Character and compatibility

I mentioned a dancer - in England - who had first shown me how powerful a quiet dance with the characteristics I described could be. As with the man in Buenos Aires, I asked him how he came to dance the way he does.  He replied in a similar way - that it was the result of a lot of social dancing, years of experience in the milonga. Neither guy mentioned classes. 

Both men share similarities beyond giving memorable dances so I wonder if these are characteristics of such dancers.  Both dress casually, are quiet, discreet, are in every way wholly unobtrusive.  Both say little, look much, start to dance unusually soon.  I was surprised at this in the Argentine because most people in Buenos Aires chat well into the track before starting to dance.  He I only ever saw dancing in the inner ronda which may be in part why it took me over three weeks to spot him. Both men dance musically and above all for the woman and to the conditions of the woman and the couple. 

The interesting thing about both these dancers is that neither of their dances are characterised by moves. I simply don't see how teaching in class can create that kind of dancing and I have never seen or heard of anyone trying to teach the kind of things that characterise it.  To try and do that in class would be absurd and grotesque because what is created between the couple is a feeling, a sense.  It is to do with the music and the couple.  I do not see how it is something that can be taught in a class.  It is something I think you learn yourself with and through other people and it does not require speech. My description is perhaps not very helpful but what it does suggest is that what some (not all) think of as good dancing is not about "dance levels”.  It is perhaps about finding compatibility of various things, including character within the dance.  In this sort of dance - I speak from the girl’s side of things - there is trust, harmony, discovery.  The words I am reaching for are nebulous, words like understanding, recognition. 

But this is one perspective. This sort of dance is not or at least does not seem to be what everyone wants.

“Many different perspectives”

I suggested comparing the kind of dancing that goes on in class with what happens in a real milonga and I want to give an example of the difference and power of the latter. 

March, 2016: I was in Salon Canning, Buenos Aires on the afternoon of my penultimate day of dancing. Perhaps because it was not busy I noticed a man in the inner ronda. He danced musically, quietly, very discreetly. He wore normal clothes, a t-shirt, nothing fancy. For all those reasons you could easily overlook him or just not notice him. His focus was peculiarly inward to the dance, to the couple. Unlike some Argentine guys who check out the girls while they're dancing, it was as though he wasn't really aware of anything but his dance with that girl, but he glanced up occasionally, aware of the available space. 

I don't usually look specifically to dance with smaller guys I don't know unless something happens. Maybe before an invitation he makes me laugh from a distance or establishes some kind of persuasive rapport, preferably still at that distance. None of that applied here. 

 I watched to see where he was sitting but he went behind me. He went to sit in a very quiet spot near the back. The next tanda began. I remember being mortified that if I wanted to catch his eye I therefore had to look behind me, which was hardly discreet. Luckily, he saw me straight away and invited. Years later, Christine told me she had "hunters eyes" and had used them professionally abroad, to assist a birdspotting professional who gave tours.  The real milongueros also have hunter's eyes!  

 

I can't really describe this dance and I'm not sure I really want to. I don't think a dance has ever felt more private. Later, I said in confusion to my non-dancing friend who had come to watch - “What did it look like?” and was surprised and relieved when the answer seemed to be mostly just “quiet”. The reason I am writing about it is because I wish more guys had this approach. I didn't realise until then quite how very different dancing in the milonga could be - not just compared to what goes on in tango dance class, but even in relation to other couples in a traditional milonga. I often think dance is like life and to see people who have that approach in life too would be wonderful. I mention it also because it was two years before I had a dance that was anything like this in England and not until 18 months later on my first visit to Argentina that I had a dance which reminded me of it. I have occasionally had not dissimilar dances with guys - once in Tango West last year, a couple of times with a visitor to Glasgow - but they are rare. I wish that they were not and that is why I want to mention these dances. I realised this man must make women feel the way he made me feel every time he dances yet I encounter this kind of dancer almost never. I told a new guy dancer, a young man I danced with a lot one night in both roles at La Catedral, a guy I found to be a very good and talented dancer, that the best suggestion I could give him was to find this man who he had seen in Canning and see if he would dance with him, with my friend in the woman's role. I didn't know if this would work because I can't imagine a presumably straight guy making another possibly straight guy feel that way. But I thought it was worth trying. At least the conversation would be interesting.

I want to make clear that these great dances have nothing to do with extravagance or any kind of movements beyond the simplest and most common. Other kinds of wonderful dances which may or may not have moves can be thrilling, fun, dynamic, all sorts of things. This was not these exactly and yet it was marvellous.

It was exactly how it had looked - only more so. After perhaps the first track the man mentioned Gavito and about what happens in the dance between the steps. There is a good, experienced dancer in Edinburgh who I remember saying the same thing. I don't quite know why the Argentine said it because when dancing with him that was so clear.

Another time he mentioned the silences in the dance. We had been dancing the music but I knew what he meant. I read later that apparently Gavito talked about that too. I also read that Gavito was master of the "less is more" school. The dances I am describing or perhaps not describing well were all along those lines. I had not paid much attention to Gavito previously being put off by some of his show dancing online.

I had been at Canning I think less than a couple of hours but I wanted to leave after that dance. I didn't feel like any more dances but decided that was absurd. I remembered a conversation which made me think that the cortina should act, among other things, as a palate cleanser. I decided to dance with a different guy. I looked, he invited. He did dance the music and without "moves" yet I have seldom felt more incidental, less necessary, relevant to or part of a dance. He might as well have danced with a mechanical doll. I did leave after that. The intuition that I should have stopped dancing after the quiet guy was right. I am glad though that I did not, so that I understood the contrast of how differently two men could see the dance, the woman and the couple.

The next night, my last, a Thursday, I went to a couple of clubs but did not enjoy them so took a cab to club Gricel around midnight and relaxed.

Across the floor from where I was sitting set back in semi darkness I was surprised to see the guy from Canning. He invited me. We danced three tandas across the rest of that evening. He invited so discreetly, I was sometimes not quite sure. I realised that he thought the same about my acceptance. There was a tanda of lovely Rodriguez songs, a kind of well known, lush Di Sarli I usually avoid but enjoyed with him and something absolutely awful: DJ Carlos Moreira, usually fairly reliable for me, but now in one of his most extravagant moments. I'm still ashamed and puzzled why I looked to the guy during such awful music. Perhaps because I'd missed the sweet, rhythmic OTV and the lovely calm D'Agostino. Somehow I still enjoyed the dancing, if not that music. I can't imagine how that works because for me good music and good dancing are inextricable. Perhaps my partner liked the music, certainly he danced it so maybe that's how it worked. It was my last tanda in Buenos Aires. I did not tell him I was leaving. I felt frustrated when after the drama tanda there was great rhythmic Di Sarli but by then I'd already gone to change my shoes. 

He reminded me of another dancer.  I asked him if he was a teacher. He looked at me surprised and said no. I was not surprised because I have never seen that much discretion in a teacher. I asked him how he came to dance the way he does. He looked surprised again and said he'd just been coming to the milonga for fourteen years. 

That same last night in Gricel I accepted a slim, young guy I'd seen dance but when we danced was still taken by how similar he was in style to the guy from Canning. I don't expect to find this in such young guys where style and ego often dominate. But this guy was lovely. No drama, no stunts, just dancing the music with all sensitivity to the woman and the feeling between the couple. How does it happen that it takes two years to discover dancing like that at all, then to have similar dances once or twice a year and then suddenly to find two guys like that in the same room at the end of the same night? Do guys spot something in girls when they have dances like that? Or is it just coincidence? 

With these men and with others who dance similarly, we didn't talk much between tracks. There didn't seem to be a need. But between one of our dances I stuttered out to the guy from Canning the realisation I had come to from dancing with him  - or remembered from two years previously but with revelatory strength. The insight was simply: that a dance to the same music, even on an Argentinian floor, even between different couples all dancing in a more or less traditional way could be so utterly different as to defy coherent expression. And I  wondered to myself that such a dance, so quiet and understated could have such power. I didn’t say all of this but I knew he understood. He smiled and said "Yes, many different perspectives...."

Marsyas

We have no ban on reading at the table in our house - if the reading is shared.  How can good food and good stories be bad together?  Besides, I find a combination of a good story and posh oil and vinegars means my children will eat platefuls of salad without complaint.

During the summer I read Sally Pomme Clayton and Jane Ray's lovely book Greek Myths: Stories of Sun, Stone, and Sea to them while they finished their tea. The reference to applause in that story reminded me of applause in the milonga.

There are different versions of the story of the musical competition between the god Apollo and the satyr Marsyas.  Even the victory is not always clear - in some versions Apollo wins, in some Marsyas (briefly, at least), but in most of them (though not in Greek Myths),  Marsyas dies in agony, victim of the jealous, vengeful god.

Over time, Marsyas has been represented in different ways because through the challenge or threat to power, and in the way he meets his end, Marsyas is a political figure.  In some versions it is Marsyas who, with hubris, challenges Apollo.  In that light by challenging a god Marsyas becomes a contributor to his own end.  In a contrasting version it is Apollo or someone else who sets up the competition.  Now Marsyas appears more an unwitting pawn or perhaps a knowing catalyst in a story that reveals Apollo's own weaknesses, leading him to torture and murder.

In one version of the Marsyas story, the competition appears to be going in Marsyas' favour until Apollo sings to accompany his lyre whereupon Marsyas complains that the addition of the voice is unfair. Apollo counters that using his voice is no different to Marsyas using his breath to animate his flute and if the one should be disallowed then so should the other, whereupon Apollo is declared victor. 

In some versions Apollo flays Marsyas for quarrelling.  In other versions where the complaint is omitted, he is flayed because his better musicianship humiliates Apollo.  Whichever version you prefer, although Marsyas dies, if legacy counts, it is Apollo who comes off worst, as is often the case with an abuse of power.  The flaying of Marsyas, victim of Apollo's pique or jealous fury might make for great art (Titian) or rather gruesome poetry (Robin Robertson) but I prefer the ending in Greek Myths where in victory Marsyas is well-loved and inspires others.  It is more subtle too because Apollo's presumption of victory in that story already shows his flaws.  The flaying in the other versions only compounds them.

I am reminded of a recent conversation with a friend who made the point that the renegade is always killed in the end - and not only metaphorically.  Christ most famously, Galileo managed to pull off his survival, but Giordano Bruno didn't.  Gandhi stood up to the British although his assassination was by a Hindu nationalist.  Perhaps most famously, Socrates, stinging gadfly who provoked thought in others was another who met a hastened end for speaking truth to power.  It is no mere coincidence for me that the same man is also  remembered for:  "But I was never any one's teacher." (Apology, 33a).

In any mythological-type story, characters are archetypes, examples of types of people and as such are a way of seeing what might happen when these types interact under certain circumstances.  Our interpretations of those interactions reveal truths about ourselves and others.  It is not just about what happens overtly (in this case Apollo wins and Marsyas dies) but the longer legacy of that outcome because ideas persist for centuries.  In this case, the idea might be those with power can be weak, fallible and cruel and the legacy of their actions can dog them - or any alternative reading you might care for.

In the real world Marsyas had an interesting afterlife . There was a statue of him in the Roman Forum, the area of public life - commerce, politics, law, religious worship, triumphal processions and gladiatorial sport. His statue was often found in the fora of other ancient cities. Some think it was a warning against arrogant presumption and pride.  If you were wealthy and powerful with a position in business,  law or administration  you might set up a statue of Marsyas warning against hubris and the challenge to authority.  You might even erect it to say, no matter what the circumstances, don't presume to win against authority, though it's hard to think of a better demonstration of hubris.

And yet, Marsyas was garlanded. "I warn you to know your place - but am garlanded." Does that not seem frivolous? Not only was the statue sometimes crowned with flowers it may have been sacred because a thief of that chaplet was once imprisoned. Courtesans gathered around the statue.   Marsyas was in legend, a satyr, follower of Pan, god of the wild, of rustic music and the companion of nymphs. Pan himself was a son of Hermes, god of transition, of boundaries, of traveller.  Or, he was a son of Dionysus (Bacchus for the Romans), god of wine, fertility, the theatre, ritual madness and religious ecstasy - all ways, one might say to pleasure but also to insight, of seeing further, or at least, differently. Marsyas has the air of the rebel about him and we need rebels not least to show the flaws in the established order. Is Marsyas a martyr, a rallying point, symbol of resistance, a symbol of truth against vested power and interest?  But perhaps if you were an ordinary Roman you couldn't risk voicing that thought. Maybe a ring of flowers was a symbol of allegiance and as far as you could go.

The view of Marsyas is rather like the polarised views there are through history.  Many years ago I talked with a kind Irishman about "rebels".  "The patriots", you mean he said, smiling.  William Wallace is another - rebel and renegade or patriot and freedom fighter depending on where you stood, where you still stand. Marsyas seems to stand between power and plebeian. Maybe he represents the idea that a challenge to authority can go either way.  He reminds me of Janus, god not just of endings and beginnings, past and future but also of peace and of war.   

The different ways Marsyas is represented or that his story is appropriated says so much about the teller.  A work of art, a concept, a story that allows a variety of interpretation is one that fulfils one of the roles of art in life: to allow us to reflect on the kind of beings we are. The way we tell about something can say more than any actual facts.  The story of Marsyas for me is a story of perspective, sister of empathy, both conduits for the kinds of truths we learn through the experience of others.  Film, drama, fiction, stories, poems are facets of the same magic that allows us to swap our own perspective so that we may see through the eyes of another and learn from that experience.

The same happens when you dance in the embrace.  You understand how your partner feels the music and wordlessly, you have, through the physical, the more-than-physical sense of who they are.

The Blind Men and the Elephant

Wikimedia Commons

Text of the poem.

November, 2014:

A: When, in the practimilonguero videos the older people say tango is a feeling, a passion, they don't only mean the music, do they...?

B: They don't. There's nothing "only" about this music :)

***

In July 2012  I went to my first tango social dance in Edinburgh.  It was a one-off event for beginners in the port of Leith, an area of the city by the docks.  I had been going to classes in another town for about a month.  The subject of "tango" came up in conversation with a new acquaintance, evidently an experienced dancer.  I don't remember how the conversation started but we were talking about it as I suppose a bundle of associations.  It would be at least another two years before I realised that tango is not a verb, perhaps not even a well-defined notion, it is accurately a kind of music to which we dance.   According to him "tango" could become a kind of obsession, an addiction, that people could take things too far, could get too wrapped up in it. Tango could come to mean more to them than what it is.  They could, if not careful, develop a tendency to forget that it is just a dance.  It wasn't a warning exactly, more an observation.

 Perhaps a year later I mentioned to an experienced teacher how "tango" - I suppose I meant the  self-contained space of the milonga - was a refuge from daily life.  "For some", he said, amused while I squirmed.  Tango is different for everyone.

Over three years on that music and dance, the life of the milonga - where I hear and dance tango - is for me a filter on life.  The milonga is a microcosm for, not the world, not society but specifically for how people interact with one another.  So it is true for me now that life and what happens in the milongas overlap. You hear it said that for some "tango" is a way of life, or that it is a journey in life as much as in dance or that the milonguero lifestyle is one where people spend a lot of time in the milongas.  It is not just any of those things for me.  The milongas are a way of seeing, of understanding things about life.

I see now that "tango" is different things for different people:  a kind of music, a kind of dance, an image, a fantasy; it's a hobby, a dance class, a marker in the week, a way to spend time with a partner,  a way of meeting others.  For some it is a way of meeting singles; for the predatory it is a hunting ground, a way of getting their hands salaciously on the young, the vulnerable and the unwary. It can become a means of asserting power, a form of social competition, an aspiration, a means of ambition, something to work on, something serious, "something difficult and rewarding...a valid, satisfying and worthy goal... an adequate justification for persistent effort" (here), a career; a show, a passion, a contest.  Tango for some is an exploration, an adventure, an enhancement to travel, an international community, a shared language, a way of belonging.  It can mean a social occasion, a time to meet friends, or a way of being anonymous; an opportunity to meet strangers, a way of connection.  It can be relaxing, focusing, a meditation, a means of mindfulness, a time of reflection on the past or the future, a time to be wholly in the present, an elusiveness, a mystery, a release, an oblivion, a pleasure, an ache, a drug, another world.  It is a feeling, an intuition, a recognition, a pull, a "something" that makes you want to dance.   

It is a question of perspective. 

The eponymous song.