Games and Players

Photo by and (c)2008 Derek Ramsey (Ram-Man)
and the Chanticleer Garden via Wikipedia. [CC BY-SA 3.0]

The dance teacher, from Italy, was preoccupied with the holiday and with teaching but occasionally we chatted. He was intelligent and interesting. I forget exactly the question I asked but it was something like: what did he enjoy most about the milongas or about dancing tango?  He smiled and said it was when he was in the ronda and he spotted a girl, sitting, watching, who also noticed him. Perhaps she looked away but when he came round again he would see her once more and they would play that silent game of recognition between a man and a woman. It wasn't quite that brutal game with daisies: ‘he loves me / he loves me not’, but: ‘he wants me / he wants me not’.  I have heard it called the look, look away game. And then he gets her, maybe not always, and not straight away, but sometimes. I could see the attraction, but I was callow then.

Recounting the story to my teachers when I got back, the female teacher looked disapproving.

- What's wrong?

- What he said - it isn't done.

What the Italian had said made sense in a guy-girl way, but not in a way that I understood or practised in dance. I was still dancing steps in class trying to mesh the woman's step with the man's step. Whether someone looked at you was neither here nor there - and no-one did because they were all being directed.

It wasn't until much later that I realised my teacher had disapproved because when one truly dances tango, the attention, the focus is wholly on the partner. To go looking at other girls when you already have one in your arms...I wondered if the Argentinians had a word for it.

That brief chat was a useful lesson, much more so than the ones I paid for to learn moves and technique. Later, in Buenos Aires, I saw how blatantly some guys played that game and how studiously others avoided it. When I danced with the game-players I realised they didn't dance well. But José and Roberto were among those wholly absorbed in their partner and they danced superbly. 

In Buenos Aires, it was always about that game; it permeated the atmosphere in place of the cigarette smoke there used to be. In Europe and in some of the milongas for younger people in Buenos Aires the atmosphere is different. Especially where the dancers are younger, it is more about the guys who pose and dance in a detached, flashier style, and the guys who don't.