At the end of our quest, a question remains unanswered: What is the
power in the heart of this dance? Why does the tango - born of the angst
inherited from the 19th century and the tensions of the 20th - speak
so compellingly to people of the 21st century now?
Something in it feeds our hunger for being on a level with others.
Something in it understands our rebellion and soothes our longing for “home,”
giving us a sense of belonging and a shared communication that knows no
barriers. Something in it mirrors our nostalgia. We are nostalgic, each of us,
historically: we all have emigrated from the warm, the safe, and the personal.
Our feelings parallel those of the inventors of tango, who left their familiar
homes to arrive in a city where they saw their dreams for a better future
crushed by an unexpected reality. They had to reinvent themselves and adapt to
a world of sudden and rapid change. Our world no less than theirs puts us face
to face with a grave uncertainty about the future: they did not know if they
could survive in the small locality of the Rio de La Plata; we do not know if
we can survive in a global world that veers us away from our most precious
possessions - our subjectivity and our hearts.
The malaise of our times - the philosophy “any gain is good” - demands that
we look outside for direction, that we put our status ahead of our hearts, that
we treasure possessions over human connections and subjective fulfillment. What
we lose in these exchanges are our “homes,” our hearts, our values. We are
irredeemably nostalgic for that. Historically we have arrived at a nightmare of
greed and its consequences: terror, endless competition, infinite careerism,
alienation.
We are not only nostalgic. The “any gain is good” attitude is the
culprit of another malaise: we are developing the uncanny homesickness that
descends upon people who are still at home but feel estranged from the place
they have lived all their lives. It has been called “solstalgia”: it occurs
when ecological changes leave people watching their gardens becoming infertile,
their birds disappearing, their crops and animals perishing.
The 19th century-born tango understands our 21st
century “algias,” our nostalgia and solstalgia, our isolation-algia, our fragility,
our immigrant condition, our anger at human-manufactured threats to life.
That’s how this dance of tenderness and connection eases our return to a safe
and warm “home.”
Whether as music, dance, poetry, lifestyle, or identity, the tango still
fulfills human needs and soothes our 21st century angst. This is its
power, but… is this all that propelled it to rise above cultures and to
resonate around the globe? As I pondered this question, I flashed back to two
experiences. I copy them here from my life notes; this is the first:
I wanted to participate in the miracle of birth, as an observer. The
mother had to be someone I did not know. I was allowed into the delivery room,
which was the mother’s private hospital room. Decorated in shades of green,
everything was impeccably sterile.
When labor began, the “all” of life looked me straight in the eyes.
There it was, staring me down. At its rawest. Unedited.
Mother’s ecstasy. Mother’s agony. Cries of joy. Cries of pain. Hard
labor. Sweat. Blood. Strange body materials. Malodorous fluids. A mother’s body
without will. Nature pouring her insides out. A thunderstorm agitating the
ocean.
A mother’s suffering became a baby’s head, then a baby’s body, then a
little person who could cry his very own terror out loud with his brand now
lungs. This now human being could only calm down when his father’s arms held
him securely and tightly close to his chest.
The birthing mother could have been an English queen surrounded by an
entourage of caretakers, giving birth in the luxury of a palace. Or a woman
from the Argentine pampas. Or a Muslim with a veil. The baby could have been
any color. As never before, the basic common experience of all mothers and all
babies struck me as being uncannily identical.
In that delivery room, I felt myself made of the “stuff” tango is made
of: the beautiful and the ugly, the joy and the pain, the blood and the sweat,
the fragrances and the odors. Tango has earth in its soul. It melts down
differences by zeroing in on our commonality. Tango is all of us in life’s
common places. It is who we are at the core, behind our social masks.
How is it that other social dances do not take us there? I believe that
the physical tango embrace is a one-second ticket to emotions so old we do not
have names for them, to the moment we enter this world as a creature. In the
embrace, we are held in the same exact vertical position against someone’s
chest, feeling safe and connected, engaging in a myriad of bodily duets. This
ineffable universal “home,” the beginning of our ontology, still matters to us
in that zone of the “unconscious,” where present and past are one and the same.
I heard the sound of silence during my visit to the Galapagos Islands,
off the coast of Ecuador, in the wildlife that inspired Charles Darwin, in the
habitat that remains largely as it was when he studied it. We were not supposed
to disturb the animals while touring the islands. When we encountered, on our
narrow path, the Blue-footed Boobies with their white and black outfits and blue
painted feet, they did not walk away or fly off. We humans stopped in our
tracks. Then we detoured so as not bother them.
They owned the place. The familiar differences between urban animals and
humans did not exist in Galapagos. In that semi-pristine landscape, it was
crystal clear that they had more rights than we did… Detouring around them, we
reached the ocean; a sea lion had given birth in the beach. I could tell
because a solitary placenta was basking in the sun, waiting to become food for
another species. Perfect cycles of nature: one’s discard becomes food for
another.
On that beach, for the first and only time in my life, I listened to a
new sound of silence. Not the one that results from absence of noise. A silence
that enveloped the earth and the skies and everything in a larger dimension,
where human and animals lived in a shared space and had equal rights. This zone
transcended both our species.
The delivery room and the Galapagos confronted me with something
basically human… maybe bigger than human… cosmic perhaps.
In bother memories I encountered a point, as it is at the beginning of
life and (I imagine) as it is at the end of life. Between these two points, we
do the dance of life that pushes them apart… We grow away from our common
stock, from our one same story, believing that our different affiliations to
country, religion or ethnicity separate us. We kill for those beliefs. And in
many cultures we deny our bodies as inferior to our minds and spirits. Tango
bypasses all these camouflages of the self and goes right into the ineffable
zone of the cosmic where we were in the first place, to that ineffable story of
sameness, those points where our bodily nature screams its existence.
Tango’s power also resides in how it works in our psyches from the
inside. The carnal embrace destabilizes our polar tendencies, while giving us a
visceral sense of being more complete. The dance is a meeting ground of
opposites and synthesis of the extremes that are in our very cores: man and
woman, masculinity and femininity, oneness and separation, spirituality and
carnality - all of these universally human polarities clash and blend in the
embrace. We dance our man and woman to the fullest, in halves that need and
complement each other. Yet, in this dance where the polar genders meet, I feel
strands of androgyny that we dance, that we hear in the music, that we
experience in the poetic text and in the singing. Many compositions insist on
the beat; they seem more masculine. Others are melodically slower and gentler;
they seem more feminine. Others balanced in their melodic and rhythmic aspects.
Men and women singers switch from grave “masculinity” to tender “femininity” in
voice and feeling in a fraction of a second. So do poets, who, in a macho
culture, felt free to express their “feminine” emotions.
The opposites of oneness and separation do their own dance as well. The
embrace summons us back to a wonderful oceanic experience, where two of us
become one - for three minutes - until we recover our boundaries. The distinguished
psychoanalyst Otto Fenichel used the expression “oceanic” to refer to the
blurring of boundaries between self and world (which is uncannily similar to
the experience of “merging” reported by dancers in moments of transport). It is
a wonderful metaphor for the connection we feel but that others cannot see. In
certain moments of the dance we go back to the ocean. In the rhythmic tides of
the music we rise and fall; we are waves with a form that merge with the water,
but that soon enough acquire individuality again. As dancers directly or
indirectly told us, even in nonspectacular moments, we often feel snatches of a
vast zone beyond ourselves and a sense of connection to more than what our
senses perceive.
Not only does the dance fulfill needs, but it also confronts us with our
ineffable nature, with a mystery our minds cannot understand but our emotions
do.
Whether as dance, lifestyle or identity, song lyric or alternative
culture, the tango has proven itself able to fulfill universal human needs. Most
popular dances celebrate the happy side of life and put the tragic off to the
side; the tango speaks to our pain and losses without trivializing or erasing
them. Instead by in fact confronting and intensifying what is usually left in
the margins, it summons us back to our realness.
Its initial spread and its current resurgence around the world show
that, despite the disparities of time and place, language, skin color, religion
or social status, we find ourselves, we find each other, we find the tango’s
strength in strangers’ arms.