Note: I’ve decided to switch my shorter musings, grumbles, diary entries and general superfluous opinionated rants about tango from Facebook to here (I’ll be adding the older ones, too) for reasons too boring to go into. You’ll still find that the links have been shared to my account at Terpsichoral Tangoaddict and are welcome to leave comments there, too, where they are likely to be responded to more quickly and generate a much livelier discussion.
A beginner friend commented recently that she needed to learn some of the fancier, flashier tango movements, such as ganchos and colgadas, because she would soon be leaving Buenos Aires, where so many dancers favour a pared-down, restrained style, to a home community which she memorably christened The Land of the Legwrap. Disclaimer: I haven’t been to the community in question so can’t judge the accuracy of this description. But I have been to many other outposts of Legwrap Land. They are legion, especially in our mirror-image northern neighbor.
Legwrap country is an odd place: expanses of flat and featureless desert alternate with sudden dramatic single peaks which seem to rise out of nowhere, perfect cones of volcanos ejaculating sulphurous lava high into the air, amid the flat fields of an endless suburbia. There are no foothills, only sudden eruptions of jagged icy rock, like pointy blips on the smooth electronic line of the heartbeat of someone already pronounced dead. Every river is a torrent cutting a huge swathe through an endless parched sandy plain. And the land is empty of ordinary people: except for the occasional giant whose mammoth shadow darkens entire continents at once.
Because what is so often lacking in the dancing of the inhabitants of this land is some sense of connection between one movement and the next. We see the dancers shuffle through this bit of boring walking here, manhandle the follower and trip over the leader through this mundane half giro, so that they can get to the interesting part, to the exciting, fancy move. It’s as though the rest of the dance were a boring coach journey along a featureless motorway, a subway ride deep underground: what you are waiting for is to disembark, emerge at the stops. At last, we made it to Volcada Village, let’s rush up the escalators and come out, blinking in the sunlight of Boleo Town.
The ‘advanced’ moves are the point of their dancing. The other movements mostly facilitate getting into position or marking time between opportunities for the fancy stuff. They arrange their bodies in the right constellation and then stop the dance for a moment to ‘do’ the move. I’m reminded of people posing for a series of photographs — although their wish is not necessarily to look good to spectators; they can just as well be motivated by a desire to feel the satisfying thump of two thighs bouncing off each other, the sensation of leaving the vertical for an off-axis lean. But what reminds me of photography is the oddly jerky, static quality of their dance. It’s a series of freeze frames, with a bit of rushing in between. The sensation is of two people getting into position: right, you stand here, I’ll go there, let’s make sure we are in the right light, let’s get those flowers into the background of the shot, let me just turn my face into profile — got it! Photographer, capture this moment.
But dancing isn’t a series of poses. Good dancing can’t be isolated into moves, nor is it about taking separate elements and somehow inserting them, like raisins into porridge. The porridge is the thing itself. It’s the journey that matters, it’s the road we travel, the trail, the gradual, smooth transitions. The dance is not individual freeze frames, it’s the stuff that holds everything together, it’s in the connection between one moment in time and the next, about being present and alive and deep in our enjoyment at every second. The real moment of the dance can no more be pinned down than an electron in its fuzzy shell, it’s not individual particles rushing through emptiness, it’s a smear that blurs and blends everything together. No one moment is more important than any other. It’s about fully inhabiting every place you occupy in space, whether you rest there in a pause that lasts an entire phrase or just alight for a second in the fastest, lightest traspie.
Once you’ve understood that, the holistic nature of the dance, then, yes, if you want you can make more dramatic movements part of that flow — although, when you discover how wonderful that feeling of constant presence can be, you may suddenly understand why so many highly-skilled dancers never do those fancy figures, why so many of them love the smooth skating so much that they don’t feel the need to leap up in triple saltos. My problem with the denizens of Legwrap Land is not so much that they are dancing fancy moves way before they are capable of doing them well — and, of course, those movements look clownish and feel jerky when done badly — it’s that they have abandoned the concept of flow. For the sake of a few towering trees, they’ve chopped down the rest of the forest. Their dance is a list of nouns, not a verb. For the sake of their fancy moves, they’ve abandoned the whole concept of dancing.