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.