front, back, and open (side)—with everything connected by the constant invitation of the turn. There was no more talk of “figures,” no more mention of the básico, the eight-count box. There was no roadmap; there weren’t even roads. There was nothing but a common compass and a game of choice: directions, turns, and crosses. Closed and open. Gustavo had wanted to contribute something truly new to tango, something extraordinary, and he did, just with materials already piled in the corners of the shop.
“The ‘basic step’ doesn’t exist, number 1 doesn’t exist, number 8 doesn’t exist,” Fabián said. “There are no numbers . . . this is what you have: you have three steps to each side; you mix a bunch of combinations and this is all you can do.” The cipher broken, they developed a technical language still in all but universal use today, a tango pedagogy broad enough to accommodate new blood and new ambition, while honoring all that came before. Like so many partner dances of the early twentieth century, tango was born to express the content of its music. Good dancing was not the primary motive—until, suddenly, it was. Now it is a question only of dancing. The dance is growing, changing, renovating; the dancehall music hasn’t changed in sixty years. To me, that anachronism had been part of tango’s magic. A milonga often felt like a museum—full of majesty, genteel confinement, time.
The “alternative” tango I disliked so much had simply stretched Gustavo’s methods too far. Even Gustavo condemned it, saying it was missing something critical; it was “athletic but not sensuous, excited but not thoughtful, self-congratulatory, but not tango.” It was “dull.” Real tango held so much more within it—beyond anatomy and music, beyond a rigid diagram of feet. And real tango is what Marty and I spent so many hours trying to achieve.
Open embrace, at first, felt ostentatious. I was embarrassed by it, dancing two feet from my partner, all my movements naked and exposed. After an initial evaluation of ginger little figure eights and molinetes, stark and shaky, Marty diagnosed my skills as weak. He said this with a keen glint in his eye, as though I were a new, rewarding project. And he was right: My movements were feeble out there, floating on their own. My pivots weren’t grounded as they should be—firmly, like a pestle into stone. My turns were not centripetal enough; if I wasn’t held fast to a leader, I’d fly off into space instead of gravitating, turning ever into the embrace. And finally, devastatingly, for all the work I’d done, my balance wasn’t very good. I wobbled when I shouldn’t, foot to core, and leaned when I ought to have been standing cattails-tall. It seemed I’d made the other error followers so often make, mistaking close embrace for oversharing equilibrium. Which is to say, in learning to be held, I’d gone a bit too far: relying on the leader for my bearings as I shut my eyes and let the ballroom whistle past. No wonder I had felt so thi
n and friable with Enzo. So relieved to have my weight accepted, my embrace and footing honored, I’d given far too much away.
The old milongueros didn’t say only “la baila,” as in “dance her;” they also said “la lleva como dormida”: “carry her as if she were asleep.” I had been letting myself be danced como dormida, letting the leader carry me instead of moving on my own. But Marty didn’t want a sleepwalker; he wanted a practice partner. So he swung me out—arms’ length—and made me open up. This new technique required a different kind of standing on two feet: self-sufficient and unwavering. Learning to own the movement rather than let myself be swept along. I remembered exercises I’d glossed over from Mariela’s classes with a pang of recognition, and started running through a checklist for my dancing posture like the guidelines of a golf swing. I felt first for my foot placement, pressing each of three points into the ground—metatarsal, metatarsal, heel. In each step, I collected at my ankles, making a tidy passing V. I honored the lanes and tracks of legs, careful to space my feet at distances and angles that would align our movements in the proper, pleasing triangles. I used my heel—for power and control. And I listened for the lead, as carefully as if I’d had my eyes closed and the lead were Braille. With my eyes open, heeding my own unaided axis, I found I listened even harder. Each weight transfer from foot to foot was a buoy in the blind channel through my leader’s mind—a way of understanding, without speaking, how I needed to move next. I began to claim my balance everywhere I could. Active in my every muscle in the dance.
We tested my progress by dancing extra-slow. In open, this felt almost clinical. Where before, following had been pure obliterative reverie, now it was a strange cooperative construction. You carry this board over here; I’ll bring the nails. Here’s the hammer; I’ll duck while you swing. When we came to joints in the dance that were particularly insecure—the mid-steps of the turn, the landing after a sacada—we’d stop entirely, to see if I would waver or hold strong. The technique got more complicated, but so did the concept of connection. The push and pull and give and take, feeling the whole of someone else’s body working through the pressure of the palms. There was elasticity between the lead and follow that I hadn’t understood. Tango nuevo, I realized, just refers to everything that has happened in the dance since 1983. The term does not describe a style. Just one more era in the evolution of an art that feeds on innovation—challenge, originality, one-upmanship—and has done since its earliest days. In the 1940s it was Petróleo and El Negro Lavandina who “rethought” the dance—inventing steps, refining others, even stealing the enrosque from ballet’s pirouette. A banker and a bricklayer had forever changed the face of tango. Now it was Gustavo’s turn.
Tango Lessons Page 15
