The loneliness of the long-distance dancer | Tango Addiction
F?r meine liebe Theresa, mein Tango Alter Ego; and for Derrick and Marc, brothers in tango.
?I long for your embrace,? he writes. Words which to the non-initiate would probably evoke the heaving bosom of a Victorian heroine on a divan, fainting from the constrictions of lace and whalebone, driven to hysteria by the hypocritical?restrictions of a tightly-circumscribed femininity. But I know, of course, what kind of embrace he means. The asymmetrical loop of arms wrapped around each other, left leader and right follower hands entwined isomers. We are mirror image twins. Or rather, twin eggs forming separately but simultaneously, swimming together in the tango womb. Starlas & Kilians in spirit. Twin children of tango.
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You danced with him??Ah, how lovely! Lucky girl!?Really? He is one of my favourite partners.?And Troilo, my favourite orchestra. . .??Oh yes, him, I remember exactly how his skinny ribcage felt, his breastbone against my body. Luna Llena ? I miss that place! She and I?have a connection that would be strange outside the tango world. A connection through a?kind of Woodstock of the dance; a tango free love fest; we are connected through having been blissfully enwrapped in the same sets of male arms, sister wives in the pleasurable polygamy of tango life.
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I want to turn these tap dancing fingers into elegant stilettoed feet. To shift from watching videos to being in the film with him: to fold my reading-glass away, confine them to their glossy case, close those eyes instead in tangotonin-fuelled pleasure.
?xoxo? he writes at the end of each chat. I want to convert those ?x?s into the twin nestled semicircles of ochos, the??o?s into the lovely lofty loopiness of back boleos.
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Dancers form a large, internationally-branching community. And yet, also, an intimately small one. A self-help society of addicts? A secret freemasonery built on the esoteric rites of the?close embrace? Occasionally, it feels as if there is an instant link, a joy in finding a fellow devotee of our impractical art. And we are all connected in one long, curly, twisted, tangled?chain of dance connections.
I wait here in Buenos Aires,?at the navel of the tango earth. A friendly spider at the centre of this world-wide web. Spinning my sticky threads of words. Sometimes it seems that everyone comes here eventually. Drawn by the siren call of the tango in its trafficky, polluted, graffiti-scrawled, dogshit-strewn, chaotic and beautiful hometown. Curious to experience the tango taxon in its centre of diversity, the subsaharan plains of homo tanguero. They come here and for a while some of them are gently held in my eager dancer?s arms.
And then they are gone again. Out of the realm of the physical. Far from the sticky summer porte?o heat, relating strange tales of ice crystals, snowmen and frozen pipes.?Reduced to black letters on a screen. To?photos in Facebook, images of congealed dance?that speak their names at you if you hover over them with a cursor. People shrunk to pixels. I miss them. Dance requires a warm body, not the chill blue light of a monitor. That is its blessing ? and its curse.
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Source: http://tangoaddiction.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/the-loneliness-of-the-long-distance-tango-dancer/
hawaii five o don t ask don t tell repeal michelle le steve o greg giraldo greg giraldo bob hope