“Tango is a sad thought that is danced”. – Enrique Santos Discépolo
”For the boys to dance, today I will play the Bandoneón, life is a Milonga” –Aníbal Pichuco Troilo
“…The Milonga makes you fall in love: Tango, hug, promise of something new!! …. ” Anonymous
Tango and me. I was always very jazzy. Ever since I started appreciating music more seriously, my absolute idol was Miles Davis (my black Labrador retriever was named Miles). Between this, and on the other hand, the fact that since I was a child, Tango was not something that was heard in my families home... so it was only when I was approximately 55 years old that I began to feel attracted by that mysterious music, so powerful and heartbreaking at the same time. A fascinating dance. When it "touched" me and I "went in", it didn't go out anymore, a kind of emotional fascination.
First I started going to the Milongas, attracted, as a photographer, by that kind of similarity with the image acquired in the film "Le Bal" by Ettore Scola. Large rooms, sometimes even sordid... with very different characters, often unusual, the dancers, who intertwined in sometimes bizarre hugs.
Characters that seemed to me many times as coming from the antipodes. It seemed that way to me at first. But soon I realized the opposite: milongas are the "real people", from everywhere (not a show on an artificial stage), coming to meet unknown people and bodies and to embrace them, to initiate a close, volatile encounter. A disciplined dance, but creative and sensual to the maximum. It may be something that many of us dreamed of before. This initial focus, the Embrace, is the spirit and essence of Tango.
Impossible to explain with words, intellectually. I was fascinated and touched! All this quickly and forcefully conveyed different feelings into me: emotion, vibration, passion, nostalgia, meeting, loneliness, closeness, embrace, joy, enriching diversity, awareness. Something was waiting for me too. It inspired me a lot. Soon I started with Tango classes. Central is to say: I could only feel that I really started to dance Tango and (sort of) to fly, if I may say so haha (for my low level, obviously), at the moment when I really started to listen to the music and the songs of Tango and let it resonate within me, letting myself go, forgetting the steps and the strict techniques that occupied me so much. The passion of Tango came to me!! Many times I would come home alone, from work or whatever, and I started dancing Tango, alone and between the furniture!!! I felt really mobilized and excited. How many things and experiences are written about Tango and Milongas!
A tango dancer told me something like: “Once tango bewitches you, you just wait for the next weekend. One day I realized that I carried tango shoes with me everywhere. Who could know where and when a Tango scene might emerge? Sometimes you go to a tango lesson or you just want to break the habit, just for a little while. First I went several times a week and I stayed there four or five hours, until very late. I was intoxicated by the music, the atmosphere, the energy that is generated in there, the hug, the dance, the unexpected encounter. It is a universe where the sensory wins: the bodies that blur against the light, the colors, the shine of the sequins and the shoe as a fetish. The milonga makes you addicted”.
And another, “… you cannot talk about dancing Tango without alluding to that kind of metaphysical clash, that almost inexplicable abstraction that determines the game between two people, the connection and, finally, the meeting, always made official in the embrace, the famous Tango embrace, the two foreign bodies suddenly united, not by a game of sensual seduction but by an artistic dance. Of course, many things happen or can happen in a hug, but Tango is one of the few spaces in which that hug can start and end there, without any further frustration. What happens during a Tango can be complete and perfect without going further, since there is no other search than the connection through the dance and in those specific minutes, in those 3 or 4 Tangos that form a tanda (batch). That is, a tight hug, as close as physics allows: Tango is the closest hug that the world of dance can allow, always within the limits of dance and without entering the game of seduction or sexuality...”