A piropo, defined by google translate, is a "compliment." Piropos are what you hear on the streets of Buenos Aires if you're any kind of feminine. Unlike in the United States, these piropos are flattering. Many American women may feel uncomfortable with these (especially if they do not speak Castellano) but I believe this to be because in America, strange men saying things to women in the street are usually insulting. Case in point: I was at the beach returning to my car and a jeep full of younger guys yells at me, "get a tan!" On the other hand, once I was in San Telmo with my Canadian and Italian friends, three blondes, and an older gentlemen says to us, Mira las rubias, tan lindas! Que vivan las rubias! Look at the beautiful blondes. Long live the blondes!
Last weekend after two hours of street performance, I went to the symphony to rest my feet. Music is emotion and I was so moved that I thought of the following piropo, in English, but to be honest to the definition of piropo, I'll first share it in its Spanish form:
Si pudiera morirme así bailando con vos, la transición al cielo sería imperceptible.
translation: If I could die like this, dancing with you, the transition to heaven would be seamless.
Sometimes I'll find myself on a different plane of existence when I'm dancing. The partner* and I become two balls** of energy and the feeling of being swept away is so strong that I become scared and bring myself back to earth. But I'll keep searching for it; I am challenged to push the limits to see how high it will take me.
*I use "the partner" instead of "my partner" because I'm not comfortable with thinking of a person as "mine." I'm jealous and if I were to begin to conceive of someone as "mine," I would be heading down the wrong path.
**One would think that ideally he would merge with the partner and become one ball of energy moving around the dance floor, but I don't believe this is the appropriate level for it, not with dance. This idea of two energies ("souls" or the true nature of each person, what I am referring to when I say "ball of energy") becoming one, in my mind, is reserved only for the most intimate, multidimensional relationships. However, at a level further removed from one's core, this merging can occur. Only it's not merging of two energies, it's merging of two dancers who become one unit circling the dance floor.
14 May 2011
09 April 2011
Modification
I have a problem with my new tango shoes, Tangotacion's Jenny, green fish skin, size 37. They are absolutely beautiful, but too wide at the heel and not tight enough at the front. What I mean to say is that the peep-toe is too wide for my toes to merely peep out. Instead, all four of them shout out the front of my shoe in a chorus of potentially crying toenails. I don't like having to modify the shoe with inserts and it breaks my heart (at least the tiny part reserved for attachments to footwear) that the shoes do not fit perfectly.
I was hoping to find a cobbler skilled enough to remedy this. A cosmetic surgeon for my shoes, if you will. I visited two yesterday and both said they couldn't change anything about the shoe. One woman said the shoes were just too beautiful and well-made, and that it would just be easier to add inserts to them.
I took that home with me. The shoe is already perfect in its own right; it is made of superior quality materials, and "putting it under the knife" to try to modify it would compromise its integrity (not to mention scratching up the patent leather piping and potentially adding on sub-par materials). Fortunately for the shoes both cobblers were wise enough to tell me there was nothing they could do. I'm going to have to relent and add insoles. I'm not completely happy with this (I still long for a perfect fit, but I can't exactly buy another expensive pair of shoes at the moment). In the same way, going under the knife to change some thing about someone's physical makeup could needlessly alter who that person is. Mind you, different people have different reasons for cosmetic surgery, but in my case I feel that changing anything the easy way would detract from what I am supposed to learn here on earth. I'm already crafted perfectly to whatever purpose is mine. Perhaps frustration with how clothes fit me is a cross I am meant to bear, to teach me patience or to give me just enough push to learn how to make my own clothing. As with the shoes, the easiest thing is to just add padding and dance like nobody knows.
There is much more to be said about the relationship between a dancer and her shoes. In the case above I am comparing the shoes to the dancer, but more can be said when we compare her shoes to her partners. That is a topic for a later post.
It's amazing how relevant this illustration was to me; the whole past week I had been struggling with my own issues, and realizing that cutting up the shoes would make them less beautiful was like being told, "you are perfect the way you are." This is how tango speaks to me.
16 March 2011
beginnings
In the beginning was the year that was 2001. And was that ever a year.
Sometime in the fall, after September, but still warm enough for me to be sitting outside the Mechanical Engineering building at the University of Illinois waiting for an astronomy class to begin, through tears in my eyes I see a green flier taped to the door, the number pull-off tabs waving at me like twenty arms reaching down to grab me. LEARN ARGENTINE TANGO! it said. Thirty bucks for a semester's worth of weekly classes. I was in. Not because of the programmed dreams of passionate leg kicks and roses in lovers' mouths or the opportunity to meet people, but because I had fallen in love with Argentine tango the semester before (thanks to The Tango Lesson, directed by Sally Potter, and Paper Tangos, by Julie Taylor), fallen in love in and with Argentina the summer before, and fallen hard to the bottom of a depression fed by evaporated illusions and the effects of five calculus-based courses with no outlet for my right brain. Not to mention the overall climate in the culture at large shortly after September 11th.
I show up to the first class, black suede-bottomed ballroom shoes (to which I have been extremely faithful, despite their low heel and worn away parts of the sole, they fit me perfectly and I still dance in them) in hand, not a word leaves my mouth and I am addressed by an Argentine woman: Sos la esposa de Mariano? she says, coincidentally asking (assuming I am Argentine or at least fluent in Spanish) if I am Mariano's wife; Mariano, the name of evaporated Argentine illusions. This question was the first yellow arrow on the camino that would become the dance of my life: a synchronicity that told me, before I had the vocabulary or the capacity to understand its meaning, that I was on a path that would lead somewhere towards that place underground where my heart was buried.
The classes came and went. I learned the salida, ochos, ganchos, had my big toe bloodied by a clodding moron in work boots, and went to two milongas. It was only the beginning. My legs learned how to move, my muscles memorized the steps, but I failed to learn how to really dance. Argentine tango has a lead and a follow, and they must maintain a connection between themselves so that she can feel and respond appropriately to his every move (or invitation). I was still stuck in ballroom-dance mentality, believing that tango had a count to be kept in one's head, that every dance always started with the same move, that every move was programmed and set in stone. I had no concept of the subtle, wordless communication between partners that makes the entire dance worthwhile. I was twenty and had a lot of growing up to do before I could understand it.
The next year I spent in Buenos Aires. As part of a study-abroad group of thirty or so students, we were encouraged to attend cultural affairs. I took a tango class at the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas taught by Domingo Pugliese, but all the more experienced male dancers continually lost patience with me and my anticipation of their dance moves. I lasted a month. Being a 21-year old in a city known for its night life, I soon lost interest in tango and traded it for nightclubs (boliches). Consider it a cultural study of a different kind.
After that year I came back to university, but tango lay dormant. Then came graduation and the beginning of "real-world" life, and tango got stuffed in the decorated shoe box filled with my memories. I took it out and looked at it several times, once on a return visit to Buenos Aires in 2004, dancing with a partner who was telling me how beautiful physics was, and twice while I was coupled with a non-dancer in Charlotte in 2007 and 2008. It wasn't until I was alone with very few friends in Charlotte that I decided to take up tango seriously, take it out of the shoe box and prominently display it on the mantle piece. In May of 2009 I started dancing with a wonderful group of people, taking beginner classes on Monday nights and learning everything else by dancing with more experienced dancers. The first lesson I learned from tango was that it is essential to dance with the better dancers if you are to improve your dancing, even if you are intimidated by them. As in life we grow by learning from souls greater than our own despite our fears.
When anyone asks how long I've been dancing tango, I tell them it's a complicated story. I learned it ten years ago, but have really only been dancing it for almost two years now. I didn't understand it when I first learned it, but now it makes sense to me.
Tango was reaching out to me. The classes I took in 2001 were the fling whose flame was soon outshone by the numbers of young Argentine men continually complimenting my blue eyes and calling out piropos in the street (which, unlike in the USA, are actually flattering). Tango called me every once in a while and we went out on a few dates, but, comfortable where I was, I stopped returning its calls. But tango waited patiently and, alone and without a path to follow, I came back to it and it opened my own world to me. I will be dancing as long as I am able.
Sometime in the fall, after September, but still warm enough for me to be sitting outside the Mechanical Engineering building at the University of Illinois waiting for an astronomy class to begin, through tears in my eyes I see a green flier taped to the door, the number pull-off tabs waving at me like twenty arms reaching down to grab me. LEARN ARGENTINE TANGO! it said. Thirty bucks for a semester's worth of weekly classes. I was in. Not because of the programmed dreams of passionate leg kicks and roses in lovers' mouths or the opportunity to meet people, but because I had fallen in love with Argentine tango the semester before (thanks to The Tango Lesson, directed by Sally Potter, and Paper Tangos, by Julie Taylor), fallen in love in and with Argentina the summer before, and fallen hard to the bottom of a depression fed by evaporated illusions and the effects of five calculus-based courses with no outlet for my right brain. Not to mention the overall climate in the culture at large shortly after September 11th.
I show up to the first class, black suede-bottomed ballroom shoes (to which I have been extremely faithful, despite their low heel and worn away parts of the sole, they fit me perfectly and I still dance in them) in hand, not a word leaves my mouth and I am addressed by an Argentine woman: Sos la esposa de Mariano? she says, coincidentally asking (assuming I am Argentine or at least fluent in Spanish) if I am Mariano's wife; Mariano, the name of evaporated Argentine illusions. This question was the first yellow arrow on the camino that would become the dance of my life: a synchronicity that told me, before I had the vocabulary or the capacity to understand its meaning, that I was on a path that would lead somewhere towards that place underground where my heart was buried.
The classes came and went. I learned the salida, ochos, ganchos, had my big toe bloodied by a clodding moron in work boots, and went to two milongas. It was only the beginning. My legs learned how to move, my muscles memorized the steps, but I failed to learn how to really dance. Argentine tango has a lead and a follow, and they must maintain a connection between themselves so that she can feel and respond appropriately to his every move (or invitation). I was still stuck in ballroom-dance mentality, believing that tango had a count to be kept in one's head, that every dance always started with the same move, that every move was programmed and set in stone. I had no concept of the subtle, wordless communication between partners that makes the entire dance worthwhile. I was twenty and had a lot of growing up to do before I could understand it.
The next year I spent in Buenos Aires. As part of a study-abroad group of thirty or so students, we were encouraged to attend cultural affairs. I took a tango class at the Centro Cultural Ricardo Rojas taught by Domingo Pugliese, but all the more experienced male dancers continually lost patience with me and my anticipation of their dance moves. I lasted a month. Being a 21-year old in a city known for its night life, I soon lost interest in tango and traded it for nightclubs (boliches). Consider it a cultural study of a different kind.
After that year I came back to university, but tango lay dormant. Then came graduation and the beginning of "real-world" life, and tango got stuffed in the decorated shoe box filled with my memories. I took it out and looked at it several times, once on a return visit to Buenos Aires in 2004, dancing with a partner who was telling me how beautiful physics was, and twice while I was coupled with a non-dancer in Charlotte in 2007 and 2008. It wasn't until I was alone with very few friends in Charlotte that I decided to take up tango seriously, take it out of the shoe box and prominently display it on the mantle piece. In May of 2009 I started dancing with a wonderful group of people, taking beginner classes on Monday nights and learning everything else by dancing with more experienced dancers. The first lesson I learned from tango was that it is essential to dance with the better dancers if you are to improve your dancing, even if you are intimidated by them. As in life we grow by learning from souls greater than our own despite our fears.
When anyone asks how long I've been dancing tango, I tell them it's a complicated story. I learned it ten years ago, but have really only been dancing it for almost two years now. I didn't understand it when I first learned it, but now it makes sense to me.
Tango was reaching out to me. The classes I took in 2001 were the fling whose flame was soon outshone by the numbers of young Argentine men continually complimenting my blue eyes and calling out piropos in the street (which, unlike in the USA, are actually flattering). Tango called me every once in a while and we went out on a few dates, but, comfortable where I was, I stopped returning its calls. But tango waited patiently and, alone and without a path to follow, I came back to it and it opened my own world to me. I will be dancing as long as I am able.
Bienvenidos Tangueros!
Welcome to Tanto Tango (translation: SO MUCH Tango!). If you are looking for the tango you've seen in the movies, you're in the wrong place. This blog is dedicated to thoughts and discussion of Argentine Tango. That's right, the tango that was born and bred in the streets of Buenos Aires, before it was whitewashed in Europe and made suitable for Hollywood. We're talking about the tango that anyone can dance if he knows how to walk and exists on many levels - not only the physical but the metaphorical and metaphysical. Tango is a dance with which one has a lifelong relationship. It is a teacher and a lover and a drug. This blog is for tangueros of all levels, ages, and places to discuss the philosophy, teaching, and culture of Argentine Tango. Que disfruten!
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