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CHAPTER 19 Tango Zen

It has long seemed to me that there are two distinct wings of tango. I used to think of them as ‘techys’ and ‘feelys’ but over the years a more significant division has appeared. For the sake of discussion I want to characterise these as the introverts and the extroverts. The introverts concentrate on the music and the person in their arms, tending to dance more slowly with more pauses and tension. They are content in their own little world and find pleasure by tiny variations of a very modest number of movements. Their eyes are glazed or focussed who knows where and often the followers dance with eyes closed and dreamy expressions on their faces. They are most likely to be seen dancing in close embrace.

The extroverts tend to dance further apart, faster and with more flashy moves per mile. What mainly characterises them is the fact that they tend to look about them to see who is watching them. You can be kicked or barged by either tendency, but you are more likely to be trampled underfoot by the extrovert couple who will finish the figure they have started whatever happens around them.

The next time you are taking a rest in a milonga, watching the world dance by, it might be amusing to try to guess which wing of the tendency the dancers fall into. Long established couples make the job of assessment easy because they share the tendency. Where the fun lies is watching the mismatched couples. My experience leads me to believe that leaders are more likely to be extroverts but in any case it is not hard to spot the introverts among them. Because leaders shape the dance they can, to some degree, impose their feelings on their partners but it works in reverse too. I suspect that most followers would be more comfortable on the introvert side. That’s not to say they don’t like the odd mad fling; they do. Many genteel followers can become temporary gangster’s molls in the arms of some leaders. In addition, there lurks in the bosom of most introverted leaders the desire to look flashy from time to time. It rarely works out as planned. Flashy moves rarely succeed spontaneously. The show dances we so admire spend hours honing one or two exotic moves as a couple for a totally choreographed dance and even then things go wrong in the performance. How then can we mere amateurs bring off something flashy that we have spent a few minutes working at, often alone. It's all a bit like air guitar. Fun in the bedroom but no use in front of fifty thousand people in Wembley Stadium.

I long ago realised that I had a problem. Naturally, I am of the extrovert tendency. Well, what did you expect from someone prepared to write a book? The problem is that I am no good at it. To begin with I am too tall and heavy. My centre of gravity is too high for easy swift movements and changes of direction. Besides, most partners I meet are a foot shorter than I am. The worst thing however is that I did not discover tango until I had pass the age of fifty. This is not an excuse for not trying. It is merely my acknowledgement of the barriers that are insurmountable between where I am now and any ambition I might have to be a show dancer. The same handicaps would prevent me winning an Olympic Gold medal on the parallel bars. I have watched great show dancers my age doing amazing things. The difference is that they started in childhood and are now still trading on experience and muscle memory. I sometimes have difficulty tying my own shoelaces, now my back is so stiff. I think that the sight of a fat incompetent man performing flashy but inelegant complex figures with younger women is very unappealing. Such a man would be horrified to realise how vulgar and ungainly it looks. I think he would be better occupied working with the grain of his body shape, not against it, but it is all a matter of taste. Perhaps if he saw a video of himself he would change his point of view but I suspect he might take the line of giving up tango and that would miss the point altogether.

What makes tango so different from other dances is the concept of deep connection throughout a fully improvised dance that needs no checklist of ingredients to satisfy it. To coin a metaphor, the ungainly tanguero described above is piling cream on the jam on the butter of his bread because, in my view, his bread is in itself tasteless and lacking in meaning. Having watched so many tango masters dance great ‘bread’, I am delighted to attempt to suppress the extrovert in me and concentrate on making a really good loaf of bread because that is well within my ability.

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