In this photograph from the memorial services on Sunday, we see how his friends were projecting dozens of photographs of Georg, from his childhood through his illness as more very beautiful music was played, people filed in carrying food for the buffet, some embracing, all then sitting quietly. Then the two women closest to him spoke briefly about caring for him those last months, how they felt that he died surrounded by love. It was terribly sad and terribly beautiful all at once.

On that Friday, in a room filled with maybe 150 strangers, the news was completely unexpected. The band was at the end of its first set, and the floor was thick with energetic dancers. Raphael said: “Bassa is now going to play a piece in memory of our friend Georg, who died of a brain tumor on Wednesday. He was a great friend of ours, and they will play and there will be no dancing, this is in his memory …” We all backed up to the walls, leaving the floor empty, completely empty, but for the sweaty air. The band then filled the room with sadness — all the more striking as they had been playing tango music and now suddenly these classically-trained musicians played something else, modern chamber music: it was completely sad and moving. Afterwards, for what seemed to be a very, very long time, nobody moved. There was no sound, not even of breathing. There were tears, and then Andreas said we had simply to move on. No one was in a hurry.

On Sunday, after the service, I felt empty and headed to the subway, but Margit told me I had simply to move on then, too. So I returned to the milonga.

Children, of course, are the best thing for such moments, and on Sundays Tangotanzen Macht Schön welcomes them generous with a quiet room to the side and child care, there were many, including the 11-year-old of a very nice dancer and former dance classmate. When we met to dance the daughter suddenly needed a pencil. With Mom off to find one, she checked me out, and when we were finished dancing she came right over, wanting to be introduced, and within minutes was showing me her vocabulary book in English and her math lessons and said she wanted a piece of chewing gum.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N8TTiXEFMg8

And then this wonderful thing happened: a perfornamce by Alessandro Hermida, who was in town from Argentina to give workshops. He is famous for his study of the masters and holding true to the milonguero style of the 1940s, which in respect to tango nuevo and the zillion variations of the dance being done here in Berlin these days is conservative, but also quite welcome by many, and especially, as it was in Georg’s.To appreciate why this performance (view also dance 2, dance 3) was so moving to me I must explain that I to love the modern music and dance. For months I listened to Bajofondo’s Mar Dulce just about every day so I might begin to understand it, as I have many other modern works. I’ve gotten to like the techno version that is so popular here in Berlin and elsewhere, like this. But with the Hermido performance I was brought back to the basics.

Where Mar Dulce builds complexity onto the traditional forms and seeks to develop something contemporary, the Hermida perfomance seeks essences in each of the dance’s four major dimensions.In respect to the floor, the dancers maintain a precise balance, their heads leveled, their backs precisely erect, and their feet bearing their weight with precision.

In respect to their partnership, the most notable quality is his care to insure her consensus. He gives her sufficient sufficient time to respond precisely and happily, and so predictable is his lead that she taps and caresses the floor almost at her leisure.

In respect to the music, the the dancers stay well within music’s 8-bar structure, with adventures in the middle and pauses as the music recommends.And in respect to the other dancers, as we see especially with the first piece, they walk carefully around the room, giving each of us a chance to see them close, in the middle, and from afar and so offering a balanced perspective.

The respect for floor, partner, music, and the rest of us who wanted very much to see the dance done well was just what I needed on this sad day. They spoke of tragedy and dignity.

—–

ps: I think a “ps” is the way to look at the following comment, because a friend just left a message on my Facebook page asking if I’d seen the UNESCO recognition of the Argentinian tango, http://bit.ly/3vc5xd, and it led me to think about how the talk about “endangered languages” did little to illuminate the tremendous revival of tango (and other dances since 1985) and what this suggests about culture and cultural heritages. I directed him to this site, and wrote:

“… I talk about the death of one of my dance teachers, and on the day of a memorial service at Max und Moritz, about the performance I saw just down the street at “Tangotanzen Macht Schön”, and where I’ve linked to the video I made of a performance of an Argentinian and his German partner at the beginning of two weeks of classes led by him — a dancer who has elevated the traditional 1930s-40s “milonguero” style, to something quite elegant and modern: transformed a rather macho style into something more consensual and dignifying: notice how his respect for time allows her to execute each figure with dignity and grace. So, I would amend to UNESCO declaration to celebrate not the dance, but the generous embrace of a cultural heritage by others, and especially the Europeans, and especially the Germans, and maybe even especially the Berliners … who you see circles around the dancers in this video, observing, and if you were an intimate observer of the scene, would then see, over weeks and months, how the cultural values that this dancer conveyed were taken up in the way partners hold each other now a bit differently, set up figures maybe with a little more care … that there is a resonance here that in various contexts, especially this one (Berlin, once scene of terrible crimes, now rich cultural scene, but still a place of bureaucracies, corruption, brutalities on a smaller scale, like many other places), develop special meanings … “

Learning from other dancers is built into the business: our lessons are based on demonstrations, explanations, and training: over and over we exercise, until we learn the elements in our muscles, bones, and bodies and can do it without thinking. When dancing, we pick up the “fire” of the other dancers, so to speak, and in very practical ways: we leaders are trained to pay attention to our distance form those in front and those behind (we call them “our friends”) and to follow their lead, too, such that in especially attentive dance scenes one can observe similarities of movement that have been picked up and passed along. At Bebop, I often amuse my partners by saying, “we’re behind Karsten, we’re going to do everything he does,” which is a wonderful joke because he has been dancing 20 years and dances in a very special way and it would take me five years I would guess to even come close. Last Tuesday, one of my favorite partners, who is in fact taking a class with Karsten, said that she could see the other people in her class carrying what they learn into the weekly milonga there and remarked how the style of this scene was being “Karstenized”.

There is another wonderful comment, one I’ve heard repeated by some of the younger teachers when I’ve asked them “why tango, and why now?” They answer as if they were therapists, saying, that with this dance young people are finding an opportunity to connect with each other in a society that otherwise pits them against each other.

Mostly I want to be dancing and not writing about it, and usually the conversation is likely of little interest outside of those taking part in it, but when explaining to a partner how completely wonderful, but from a very different time, was the dancing I saw of Gloria and Eduardo Arquimbau in New York City last year I learned that my explanations made little headway until I could dig up some youtube videos and offer a demonstration. So now I have something to say.

The problem was explaining the “fantasia” style to someone who had not grown up watching Disney films, and more generally, understanding the difference between the older and newer, more modern way of dancing that my favorite teachers and dancers dance, something that has been heavily influenced by modern dance and features less emphasis on showing for others and more on the partner’s communications, what I first learned in San Francisco as “the intimate embrace”.

The older style is perhaps best introduced with the film that has given it its name, “Fantasia”, and especially the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” sequence, which I will then compare to a video from the 1950s of Gloria and Eduardo — a performance consistent with the dancing they perform for others today, such as this clip made around the time that I saw them in New York City in December 2007.

Both clips begin with the protagonists as lower class and stuck doing menial work for a living, and in both the absence of their masters occasions their breaking into dance.

To be sure, the Disney clip is vastly more complicated as Mickey enters into a Faustian bargain with technology. He steals the sorcerer’s hat, assumes the magical powers that comes with it, orders the brooms to set about collecting water, only to wake up from a dream of infinite power to find that the brooms have run amok and that he is powerless to stop them. It really is a remarkable nightmare, for then he chops the uncontrollable broom into pieces only for each to regenerate yet another uncontrollable broom and all obsessed — this film produced in the California desert — with collecting unlimited supplies of water and ending with the sorcerer’s return, an all-powerful God parting the waters, to save the errant child.

While Gloria and Eduardo dance shares with the Disney film a celebration of youthful energy, playful sense of purpose, and happy precision in movement, their scene of work is simply a background for a light, decorative comedy and there is nothing of the psychological complexity nor historical allegory. While in this clip’s final scene the actors and camera move so that their employer, still sleeping, is hidden behind the dramatic end pose, there is absolutely no threat that she will wake up or return later to haunt them.

In the contemporary dance clip of Tomás Howlin and Brigitta Winkler one finds neither depth psychology nor historical allegory, but a drama of real-time communication being worked out on the surface of the dance, for example, in the follower’s taking her time in the turns. It is clear that these skilled dancers can and do move perfectly as one, but when they do not it is always because the follower has chosen to slow down, offering resistance, until one can almost see the a debate over autonomy and cooperation being played out in slow motion.

I don’t think I am projecting onto this clip, because something like this is what I am being taught here in Berlin from teachers who know Brigitta Winkler and her dance intimately. I have had to learn how to lead, but the business of leading, so I am being taught, is carefully limited: I set the direction and pace, and at the end of a step or figure I regain control to do so again, but in the middle my partner is active, responsible, signals to me all manner of feeling and suggestion, and if I don’t take that up I am an idiot.

Show dancing is often a wonderful thing, but it seems beside the point of much of the social dancing that I am learning, where men of my generation have to learn how to lead, as if we lost this along the way, and where women have to learn how to follow, as if they lost that along the way, too. Many say that rock and roll killed partner dancing, and I can believe them; I think we are returning to partner dancing to regain something that was lost.

I watch the dancing of Gloria and Eduardo in the same way that I watch Olympic ice skating, as so many highly stylized figures and predictable, disciplined acrobatics. I watch the modern dancers in the same way that I listen to jazz, and I think it is because the modern dance foregrounds improvisation as a problem not simply of lyric invention, but as communication and coordination. Gloria and Eduardo are exceptionally skilled dancers, and seeing them in New York City in 2007 was a treat, and they certainly know how to communicate with each other, but they are not exploring this communication at the same time as they would show it to us. Now, I understand that staging authenticity is staging in another name, but one can stage moments of exploration and risk, and I think that we evaluate this as one recognizes a spark: immediately, if one is attuned to it, and confirms this recognition in a feeling of satisfaction.   

To illustrate this I’ve chosen the piece Silk, filmed by Astrid Wieske, where Brigitte Winkler is dancing with Fabienne Bongard in a Leading Ladies of Tango performance. This is as much modern theater and modern dance as it is tango, with the sound of a gentle rain falling and a steady subtle heartbeat instead of tango music. The benefit of this quiet, subtle background is that offers nothing in the way of structured musical sequence, never mind drama, but falls to the background so that we evaluate the pace, duration and quality of each element against the interaction of the dancers themselves, their impulses.

The piece also works against the traditional tango because it is danced by two women, and instead of the usual assumption of leader and follower this piece begins with the partners lifting their flowing silk blouses off of their shoulders until they fall down partway so that we can imagine them pressing their breastbones together. Then, instead of the traditional, male-led drive forward with the woman being driven backwards, the dancers start by swaying together, and not walking but turning around each other so it is not clear who is leading, and instead, that these turns are about exploration of each other’s bodies in turning.

As of the summer of 2009 I’ve been dancing only five years, but already I’ve noticed this unusual change in my own dancing and that of others. About two years ago many of us were quite taken by electro-tango, including its novelty and pace, and that pace extended to experiment with figures, so that in a tando many of us intermediate dancers would make a point of exploring our full repertoire of 30-50 figures (far short, of course, of the many hundreds the experienced dancers might know). But over the past six months or so I’ve noticed that, at least in my circles, we are dancing fewer figures, doing more walking, slowing down, and paying more attention to the quality of our movements and communications. “Finally!” said one of my favorite partners, who is in her late 60s and has retired to Berlin to dance, “I am finding partners who will wait for me!”

stand on one foot while letting the other hang. When cooking or cleaning or moving things around, instead of stepping around I twist, and when I’m on a slippery surface I twist and notice my twisting. I skip down stairs to various rhythms. And the perhaps oddest, most delightful thing is that when I’m in the spooky places that I like to photograph and am standing on broken glass on a hard floor in my boots I twist on that glass — large camera and tripod and all my other gear slung over my shoulders — standing knee bent, free leg swinging in an arc, drawing a nice curve in the crunchy glass: a free, lyrical gesture amid discarded ruins. And so on. In this way, the dance is literally built into your body over time.

Your partner. There is a wonderful ritual quality to stepping onto the dance floor and presenting yourself to a partner. I always take a breath, take a moment, and concentrating on this moment I feel the rest of the day and all my little troubles melt away, like when a stage curtain is drawn and there is a hush as a performance is about to begin, and I get my head, and body, into the dance, and I am drawn back into many of the other times I have danced and start remembering things. It is like being drawn into a parallel universe.

It is also often quite specific. With each partner there are certain things that we love to do together. For example, with one partner we once did the “molinetta”, where we spin around each other in a clockwise direction, and instead of stopping and turning back, I twisted clockwise again, spinning her around, about twelve times until we were both completely dizzy and silly, the room spinning, we had to hold on to each other not to fall, and since then, whenever we do this figure even once she gives me this certain look of expectation and terror and delight, and nine times out of ten I play the innocent, but on that tenth time we do it again: it is a game, one we’ve played many times, with a wonderful combination of predictability and surprise, and it goes fast, and “mistake” means we end up falling over each other laughing. With each partner there are these little things we do: our partners help us remember.

The music. Tango music is often wonderfully complex because it has developed over 100 years from a kind of folk music played in bordellos into a very complex thing branching out into a number of directions, given big band and middle class legitimacy in the Golden Era of the 1940s, and so on. The great bands of the 30′s and 40s where very competitive and developed a variety of styles. With Pugliese there is all this modernist stuff that cuts through the rhythms, like old African drummers daring the dancers to dance. With Piazzolla all sorts of classical and jazz influences are intertwined, are legitimated as tango, and so the genre opened up. With advanced recording and performance technologies, bands got smaller and greater subtleties and complexity could be more easily conveyed; nowadays, such as in the new Bajo Fondo album, Mardulce, one hears whispers with behind the major rhythms and melodies, adding great dimension. With the great expansion of tango in the 1980s came new audiences, composers, and performers, including classical conductors and musicians like Gidon Kremer, Daniel Barenboim, Yo-Yo Ma. Among my favorites are the recordings Piazzolla made with Gary Burton and the Kronos Quartet. Burton, who I heard in Boston in 1973 or 1974, fully matured, appreciated by the master and driven by him at Monterey to new heights: simply exhilerating! Kronos: polishing and making even more complex and exquisite Piazzolla’s last and maybe best quartet, lending great dignity and concert hall perfection to works drafted and matured in smoky clubs. Much of the jazz you don’t dance to, and that’s just fine because many dancers listen all the time and train the ear in listening, but the jazz is a the proving ground for the dancing pieces, such as this fabulous performance by Pablo and Dana to Piazzolla’s Biyuya.

Like the memory of partners, the music can be powerfully provocative, eliciting responses, including recognition of things that you have associated with at one or another time before but almost always offering new things that you can address and build on. A year ago I was lucky to have done a little workshop with Pablo and Dana here in Berlin — these completely gentle, good-humored, loving people, who respect beginning and intermediate dancers such as myself by giving us a taste of what can be done in their way (and even had my one minute of paradise dancing with Dana), I was left with a very distinct memory of how they interpret the music, how they add their peculiar “swing” to it, as you see in the video. So, the music helps us remember: it reminds us of some encounter in its quality and the responses it evokes, speaking to us, and if we are open to this invitation we follow, walking in the footsteps of suggestion and interpretation, and build on it to make it our own: so wonderful is this music!

The other dancers. My eyes are mostly open, and following them I see what they are doing and imitate, add to, and depart from what they are doing. You see this at the beginning, as people hear the first notes: they look up and then around to the others: the dance is to begin, and we do this together. Since many of us change partners all the time, the dancers are a kind of “company”: the person you are about to run into might well be someone you danced with before, or one of the many, many others you know “from sight”, even though you may never dance with them. When finally we do dance or chat with others from the scene that you’ve been a part of, and for me that now means for some a knowing from a distance of now three years or so and since I was just starting out, there can be this very sweet mutual respect: something like, yes, I’ve seen you dedicated to the art now for years, you have grown into it: you are one of us.

We pick up on each other’s energy: Sonja Abadi refers to this as the fire that one feeds off of and adds to. In each of the different places there are different combinations of people, different societies or “scenes” as we say here in Berlin. Some places have lots of students or tourists and the floor can be chaotic. I’ve been to Claerchen’s Ballhaus on Tuesdays when it was packed with people who barely knew the dance and it seemed all of us were getting kicked on or stepped a dozen times, and it would have been a drag if not for the good humor of the place set up by Hagen, the DJ and organizer, and the lack of pretention. Beginners were more the welcome, and I was wonderfully amused to witness one of my favorite dancers, a man in his late 50′ like me, dancing with a whole family, from mom on down to her young teenagers: they were tourists, clearly, and he an experienced dancer, but in an ancient place: a dance hall that has the same furniture and decoration that it had when it was built around 1905 or so and when it was a great meeting place for immigrants and residence, a true social meeting place, and so open, welcoming, and there he was, finding interest in the daughter, mother, and sister: each wanting to try it out, and nodding to the father, signaling that he could pick it up, too, for the asking. I’ve been to the Salon Urqueza evening where it seemed everyone was afraid to go out on the dance floor, the leading ladies in their slinky black dresses were fierce, and I felt completely out of place … though others tell me this must have been an exception. At Tango Nou there is so much emphasis on communication and care that I feel like I am learning tai chi! And Sunday evenings at Tango Loft before it became so incredibly popular such that now, on Sundays from about seven until ten pm everyone has to dance “eng” or closes, late then, when most people had left and there was lots of room on the floor, the music would become incredibly dreamy, the dancers seemed to be floating, and I along with them. In this way I was initiated into the mysteries of late night dancing — not that I can do this often and still function the next day, but I had the chance and curiosity and stmina, and did. So, the other dancers set the tone, lead the way, and help one remember.

What your body will allow and recommends. Or, the floor. The formal lessons offered in the many schools take you through the basics, and you learn what the body can do. You almost always have one leg with weight and the other free to play with, and so movement is tied to gravity, physics, and physiology. Last night we suddenly remembered to stand up straight, pull in our stomachs and so give strength to our backs, and found ourselves 5cm taller. We worked with that, and talked about it: about how we could each feel each other’s axis and shifts of weight much, much better. And as we turned we could feel the arc of each other’s movements and try to accommodate that arc to the timing, slowing down sometimes, speeding up at others. And there were all these impulses, little wishes, hesitations, desires, etc., that added or interrupted these arcs and suggested, at their end when the next thing is to be decided on and communicated, to this complex communication. So, we don’t just remember, we listen to each other and improvise: memory is an important part, but we aren’t just rehearsing from a script: we are also creating something new.

You think about it. Each song is about 3 minutes, and there are typical beginnings and endings, and as the music changes you are aware of where you are in the piece, and there are things like “penultimate moments” near the end where there is time for just one more fancy figure before the end game needs to be played and the whole thing brought to its conclusion. Sometimes I’m more disciplined than at others, and one night when I was and had asked a very experienced dancer for the first time, I could tell from the first step that she could do lots of things, but I simply did the basic step, and every time I felt her wanting to do something else, I acknowledged it but held to that basic step and the way the music supported it, until the very end, the last eight bars, when I led her into the figure 8, and we ended facing each other. I thought, now this really is something: here she can do all this wonderful stuff, and we’ll do that in the second or third dance, but in this first dance I want us to do the perfect basic step, to connect, to be patient with each other, and at the end, if we are good, we can do the perfect “eight”, which we did, and it was wonderful. This is choreography, of course, and for me still my choreography is simple, but even at that we think about it and work with it: it gives our otherwise improvisational dance coherence.

There are moods to be addressed. And especially, there is the mood your partner conveys as she wants to be held this way or that, close or far, cuddled or set free; and as you dance with someone and get to know them there can be a building of trust and room for greater struggles and intimacies, or sometimes, when it is just not going to work out — just like in life — there is resistance and rejection: though I hasten to add, the protocols for this are generous: after three dances either partner can smile warmly and say “thank you,” and both leave the floor and each other with dignity.

The genres tell you what to do. The milonga is playful, quick, and full of surprise. The waltz is powerfully romantic, the pairs sharing a common axis, the spinning hypnotic. The tango is passion, sentimental, and with the thematics of seduction, knife fights, showing off, a search for safety, etc. I found one tango partner in my standard/ballroom lessons when, at the end of dancing rumba, I led her into a tango figure … and therein discovered that she knew tango. Since then, when dancing a tango that has rumba elements to it, we break into that other dance. Since these dances include so many different influences, and since we can often recognize even subtle elements of other forms, such recognitions can stimulate and inform the improvisation.

And so there’s Improvisation. Hearing even a fragment of tonal change presents an opportunity, and with highly emotive music like tango you can interpret a moment of joy or suffering in the way you hold yourself: wounds turning you down deep in the stomach, joy leading to breath in the lungs, the framework of the arms twists the spin which in turn stores energy that can be released in a foot as you lift the heel 2mm and so spin to the side … so that only part of the dance is about remembering the figures, a lot is invention. When everything is working well, we sometimes enter into this special state-of-mind where we lose ourselves in the dance, find ourselves responding very sensitively, and so do things we haven’t done before. I think this is the best part of memory: when we are in thrall of creativity and are not self-consciously remembering at all, but living in the present, creating something together and new, and enjoying this creation as a wondrous thing that will live in this moment and all but disappear when the dance comes to an end.

The dancers here are dancing close, in the salon style, and more intimate than the show dances seen from afar and often with highly-stylized routines presented for others. Some of these show dances are simply breath-taking, and my favorite these days, one of the most fabulous I’ve ever seen, is a performance by Pablo and Dana viewable on Youtube.

For the rest of us mere mortals, the attention to body awareness, communications, and complex inter-personal dynamics of salon dancing is every bit as demanding. As I’m only a year into the business, I’m constantly learning about how we might hold each other, and it is fascinating work. Sometimes we practice moving without touching, signaling with our hips and shoulders. At others, we dance and touch only with the fingertips. And of course with different partners the embrace is different — like embracing in the real world — we are almost always learning, adjusting, adapting to the figures, the dance, and each other.

In the image above, I see much of what I am learning. His right arm appears wrapped, but it is loose and more of a guide than a rudder: with her left arm she has determined the distance, drawing herself to him and to where she feels comfortable. While the sensual experience of intimacy, warm bodies, and feelings is a part of it, the structure of the dance depends on sets of contact points and signals along those points in carefully-timed sequences. I am learning how to understand those hands as they describe an arc that passes from hands, arms shoulders and back down to hands; how this arc rotates on on the spine, how this upper body rotation works together and against the hips. This arc offers her a supportive and communicative framework within which she may move beautifully.

This framework is set up in time, too, and as the leader thinks two, four, or eight bars ahead but while signaling to his partner what she is to do in sequence. There is a fundamental tension in having one partner being able to see further head in space and time, particular as the follower is literally walking backwards, and so blind: this tension is fundamental to the dance: it requires the development of trust, and without it there would be far less surprise and fun. In respect to time, he can’t really signal more than one or two elements ahead: she has to wait, and the trick is to create a space — a place, a direction, body position, signalled intent, and enough time — for her to do something beautiful. Fundamentally, the happiness that might be achieved here is akin to that experienced by young girls when skipping rope: the limits of the game create opportunities: with surprise, skill, improvisation, coordination, and craft the game can become expressive and wonderfully fulfilling.

Though now nestled on his chest and appearing comfortable and content, she is also very alert and happy in anticipation. Though his eyes are at this moment closed, his whole body he is leaning forward. That arc passing from one hand to another creating a open-end shape like the letter “C”, is closed on his right and open to his left and in the direction they will be walking. She is walking backwards into, and as she cannot see where she is going we might say that she is walking into a framework being set up for her, a cat’s cradle, and as their backs twist the spring is being wound up and the trap set, and in a second, if they are good at it, something wonderful will happen.

Like all social dances, the tango is a curious combination of intimacy and being out in public, so we might also see that this “C” opens out to the rest of us and welcomes our gaze, too: they walk in the direction of this open end, in the path that he tries to find through the other dancers, turning among them until he sees an opening. As he does so he sees what the others are doing and might even respond to them as they interpret the music, picking up their energy as so much fire and nourishment as he walks forward and steps into where they had been standing. Sonja Abadi writes about this energy at one point as something consumed like food and at another as consuming as we lose ourselves in the dance.

I’ve started this blog to share what I am learning in the tango with my friends. My name is Bruce Spear. I live in Berlin, Germany, and started learning the tango in March 2005. As luck would have it, I can start this blog with a photo of my very first tango lesson, as you see here, where my dance teacher at Taktlos, Christiane Goerner, dressed up in her Dutch whore costume, is showing me and my dance partner Angela, standing behind me, the basic step.

It is more than a little silly that I took up tango dancing at the age of 53 and with a body shaped mostly from slouching in front of a computer screen, but there you go, and the wonderful thing about Christiane, as well as with many other dancers and dance teachers, is that she simply starts wherever you happen to be, and as long as you are attending to the business she’ll stay right there with you.

Christiane is one of my favorite people. She is a talented actress, singer, and dancer, and I think you can begin to see here something of the solidity and care in weight and gesture she brings to her teaching and dance. Marie at Taktlos gave me my first lessons, and they were wonderful, but Christiane is the godmother to my tango, because she was the first to show me the steps, and every now and again since then will dance with me for “control.”

It is a wonderful routine. When I ask her to dance, she always replies: “wer führt?” meaning, “who is going to lead?”, and when I hesitate, she bursts out in laughter, takes my arm, and off we go onto the dance floor. The thing is, I’ve got to lead properly, and that means making that first step, and until I do it right she will not budge. What a stone of a woman is she then! And she stands there mute, expressionless, a dancer, and moves not one millimeter until I do it right. If she were to explain it I think she would say: “if you want to dance with me, you must do so properly: I need to understand exactly what you want me to do, and for you to communicate that, you have to figure out what you want to do and what you want to do with me.”

In part, this is the teacher’s role, to set standards, but it is also about human dignity. A man asks a woman to go for a walk. She agrees. His job is to set the direction. Her job is to go along and conduct herself properly. He leads, she follows, and the point is for her to be happy, and happiness comes through beautiful movement. But for the movement to be beautiful it must be done properly. It makes absolutely no sense to do it improperly. And by movement we mean every element of the movement, and especially the beginnings. So, we have to begin properly. That’s why she waits, and refuses to move, until I lead her properly.

The last time we tried this it took me a long time to make that first step, but I was taking my time, connecting to her muscles, bones, breathing, and whatever I could make out of what was going on in her head, but the head was into the body, so I had only to attend to the body: everything about here was concentrated there.

Then I made my move, one simple step to the side, and it was a solid start, a smooth transition, and with a carefully measured pause at the end — and it was perfect! Or at least, it was as perfect as one gets to be after about a year of lessons once a week and a little practice. It was like I was a two-year-old, really, because I was so proud of having gotten her to move, and I said: “ok?” and she, only, “good for a start,” as if to remind me we have been dancing about three seconds, have about three more with this song, and if I might possibly acquit myself with clarity and grace, she might possibly enjoy the experience of beauty, and for that I’d be rewarded with three dances.

It can be brutal out there on the dance floor!

But of course this business is all being done with great humor, we burst into laughter, I thought, “no rest for the wicked,” and then I said: “ok, let’s try two steps.” I took a breath, waited until the moment was right, and we did it. And then three, and eventually the basic eight steps, the “bassa”. We did the basic step a few time, and then, just when the music was ready to end, I led her into the “eight”, which is when she turns first right, then left, tracing the number “8″ on the floor as she goes, before stopping right in front of me. It was simple and beautiful.

For the next dance we moved on to the second phase of our established routine, where she follows my every move with attentiveness, precision, and not one ounce of friction — nothing more, nothing less — at my beginner’s speed, until I basically exhaust my repertoire, which does not take long.

The custom is to dance 3 dances unless things are going terribly, so basically I knew I’d get my three dances. In our routine, anything after 3 dances I basically take on at my own risk. So, I fastened my seat belt, because then she was ready to play. Now, normally on Sundays at Bebop, the DJ plays only two songs of each step — cha-cha, waltz, etc. — before moving on to the next, and there is usually no exception for the two tango songs: this was a ballroom dance evening, not a tango milonga. But as it happens, we stood there looking at each other and the DJ, who both of us happen to know, offered us a third, more modern tango, and so we both smiled at our little victory in commanding this departure from the norm, and away we went.

I set up one of my basic at that time beginner moves, and out of this pedestrian beginning she did something fantastic, leaving us both in gales of laughter for the fun and beauty and outrageousness of it. In the space of seconds I was confronted with one of those beautiful sweeping movements that make you simply dizzy with delight, turning you in circles and sending you off to heaven! But then she moved in for the kill, including some intimate play involving a foot caressing my leg and thigh as if my pocket was being picked, and then her leg I swear moved up my back — I don’t know how she did it — as if to tip the imaginary hat on my head over my eyes! If I were to imagine her entering the next life as an animal it would be as a coyote, a trickster, and such people are truly dangerous. What a riot!

Of course, she immediately apologized because, strictly speaking, the tango has laws of proportion: we mostly dance with dancers on our level or a little, but not a lot better or worse than ourselves. Followers are supposed to follow. When it comes to programmatic suggestions of intimacy, well, that has to be proportionate, too. Christiane is a Lindy Hopper, in principle and practice, and that means she hangs around with an outrageous bunch given to all sorts of foolishness, like wearing 30′s style clothing and playing grand-daddy to rock and roll. And since I took a bunch of her Lindy Hop courses before going over to the tango I’m basically a runaway, deserve to be punished, so as far as I am concerned she can basically get away with anything.

The photograph was taken by her husband and also very good friend, Reinhard Goerner, who I can sometimes even convince to leave his normal professional work in the city to come out with me to the spooky places I like to photograph. He photographs architecture mosty, until recently did so with a large view camera on a tripod, and so he’s got a highly-trained, experience eye. I think you can see this in this digital photograph’s composition, including: a) his composing the scene as basically five columns and rooms; b) with the tightness of the figures in front relieved by the perspective and other dances and open door in the back; c) the balancing of flat figures on the left, including the precise framing of Angela’s scarlet sash, with the quarter-turned figure on the right, and the axis of the foreground figures along my left side: the foreground scene presenting a lovely, intimate curve around the photographer and balanced by a studied flow behind to the vanishing point; d) his setting all this up and waiting until his wife’s gestures and expression achieve a kind of formal intensity: she is intent on showing me something; and e) for a delightful, finishing touch, reminiscent of the nobleman in Velasquez’ “Las Meninas“, he’s got the dancers in the background facing us as if witnesses to the scene.

From the two of them I learn a great deal about structure: about how to slow down, identify the fundamental elements of a scene or a figure, place them carefully, and how, once the fundamentals are done, the decorative elements are so much fill. He’s not had the art history training that I’ve had, so when i point such things out to him he laughs, saying, “really?”, but he’s learned the lessons in his own way, and it’s just wonderful what he does.

That’s just the start of it, and I think I am enjoying this dancing so much not only because it is fun in itself, but because I’ve spent most of my life learning how to read, write, and photograph, and while this has involved a lot of philosophy, and especially aesthetic philosophy, I now feel that all of it I have engaged at arm’s length, so to speak, comparatively motionless, whether sitting at a desk or sitting in the seminar. But now, with the dance, I am learning how, literally, to appreciate these things in my body; symmetry, balance, order, harmony … until now, I’ve basically only known them from afar. Really, I don’t know how well I can claim to have known balance until I learned how to turn on one foot 180 degrees without toppling over.

There’s another thing about this that I find so completely fascinating: dancing is a powerfully social affair. Until now, my academic work has mostly been solitary, spending whole days in my room or in the library reading and writing. But now I am learning in classes, with lots of partners, and in order to do anything I need a partner, and this is just great, too, as I’m getting to meet lots of people, including exceptional people like Christiane and Reinhard.

Finally, there is this powerful cultural dimension. Where before I studied “cultural studies” in literature, the social sciences, and “theory,”I am now participating in this historic chain, where I am learning through imitation what the others have learned through imitation, all the way down to Buenos Aires and back to Africa, if I can put it this way. There is something tribal, primitive, and fundamental to this. A man asks a woman to go for a walk. The drummer commands. They take up the challenge. They work with the floor, the music, and each other, and they feed off the fire of the other dancers and add their bit to it. I’m learning how to do this, step-by-step, week by weeks, and in about five years I might actually be able to do this reasonably well. In twenty years I’ll be pretty good, when I’m 73. Something to look forward to!