I preferred to dance with lighter leaders early in the evening, the ones who made me feel like we were water spiders dimpling a river. Coquettish, I ignored him. I felt his eyes on me, but made him do the work. My toes were pulsing and my face was ruddy with the dance of other men. He was an afterthought. He didn’t matter to me off the dance floor. But I let him linger; I let him tell me things like “I can’t get over how we danced last night, how beautiful it was,” how he’d been replaying moments in his head all day. In his version of me, the frightened schoolgirl made way for a new warrior queen. I liked that woman, and the Mogul brought her out in me. He was the tango equivalent of a martini in the early afternoon: he made me feel warm and buzzing, highly competent, and slightly slurred. Invincible. Within an hour or two, the effects wore off. But then again, the clock was ticking—and, with just one month left, I couldn’t lose.
Chapter Nineteen
two weeks before my imminent departure, Marty invited me to my first tango festival. Four days and five nights in Baltimore at Tango Element, the premier annual event in East Coast tango. He’d registered us for ten seminars, six hours of super-advanced classes daily, followed by prácticas, milongas, all-night milongas, after-hours milongas, and performances by visiting teachers, the best of the very best. We would split our time between Chicho and Sebastián, the base of Marty’s holy trinity, and come home glowing from the white heat of their haloes.
Festivals are unique to tango of the modern age, and there are hundreds of them. Dancers congregate in some distant hotel, most sharing rooms, two tangueros to a double bed, with some in sleeping bags or cots. The cafés sell out of bagels and bananas and cannot brew the coffee fast enough. The lobby couches and the halls are thick with dancers, and all the ballroom carpets are overlaid with rented wooden floors. For one long weekend, there is nothing more important in the world than dancing tango.
It goes like this: Coffee, sweatpants, dance shoes, hairbrush. Class for seven hours. Práctica. Stretch. Moan. Fall facedown on bed then roll off groaning to the shower. Cotton dress, mascara, splash of scent. Leave everything in room but heels and entrance wristband, pinned to skirt hem. Walk unladen through convention hotel halls and into swirling mass of dancers in a Gothic ballroom. Dance, and time submits. Dance until dawn glows cobalt through the giant windows. Pry your throbbing, sodden feet from shoe straps. Plod barefoot down marble floors. Elevator, key card, click shut of heavy door. No lights. Slip dress from shoulders to the floor. Toothbrush, hairbrush, bed. Sleep if you can. Wake to the bleating of clock radio alarms, and begin again.
Baltimore changed everything. I danced thirteen hours a day, class after class and tanda after tanda, rotating between heels and floppy ballet practice slippers. My feet went sore, then throbbing numb. I removed my ankle straps like turkey trussing, their imprint lashed into my skin. I danced until my toes blistered, until it hurt to stop.
At the opening milonga, traffic on the floor was four lanes thick. The wooden squares were tacky underfoot, making it difficult to pivot, and a step dead center would make each one sag. Dancers tangoed forth, undeterred. They kicked and spun and threw boleos, showing off. Leaders collided with other leaders, and followers occasionally lanced a passing dancer with their heels.
Sebastián was sufficiently annoyed by this lack of floorcraft that he scrapped his advanced lesson plan the next day and taught us dance floor etiquette instead. Sebastián is a bit of a prima donna. He has a reedy voice and a lustrous pouf of curls, often shellacked into a ponytail or other dapper do. His partner, Mariana Montes, is a sculpted blonde with hard-line cheeks and nose, straight hair, a pancake abdomen. They are showy dancers, capable of all the twirls and leaps and spins that impress theatregoers, yet their devotion to their art is visible in every aspect of their dance. They can embrace each other in a fluorescent room, in sweatpants, take three steps, and make a stranger cry.
For them to find us lacking was a condemnation. Sternly, they herded us onto the very edges of the dance boards and demonstrated tidy two-step sequences that could be done while waiting for the line of dance to come unclogged. Sebastián lectured us on proper entrance to the floor, traffic codes, the steps that he considered inappropriate for busy milongas. And that night, he assured us, he’d be watching.
The next day was the same. “This cannot be,” he said. “This simply cannot be.” The third day he yelled. How dare we desecrate his temple with such disrespect. How dare we presume to dance at levels higher than our own. We were amateurs and butchers. Where was our respect?
“You think you can do what we do,” he bellowed. “You cannot. You haven’t put the time.”
It was as if he’d slapped us with the unfair truth. None of us trained seven hours daily. None of us performed. But we saw his smooth fourth sacadas, the high-kick flash of Mariana’s heels, and we wanted all of it. We were impatient. Covetous. We wanted Herculean tango polish without twelve labors’ worth of toil.
Marty and I bounced between Sebastián’s lectures and Chicho’s anti-lectures. Chicho is a genius, but he is not a man of words. He would agree with Sebastián regarding floorcraft and respect, but the populist in him offers all his latest moves to every class, regardless of their commitment to the art. He’d studied first with Doctors Salas and Naveira at the Cochabamba laboratorio, and then eclipsed them. Gustavo once called Chicho “absolutely the best dancer I ever saw” and used to joke with Fabián, “We have to get him to really join us in this work, or else we have to break his legs!”
Chicho is the most advanced tango there is. He and his partner Juana have invented new colgadas where their bodies bloom out like the petals of a drooping tulip, nearly to the ground. Their feet meet in the center, like the pistil. He supports her at that daredevil angle only by her hand—then she throws in a front boleo to accentuate the empty space between them. In certain back boleos, Juana tips precariously to one side, her torso almost parallel to the floor as she whips her leg behind her. And then there are the spins—unorthodox breaches of embrace that flow into owlish over-rotated ganchos and sacadas as they pretzel through their turns. The moves were too advanced for nearly everyone, but the gauntlet of them had Marty flapping limbs in mad impatience.
Chicho leads extremely quietly. Most good leaders do. You cannot see the information being passed within the couple. This is how spectators miss most of the artistry and work of tango, and why, perhaps, all that’s left to untrained eyes is sex and legs. But Chicho’s quiet is unearthly quiet. There is no showiness in him, no broadcasting, no strain. His lead is silent, blank, as casual as a shrug, yet it upends the orbit of the dance.
Then there is tiny, freckled, red-haired Juana, substantiating what we cannot see. The effect of them is mystifying. He shifts a fraction of an inch and she flies off in all directions, her little feet vertical in her extension, like a cartoon deer. They dance like a bandoneón, pulling apart to come together, always elastic, always with exquisite tension in the air between them, yet also gliding, effortless. We took the neat blueprints of what they did and scribbled over them with crude attempts.
At the end of every lesson, Chicho stacked us into marching lines behind him and started rolling through the sequence he’d just taught, marking each step with a number. One, he said, leading Juana to a funny backward cross. Two, an off-axis rare boleo. Three, some inventive riff on the sentada, where the lady lifts and perches on a proffered knee. Sacada. Four, resolve and back to cross. It went on longer than I thought Marty’s memory could take. Then he upped the ante; the final moments of any Chicho class often culminate in this frantic drill: the same sequence repeated to match his virtuosic timing and his speed. Marty loved it. We couldn’t manage any one component of the sequence well, but we could flail through the motions. “Kid, who cares?!” he’d snap, and try to plug steps in by proxy, hurling me harriedly through each. What was important to him was to keep the pace, the breakneck devil pace of Chicho. Twenty couples stamped through complex moves, arms flying, feet pounding the f
loor, and Chicho held the center, stomping out the numbers, marking time. When the music cut, he shrugged off our obsequious applause and sent us out.
Marty and I separated each night for the milongas, which I spent mostly by myself, seining for dances or sulking in the coffee line. Festivals can be quite solitary. There is a lot of late-night mental silence to contend with, and the usual insecurities—waiting to be asked by strangers, the fear of messing up—are complicated here. Within the general mass merriment of tango festivals—the simple folk coming to meet new people and take exciting classes and buy new shoes from traveling boutiques—a more serious event transpires among the tango royalty. There ought to be a separate cordoned entrance and a secret handshake for the upper echelons. They all sit at the same tables, dressed to effortful perfection, and uniformly glowing from their dancing. Even if some of them might dance with you back home, the odds aren’t with you here.
Below the A-listers—the teachers, DJs, visiting superstars, and itinerant career tangueros—are the solid mid-list dancers of the region, your local equivalents. You won’t know who they are at first. You must not appear too eager or accept strange invitations willy-nilly. You have to be selective. Trouble is, they’ll be selective back. There are too many beavers out there whomping tails across the dance floor. It is important to be generous, and dance occasionally with beginners, but with all the seeing and being seen that goes on at festivals, the stakes are extra-high. The vetting process for potential partners can be exhausting. New leaders will not invite you until they see you dance—and if you’re dancing badly (or bearing up against the bad dancing of the individual you’re dancing with), you have to sit. You have to project poise in solitude, and dignity in attitude. No tanda will be worth your begging for it.
The Mogul was there as well, but on the prowl. I saw him lurking as I skirted the edges of the massive parquet floor. I, too, scanned the crowd. It was my counter-cabeceo, bringing out the conqueror in me. By the early hours, I’d be settled in the arms of strangers, careless, swirling. Subsumed, and rooted by the crowd. Di Sarli echoed down my legs and up the rafters. And up above us were the teachers, seated at the big round table on the dais, watching us watch them. This was tango at its purest: students at the feet of masters, a genteel hierarchy, a common cause.
Every midnight, the throng parted for one pair of teachers to take the center ballroom floor. We’d scatter to find seats for the performance as the DJ cued up songs: a tango or two first, then a milonga or a vals. A professional couple must be fluent and impressive in all three, to prove their versatility. After the festival, videos labeled by the couple, the song, and when and where they danced go viral among the tangoscenti. Theories spin from close readings of these clips, about the evolution of particular technique and trends versus the overall development of the dance. Performances give tango dancers something to aspire to, something to remind us of the magic binding us to tango.
Every couple was distinctive. Sebastián and Mariana threw in the usual leaps and Broadway spins, flashing around the ballroom, glittering in black sequins and silk. Their performances were surgical and sharp, every aspect perfect in its execution. When I watched them dance, I understood: I could not do what they did.
Pablo Rodríguez and Noelia Hurtado danced gently, in a way that constantly suggested circles. He hunched over her and she fit snugly in. Like so many professionals, she was petite even in her four-inch heels, and seemed to overflow with golden Botticelli curls and curves that spilled from her bodice, which was twisted sideways by the end of all their spinning. Their dance was liquid, spherical, full of tensile turns and wide-arc lapices.
Two lanky boys from Buenos Aires, Martin and Maurizio, were the only same-sex couple there. They wore beige jackets, white shirts, skinny ties, and danced a set of shifting leads powerfully asserted. Their dance was sharp, full of low kicks and rapid-fire ganchos, and seemed to come straight out of the old academias.
Silvina Valz was next, with short and snappy Oliver Kolker, who was then her spouse. I’d seen her once before, a few months earlier, on her own. She’d performed with Ciko, co-proprietor of Tango Café. Ciko was a free spirit who had walked away from a career in architecture to become one of the loveliest followers in the States. The faerie queene of tango, dressed in white. Silvina wore a fitted pantsuit and a blouse with ruffled cuffs, her long hair bunned into a sleek and geometric mass. She led three songs. Combined with Ciko’s flowing hair and quiet whimsy, the effect was mesmerizing. I remembered thinking that Silvina Valz led better than any man I’d ever seen.
I didn’t know much about her, save that she radiated depth—a dark star, pulsing—and she was beloved. She did not advertise herself the way most teachers and performers did. She did not troll for accolades. But when she showed up anywhere, the tango world stood at attention. I had no sense of where she lived. She was the nomad sage of New York, Paris, Buenos Aires. A daughter of the Golden Age. She’d learned the old way, from the ancient milongueros, by fitting herself inside their arms and following, by drinking cafecitos in their company, red wine late into the night. She’d left Argentina at the age of twenty and moved to Paris to become a dancer. She’d studied biokinetics, Feldenkrais, Alexander, modern dance, flamenco, and ballet, sought mentors for herself in poetry and philosophy, in thought and dance. Then she’d met Gustavo, the last teacher she studied with before becoming one herself.
Silvina was petite and filbert brown, with one long, straight rope of hair she twisted and moved from shoulder to shoulder whenever she was idle. She was neither wispy nor coquettish, though she was every inch a woman—thighs to eyes. When she danced with Oliver, whom she outmatched, her legs sliced out from underneath her slinky backless dress as though she herself had flayed the fabric into strips while dancing. I caught glimpses of the power and the muscle underneath her creamy skin as she flew by. Part elite athlete, part meteor. They danced a showstopping milonga to Canaro’s “La milonga de Buenos Aires,” a song that might as well have been written for Silvina herself. It’s a joyful, melismatic romp with an exceptionally fast-sung second verse extolling the virtues of a particular porteña, the flor de Buenos Aires. More than any other woman I had ever seen in dancing shoes, Silvina seemed to have that dignity of the porteñita primorosa, granddaughter of the beauty of the past.
I’d seen her that morning as well, stepping out of the lobby elevator as we stepped in. She had her long rope of hair tucked low, tied at her neck. She was wearing gym gear—black shorts and shirt and sneakers, headphones. She smiled dimly at those she recognized, fiddled with her phone. The crowd parted in deference as she passed. I wondered how she had the energy to teach, dance, and perform all weekend and still go down to face the treadmill in the windowless hotel gym. Her body was everything mine was not—muscled and curvaceous, brimming with abundance. Soft where I was boned. And mighty, despite her litheness. She moved like a grande dame and a dictator, ladylike and lordly all at once. Every step was masterful, and strong. I’d heard stories of her showing up to the milongas in a pair of chino shorts. As if opting out of the tango costume theatre of allure. As if withholding the unembarrassed sexuality in her for a more private sphere. Silvina concealed nothing, but was very clearly not for public consumption all the same.
During their next dance, Silvina overtook the lead mid-song. This time she led in four-inch strappy heels, pushing forward with force enough to guide her husband through the intricate footwork. She betrayed no strain. Beaming, she drove him up and down the floor. She embellished, threw in a playful hop; the crowd went mad. And her enrosques, the involute in-place spirals that are a leader’s most impressive bit of flair, outshone his by several carats. I’d envied other dancers’ talents, their sensuality and power, but what I wanted from Silvina was her unimpeachable integrity. Her self-possession, her unrestrained uniqueness on the floor. And her immovability—the fierce fidelity to who she was.
Chicho and Juana were saved for Sunday night, the final performance of the festival.
He wore a simple suit and silver dancing sneakers, she a gold and gauzy dress. They looked like gods: the long-haired rebel with his sparkling Artemis. They strode into the center space. We cleared the floor as we had for all the others, forming a cross-legged circle at the edge. They embraced just before the music cued, then started dancing, slow and understated. I looked on with awe.
It’s rare to watch a tango couple as a pair. Followers follow the ladies’ footwork; leaders watch the men. Chicho and Juana were different. He piloted; she flew. But the mechanics were invisible. There was only the indistinguishable border—where his dark sleeves met her bare arms, where his leg whipped through air with her boleo. It was so intimate, I felt like an intruder. Juana kept her eyes closed or averted, and spun atop her perfect feet like the tiny ballerina in a music box.
It is often said that so-and-so is on the music, so-and-so is in the music, but Chicho simply was the music. He danced to beats and off-beats, to all the tiny and forgotten flashes of instruments half-hidden by the orchestration. Saying, this is how this song wants to be danced. Sometimes he didn’t dance at all, just stood there holding her. Even his stillness danced. His body spoke the song: the pain, the joy, the longing. This is in here, he seemed to say—with a back cross or with a subtle, errant turn into a trifle of piano. There is also this, he danced, and this.
We clamored for them, pounding our fists and Comme il Fauts into the floor, whooping. Don’t stop. Never stop. One more song. A two-song encore is considered standard. Chicho and Juana were asked for five.
When the performance ended, we hobbled stiff-kneed to our feet. The tinny tunes resumed. Men found willing partners; mortal couples took the floor. I was in a stupor, but I caught the Mogul’s cabeceo and met him on the southwest corner of the line of dance. I took his shoulder and his hand, and he my back. I inhaled his soap and gel. And something deep within me clicked.
Tango Lessons_A Memoir Page 18
