Tango ?

What does one see in a dance born in the poor barrio's of Buenos Aires,
danced in brothels by the many masculine immigrants who left their loved ones in Italy ?
Or was it born in Africa ?
From candombe to milonga and then sold to tango ?
What seduced Paris when it appeared in cabarets ?
Then tango became a nouvelle vague for the not-so-poor niño bien...
acceptable for the mujeres argentinas.
What seduced their perception ?
Chic tango for export or tango puro ?
Passion !...
does one find it in brothels or cabarets ?
Tango is solitude, say others. A contradiction ?
Anyway, it's back and the attraction is still the missing thing.

Qué ganas de encontrarte
después de tantas noches.
Qué ganas de abrazarte,
¡ qué falta que me haces !...

How I long to find you
after so many nights.
How I long to hold you,
how I need you so !

Do the lyrics match with the scenes on the dancefloor ?
Tango matches in many ways ...
Donc, à la recherche du tango perdu,
but the magic of Proust is not inside the story.

So to go forward...
as the immigrants and gauchos lost their identity,
they found a new one in a way of walking.
There is nothing like your own caminar,
the pianist's toucher.
This appearance is very sensual,
it's the art of provoking a desire.

Comme au cinéma...

But... El Dramatismo goes on.
In today's Question Humaine,
management makes the difference.
So... a tango takes 3 minutes,
you stab them full with dancesteps... figures.
You work hard and move on to a choreography.
Time, space and energy are pointed,
you score succes.

However...
the sky is high, competition sharp.
Then one fine day as in a blitz,
you're shocked by your own reflection.
Now you can dance on a sad thought,
which gives your touch a profound sensuality.

Sensualidad y Dramatismo

    It is obvious that Argentine tango is a sensual dance, but what is sensual? Is it the same as sexy? Or sensitive?

   According to the dictionary, sensual is relating to or affecting any of the senses or a sense organ; sensory. Sensuous: highly appreciative of the pleasures of sensation. Sensual is all that reports to a sense, all and everyone existing in human life. Sensuality, also sensualness, means all that reports to any forms of sense one that can recognize, say, “sense” it.
    Sensualism relates to the search for beauty, amazing beauty, and the cruelty and pain that often accompanies that beauty. In tango, Borges refers to the beauty of the panther, the leopard or jaguar. Cruelty is a part of the beauty.
    Sensuality refers to subtle, interior sensations. Such as, a tattooer who falls in love with a girl after just seeing her foot, as in Junichiro Tanizaki’s story, "Shisei" (Sisei, Si-Sei, The Tattooer, Tattoo, Irezumi). Much "sensuality" can be found in Japanese literature: Yukio Mishima, Yasunari Kawabata, Baku Akae.

    Sexyness, sexiness, sex appeal or being sexy is about an exterior appearance. It can be related to self-perception, self-awareness, self consciousness, ego. A feeling of self-consciousness occurs when we realize that we are being watched or observed, the feeling that "everyone is looking" at us. When feeling self-conscious, one becomes aware of even the smallest of one's own actions, self-objectification. Much of human sexual attractiveness is governed by physical attractiveness which Ariadne von Schirach calls "Der Tanz um die Lust", wrapped up in desirability. Attractiveness involves the impact one's appearance has on the senses, especially in the beginning of a relationship: Visual perception (how the other looks). Audition (how the other's voice sounds). Olfaction (how the other smells, naturally or artificially; the wrong smell may be repulsive). Olfactory signals, or smell, can influence the perception of attractiveness. Physical attractiveness is the perception of the physical traits of an individual human person or a group, race, or type of people, as attractive or beautiful.

    Sensitivity, sensitiveness, sensible, sensibility: mental responsiveness and awareness, refined sensitivity to pleasurable or painful impressions. Sensibility seems to have a particular literary sense, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. It refers to a cluster of attributes, amongst which you can include the display of "elegant and graceful" emotions and tastes, exhibiting a careful attention to detail, etiquette. Hard to please, demanding.

    You can click at each picture at the right, it opens another way of looking at tangos.

Notes on 'The Gaze'

If tango is passion
then it aims transformation.

Deep in the nature of theatre is a sense of ritual
Transformation uses persuasion. In fact, the woman cannot be treated as an inert substance. She has the abilities and capacities to sabotage, to delay and to dislocate the effect of leading. This gives the man a dynamic dimension of uncertainty. How higher he aims, the greater is the capacity of the woman to neutralize the intervention of the man. It constitutes a serious problem.

So, also for the man it is necessarily that persuasion appears as strategy. For the tanguero, to persuade is to seduce. To persuade is to exert an influence cognitive and affective. To persuade is to influence by word and gesture, it is to seduce the mind and the heart at the same time.
In this direction, tango is true labour. It demands coordination between the mind and the arms, between the mind and the legs and also between the mind and the shoulders. It looks simply physical but this work demands that the person provokes or suppresses the emotions and that he demonstrates an exterior control capable to produce a state of particular spirit in the woman. She needs the feeling that she is taking care of and can move in a pleasant and safe space. This asks deep and integral individuality of the man. Then there are the extreme games of seduction, Casanova and Don Juan.

A tanguero like Casanova wants to seduce all the women. Casanova is essentially a being of instant-pleasure. He likes the pleasure that he provides to the women. However, Casanova is not a strategical seducer, he does not plan or calculate. Casanova is a surface being, whose exterior is confused with the interior and whose present is the now.

How Casanova seduces?
In a very simple way: he gives without reserves. If he is possessed, the women feel in it the animal fever. Therefore a casanovense tanguero has little technique of the conquest and the seduction. Its secret is in the sincerity of the desire, in the elementary expression of a gotten passionate nature.
He is not demonic, it remains in the surface; it is the body of them that he wants, not the soul. His relations with the women are really loyal, because they are simply of sexual and sensual order. It does not provoke a catastrophe. It made many happy women and he did not make none of them to be hysterical, none are suicidal or in compleet desperation, her interior balance is not disturbed, it is a conquest without destroying.
However, in tango people like the body to be passional, sin limites. So, we speak of seduction as an instrument of transformation of the other in the context of a dance of passion. Now we have Don Juan.

Don Juan also wants to seduce all the women. He likes to walk from one relation to another and does not like to be motionless. However, far to love them as Casanova, he wants to win them. The women represent a species of challenge, a conquest object, tanguerre.

It is the beauty, before everything, that attracts Don Juan. However, the same beauty that fascinates him, reflects his proper death. So, Don Juan is the capricious one, the corridor, the traveller, the one that is always of departure, he is always in movement. He is not able to be faithful. This would mean defeat, to deliver the weapons to the feet of the enemy, that is the woman. It is necessary to win the woman before being looser. Therefore, contrariamente the Casanova, Don Juan prefers the seduction of women is a Machiavellian pleasure, not so flirteo.

The Donjuanismo is much more a passion of the spirit of that of the instinct. Don Juan elaborates diverse strategies to win its adversaries. In his cold technique, the women start to see in him the proper devil. They detest him with all their passion.

Another important difference between the seducers is the relation with the time.
With Casanova it tends to last, while Dom Juan pledge his energies in enjoying the last moment of the fall of the victim. He pursues an objective in the long run, Casanova lives the instant. Don Juan looks something that is beyond the relation. A vision, only then.

The extremes appear clearly: the exclusion of the seduced person or its conservation in the game. None of the women seduced by Casanova is excluded from the game after an adventure. In contrast, all remain being potential partners for new departures. On the other hand, the game of Don Juan precipitates them for the deepest desperation.
Si supieras...

Kiss & Tango

  Marina Palmer's book "Kiss & Tango: Looking for Love in Buenos Aires" (2005) is the story of her personal infatuation with the tango. Her autobiographical writing is honest and frequently humorous. She points out that tango dancing invites close physical contact, which often evolves into feelings of lust. She is quite frank in discussing her experiences in this regard such as wondering "if people realize how difficult it is to dance tango while on the brink of orgasm."

  Tango isn't just a dance, it's a grand metaphor for sexual pursuit. The many dance halls of Buenos Aires are open around the calendar and around the clock. Men and women eye each other dancing in crowded, usually poorly lit rooms and use subtle signals to indicate their interest in becoming partners. There are rituals used in going to a woman's table and certain gestures to invite her to dance. When paired off, a couple usually dances a tanda, that is a set of four or five successive tangos. Thus beginning with a nod from the man, signifying his desire for a particular woman, tango continues in a series of moves resembling stylized foreplay. In time, dancers get to know who goes to which dance halls, who are the best dancers and who are regular partners. These change as some dancers disappear for "gigs" in Europe or New York. There is always an atmosphere of temporariness and the possibility of change.

  Marina Palmer arrived in Buenos Aires in March 1999, picturing a career as a professional tango dancer. As Palmer was 31, about 10 years older than the partners favored by male tango professionals, she would have to work extremely hard. She took ballet lessons three times a week to improve her flexibility, studied tango with various local masters and hit the milongas every night. Exploring Buenos Aires by day and seducing sexy Argentines on the dance floor by night, her tango obsession ruled her life. She spent almost every night until dawn dancing at various venues, occasionally bringing home a partner, and her trials on the dance floor... aching feet, battered ankles. After absorbing five years of diary entries, readers will feel at home with Buenos Aires street life and almost accustomed to the retrosexual politics of the tango scene, so when Palmer says things like, "I wish all men knew how I long to be treated like an object," they sort of know what she means.
And so it goes, from auditioning for the extravagant Broadway hit Forever Tango, to becoming a street dancer on the infamous calle Florida. For five years Marina lives and dances in Buenos Aires, making friends and contacts with other dancers and absorbing the life in Argentina, but she refuses to let her mind rest on the idea that she was getting too old for the dance without a partner and that making a living dancing was getting to be impossible. Only when the political unrest in Argentina finally erupts in front of her small apartment building does she have thoughts of leaving, even though her latest dance gig is on the street, doing the tango for donations in a hat. She comes close to finding the love she seeks. After fleeing Argentina during the financial collapse (the moment this book ends), she lives there now.

  Tango is playing with fire, it's all pursuit, all foreplay with sexual frustration making the dance vibrate with tension. Completely a liberated modern woman, Marina unfortunately couldn't help but still search for "The One" partner, the man who would make all her hopes and dreams come true, the man who would make her life whole, both on and off the dance floor. But as no man seemed to possess all of her long list of requirements, she's left tangoing from one partner to the next. Some she drops and some drop her, leaving her open to heartache and tears. In the end of her amour fou search, Palmer concludes: "Tango thrives on ambiguity. That's what makes it so addictive. ... Desire is awakened but not quenched in an endless foreplay — a foreplay that is never consummated by sex.".
The tango is always about wanting that which you can't have.
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