DANCE AS LIFE

By Cafe Girl
Published by courtesy of Cafe Girl Chronicles

I used to think my dance lessons were all about timing, steps, musicality, and technique.   Lately I have come to realize that that there’s more too it than that.  The more I dance, the more I learn about life.  According to my teachers – dance is life.

And nowhere was this more apparent than on my recent trip to New Orleans where I managed to squeeze in a two-hour tango lesson with the very elegant, “man in black” – Alberto Paz.   He was gracious and patient, and I immediately felt at ease with him despite the usual stage fright I feel whenever I dance with someone for the fist time.

“There is no test,” he said. “You’re here to learn.”

Lesson #1: “Dance is like life. You have to understand that it’s not about pass/fail; it’s about getting the most out of it.”

Alberto was surprisingly complimentary at what little technique I had managed to pick up in Buenos Aires.  (Ah, me of little faith.)  He liked working with beginners, he explained, because there were few bad habits to correct.

Doubting myself – as usual – I told him that it was his excellent lead and clear direction that enabled me to dance well

“Catherine,” he said. “It’s a compliment so take it and just say thank you,” he said.

Lesson #2: Dance is like life. You have to give yourself a little credit.”

I decided that the next time someone paid me a compliment, I would own it.

I would say: “It’s mine. I worked for it.  I deserve it.”

As the lesson progressed, the steps started to feel different – they started to feel “right.”  Alberto’s small tweaks were making a big difference to my comfort level.   But just to be certain, I asked, after a particular sequence of moves, “Is this right?”

He tossed the question back at me, “Does it feel right to you?”

“Yes,” I said.  “I can definitely feel a difference.”

“Then, it’s right,” he said, then added: “Never ask a man his opinion. He’ll never tell you the truth. If you ask him if something looks good, he will always say yes.”

As naive as it sounds, it came as such a revelation that I actually asked Alberto if I could write that piece of wisdom down before I forgot it.

He laughed, put his arm around my shoulders, and gave them an affectionate squeeze . “But you already knew that!” he said.

Lesson #3: “Dance is like life, It’s about how you feel and not how someone else makes you feel.

Probably the hardest lesson of all was just learning to slow down.  Tango, more so than any other dance, requires the dancer to be in the moment, wait, and savor each step. However, I sometimes I approach tango as something “to do” rather than something “to dance.”  I want to make sure I do all of the steps whether I enjoy them or not.

As Alberto so eloquently put it as I rushed through my steps of our last tango together, “Slow down, you always have time to make a step, but once it is made you can never take it back.”

Lesson #4: “Dance is like life. Make every step count!

HOW DID THEY DO IT?

by Andy Doubt Raiser
London, November 2008

The claims that the population of African origin in Argentina was exterminated in an act of genocide are absurd and they deserve a place next to extraterrestrial kidnappings and the staging of the moon landing in an Arizona undisclosed location, under the heading of looney tunes hoaxes. Currently 10%, around 1.4 million of the population of Buenos Aires has African heritage. In 1810, black and mulatos totaled 9,615 [42% of the population], therefore, in 200 years, the number of individuals with African ancestry in Buenos Aires has gone up 142 times!!!!! This confirms the claims of those who attribute the “disappearance” of blacks to consensual interracial marriages among other things.

The slave trade was made illegal in 1810 with independence from Spain, Then in 1813, came what was known as the “Ley del Vientre”, declaring free anybody who from that day onwards landed on Argentine soil, whether from abroad or from their mother’s womb. Clearly it made no difference to those who were already slaves at the time, who had to wait another 40 years, until slavery itself was made illegal, in the Constitution of 1853 to acquire their freedom.

The Constitution of Argentina, to this day, has a racist foundation: Article 25. “The Federal Government shall encourage European immigration; and may not restrict, limit or burden with any tax whatsoever, the entrance into Argentine territory of foreigners who arrive for the purpose of tilling the soil, improving industries, and introducing and teaching the arts and sciences.” Imagine the audacity of these people wanting to attract laborers, artisans, artists and scientists. What’s next, restrictions to terrorists, or tango teachers like the US and the UK have done?

There is a precedent out there. Domingo Sarmiento, abhorred blacks with their candombe processions because he was painfully aware that white men can’t wave and shimmy. His dream was to populate and civilize like the British Empire and the rising US had done. To that effect he toured extensively both countries to copy their educational system and their immigration policies. Natives and Negroes were systematically eliminated, and Argentina was the success story of genocide, well in front of Custer and the 7th Cavalry, Apartheid and Adolf Hitler. If you think this is absurd wait until I tell you about the yellow fever epidemic.

The yellow fever epidemic of 1871 started in 1871. Biological warfare had already been used against the Indians; indeed, in the first 100 years of their occupation of the Americas, the Spaniards eliminated at least 80% of the native population, with the diseases they brought with them. The authorities encircled the Negro barrios with the army holding hands after releasing a swarm of mosquitoes and mowing down anybody trying to escape with a blunt instrument called the bandoneon, invented by Hitler’s grandfather in a white supremacist region of the Bavarian Empire.

What does this have to do with tango? Probably nothing. The tango doesn’t come from Africa.

With so much persecution, genocide, extermination, chemical warfare, and every known or to be invented methods of extermination used against them, how did the black population find the time to go dancing? With such impossible living conditions how did they manage to develop such a unique and complex choreography? How was it possible to create such a alluring music with their typical drums?

Not only that but how did they manage to impose their cultural preferences to the great majority of Europeans and Creoles who were so busy exterminating them, yet couldn’t help stealing their dance moves and cultural roots instead of using their power and wealth to create something on their own.

How did they do it?

Andy is a fantasy writer specializing in the inclusion of fantastic elements in a self-coherent setting where any location of the fantastical element is possible. In addition, he is the European record holder in Conclusion Jumping and Tall Tales category.

BLONDES OF BUENOS AIRES

Black Roots: What tango and the Rubias de Buenos Aires are Hiding

by El Yanqui Yeff
Buenos Aires, February 1996

Mary, Peggy, Betty, Julie. We are all familiar with the Rubias de New York, the blondes about whom Gardel sang some sixty years ago. I would like to turn our attention to Susana, Libertad, Claudia, Zulema, Rubias de Buenos Aires. I write “rubias“, but what I want to focus on is that they, and many of their compatriots (and the Rubias de New York), are “rubias teñidas“, that is to say, “dyed blondes”. It is not a secret that Susana Gimenez, Libertad Leblanc, Claudia Maradona, and Zulema Menem, to name just a few, owe their blondness not to nature, but to Roberto Giordano, Miguel Romano, or some other porteño hairdresser. The Buenos Aires newspaper Clarin even observed that one of Madonna’s key qualifications to play Evita was that she, like Evita, was a rubia teñida. There are natural blondes in Buenos Aires, but they are not nearly so numerous as the rubias teñidas. Walk down Calle Cabildo in Belgrano. If you doubt that most of the many rubias you see are teñidas, ask yourself why there are so many more blonde women in Buenos Aires than blond men.

What do these rubias teñidas have to do with tango? The answer, some theories say, is that both try to conceal their black roots. Most of us have heard stories about tango’s uncertain origins that nevertheless involve Afro-Argentines, Afro-Uruguayans, and even Afro-Cubans. Or, we have heard that musicologists recognize a connection between the syncopated rhythms of tango and habanera. Few of us, however, could identify any African elements in the contemporary tango scenes in Buenos Aires or San Francisco, Tokyo or Amsterdam. Some would claim that tango’s black roots, like those of the rubias teñidas, are hidden.

In Buenos Aires, black roots are often hinted at, but they are seldom seen. Go into any milonga in San Telmo, Boedo, or Almagro today and you will hear people call one another “Negrita” or “Negrito“. Similarly, one of tango’s great lyricists was “El Negro” Celedonio Flores. Such references to blackness are common in tango and in Argentine culture in general, but blacks per se are very rare. In several years of attending milongas, practicas, and tango shows in Buenos Aires, I have seen only one black tanguero. He is a professional dancer who goes by the name Pochi and he has been performing for over a year now at Cafe Homero in Palermo Viejo.

Last July I attended a performance at La Trastienda in San Telmo by a group called “Afro-Tango“. Though the instrumentation included several African drums, none of the musicians was black. I am not suggesting that “black music” or “black dance” can only be performed by black people, or that black people necessarily sing or dance differently from white people. For example, Pochi is a very good dancer, but so far as I can discern there is nothing unusually “black” about the way he dances tango. I do not even accept that there are “black people” or “white people” in a genetically significant sense; I understand that there is more variation within so-called racial groups than between them. As a matter of fact, in my (white) opinion, the all-white Afro-Tango group was quite good. Still, even if it is not genetically significant that the group contained no blacks, it is politically significant. Race may not exist in nature, but it does exist in the culture.

I was prompted to consider these politics when my partner, which I will call La Morocha, and I had the pleasure to show Buenos Aires to an African-American friend. Our friend was staying at the Sheraton, so she had a beautiful view of Retiro and the Costanera from her room. La Morocha, who is something of a historian, explained that African slaves used to be auctioned off just in front of Retiro. Our friend was surprised and she wanted to know what happened to the slaves. Why was hers the only black face she saw in Buenos Aires? La Morocha explained that there is no simple answer to that question, but that some factors have been identified. Throughout the nineteenth century, thousands of Afro-Argentine men died fighting in wars. Some blacks emigrated because they were not welcomed in Argentina’s recessionary labor market. And many blacks stayed in Buenos Aires, where they were more integrated into the general community than elsewhere in the Americas. Thus, their descendants are usually not identifiable as black. Like the hair of rubias teñidas, the Afro-Argentine community has been whitened.

The disappearance of hundreds of thousands Afro-Argentines should not be forgotten, nor should the disappearance of a million or more Native Argentines. Indeed, the Venezuelan anthropologist Fernando Coronil suggests that one of the reasons the 30,000 disappearances of the “Dirty War” were possible is that Argentines were already accustomed to live in the shadow of black and Indian desaparecidos. What I am concerned with here, however, is not the disappearance of the Afro-Argentines per se, but with the absence of blacks in the contemporary tango scene both in Argentina and abroad. The fact that there are far fewer blacks in Argentina now than there were one hundred years ago might explain why there are almost no blacks to be seen in the milongas and tango shows of Buenos Aires. This fact does not, however, explain why there are so few blacks seen in the milongas and tango shows of San Francisco or New York. Despite alleged tango’s black roots, the international tango scene has grown to include just about every one except blacks. Tango is popular in many countries–including, for example, Japan and Turkey–but not, so far as I know, anywhere in sub-Saharan Africa.

Blacks do participate in the tango scene in Uruguay. For example, La Morocha and I recently met Francisco Prieto dancing at IASA, a social club in Montevideo that also goes by the name Salon Sudamerica. Mr. Prieto explained to us that he, too, goes by another name, “El Groncho de la IASA“. “Groncho” is a lunfardo word that means “black” since it sort of reverses the syllables of “negro“, the way that “gotan” reverses the syllables of “tango”. What struck me about El Groncho’s dancing is that it is both very good and very different from the dancing I have seen in Buenos Aires. For example, he moves his upper body more than would be permitted in the tango Argentino or the social dances of Europe, and sometimes he marks an ocho with his right hand gripping his partner’s waist. In Buenos Aires, El Groncho would probably be dismissed as too “canyengue“, a word used to indicate old-fashioned, low- class dancing.

While we were in Montevideo we also had the privilege of attending an asado at the Asociacion Cultural y Social Uruguaya, an Afro-Uruguayan collectivity. There we heard classic tangos such as “La Ultima Curda” sung to the accompaniment of a guitar and three African drums. Once again, it was different from any tango I have witnessed in Buenos Aires (including that of Afro-Tango). The rhythm is what Uruguayans call “candombero“. The word comes from “candombe“, an Afro-Uruguayan music, dance, and religion. Also, the singing was less operatic and more enunciated than is typical in porteño tango. It reminded me more of Goyeneche in his final years than of Gardel, Corsini, or Rivero. I have rarely heard tangos performed more beautifully or to greater effect.

Before our trip, La Morocha and I asked tangueros in Buenos Aires for recommendations on where to dance in Montevideo. We were told that the tango scene in Montevideo is a disaster. Note that many Argentines express admiration for Uruguayan soccer, asado, dulce de leche, and wool, so their lack of respect for Uruguayan tango cannot be attributed to a general anti-Uruguayan attitude. Thus, I was surprised to find that Montevideo is such a wonderful place to hear and dance tango, and I asked myself why the tango scene in Montevideo is so little known and respected in Buenos Aires and the United States.

Could it be that in Montevideo tango’s black roots are too visible, like a rubia teñida who has waited too long between color treatments? I suspect that this is one of the reasons most tango tourists go to Buenos Aires and not to Montevideo, and why so many people are enamored of tango Argentino whereas so few have even heard of tango Uruguayo. Tango in Montevideo is too African for the international Tango market.

When I say that the tango’s black roots are closer to the surface in Montevideo than in Buenos Aires, I do not mean to suggest that Montevidean tango is less developed or more primitive than porteño tango. A century of history has surely left its mark on tango in Montevideo just as much as it has on tango in Buenos Aires. The difference is that for most of this century porteño tango has been systematically whitened, while Montevidean tango has not. In tango Argentino, both in Argentina and abroad, African (and Indigenous) elements have been suppressed in favor of the European elements with which they once coexisted. There are also many fewer rubias teñidas to be seen strolling down 18 de Julio (in Montevideo) than down 9 de Julio (in Buenos Aires).

El Yanqui Yeff is an anthropologist dedicated to the study of Argentine popular culture and an enthusiastic but inexperienced tango dancer.

MY EXPERIENCE WITH ALBERTO PAZ AND VALORIE HART

A testimony by Jean-Pierre Sighé
April 2, 2006

I met Alberto and Valorie during the Winter of 1998, in California . I had just made the decision to learn Argentine Tango, after going to the show “Forever Tango” twice in San Francisco and watching the movie “The Tango Lesson” by Sally Potter. I needed someone from the Culture of Argentina to teach me Tango, as I had intuitively sensed how deep Tango seemed to touch the different delicate layers of the human emotions.

Someone had given me their phone number. I called and during the preliminary introduction, I explained the reason of my call: “I needed someone to teach me Tango, but more than the steps. I wanted to understand the “Culture” behind the moves”. After his delighting usual chuckle, he said: “Well…you found me. I think I can teach you what you’re looking for”. These words marked the opening of a marvelous door to my quest.

The first lesson consisted in Walking and… Walking, with no reference to any figure. I had to learn how to keep my partner in front of me, therefore, learn how to “negotiate” curving and straight paths. “Tango is a walking dance” Alberto said. Little did I understand at the time all the profound implications of that comment. Confident I was, sensing I was studying with someone who knew what he was doing.

After several months of private and semi-private lessons, Alberto and Valorie encouraged me to start going to the milongas to dance. The dance floor is the place where my many lessons taken, would show, they kept saying.

About 6 months later, as I signed up for the Nora’s Tango week-end (a major Tango event in the San Francisco Bay Area in July) I began to realize how fortunate I had been to study with Alberto and Valorie. I had been very well prepared to understand the instructions of other great tango Masters such as Fabian Salas, Carlos Gavito, Tito…etc. that I encountered at the event and later on, studied with.

I had NEVER had to go back and unlearn or correct anything Alberto and Valorie have taught me. For that I will be forever grateful to them. In the world where many delve and stagnate in so much fantasies and half information dispensed by people who have not yet studied long enough and yet want to be “teachers”, it means a lot to find the right Master Teachers such as Alberto and Valorie, from the very first neophyte’s steps.

To Teach is also to express Love. It is a gift and a talent. I was very impressed with Alberto’s ability to go into my mind and explain to me a difficulty I was experiencing. He was thus able to help me identify the problem and therefore put me in a better position to correct it. Infinitely patient, Alberto and Valorie NEVER looked at their watch to “check the time” of the lesson. I remember one day where I was so enthusiastic about a subject we were studying, that I kept working on it and asking questions, over and over. At some point, Valorie went to the kitchen for a quick brake. I continued with Alberto for a while. Then, Alberto walked toward the couch, slumped onto it with his hands resting on his head. At that moment, Valorie came out of the kitchen and Alberto, looking at her said with a very calmed and exhausted voice : “I think we’ve created a monster!” She burst out laughing. I quickly realized…checked my watch and (Oh my God!) we had been working for over two hours already, for a lesson that was meant to last one hour. I too laughed, apologized for my “stubborn focus” and departed shortly after to allow my teachers some rest.

That availability of a Teacher, that Love expressed tirelessly for the student, has marked me forever. There is an indescribable joy in helping a student receive the information and to see that information take shape in his/her mind. The length of time it takes to accomplish the goal does not matter anymore. That is the modus operandi of Alberto and Valorie.

Very attached to the historical accuracies, Alberto opened my eyes to many facts about Argentine Tango. He is the one who made me realize the contribution that the African descents in Buenos Aires , along with the Italian, Spanish and Indian, had brought to the birth of Tango. After the class, it was customary to sip a cup of tea, graciously offered by Valorie, in the kitchen of their wonderful house (I called it ‘The Temple of Tango”, because everything in that house was breathing Tango). During that special time, casual comments often helped me open my heart more to the Argentinean spirit.

Alberto and Valorie gave me a gift of a priceless value, an added life lasting joy to my existence: the experience of Tango. They opened a window on the garden of my soul to let more rays of the sun and more warmth of Love rush in. Thank you!

FLIRTY DANCING

By Jim Rendon
Photograph by Christopher Gardner

Tango has been called the three-minute romance, and a thriving circle of aficionados says the late-late 20th century is the right time for its passion and perfection.

Dance of Life: Sunnyvale residents Valorie Hart and Alberto Paz found each other through tango and now teach others in a thriving Bay Area scene where a milonga can be found any night of the week.

VALORIE HART LOOKS out on the empty dance floor, watching as couples arrive, a few at time. She reaches across the table and grabs for an Altoid. “These are addictive,” she says, popping a bright-white mint in her mouth from one of the little red-and-white tins that seem to be everywhere. Tango is a close dance. Dressed in a glittering black shirt, fishnets and a short skirt with a long slit, Hart keeps turning her attention to the floor as she talks. Her dark hair is slicked back, cut straight at the neck. Though her eyes look sleepy, her conversation is sharp and entertaining.

“With tango, you are either in or out,” she says, turning away from the floor. “Family and non-tango friends don’t understand. My friends in New York thought I was white-slaved away. I sold my business, gave up my apartment. But I did not really give up anything,” she says. “I have a great life with Alberto. We embrace this community.”

On the dance floor, couples move tentatively in a counterclockwise walking embrace. Clearing his throat, Alberto Paz brings the studied movement of five couples to a halt. “OK, now we’ll try something different,” he says. Valorie’s 55-year-old partner has an air of grace about him that makes his maroon tuxedo jacket and white silk scarf look comfortable, almost casual. “Like this,” he says as he and Valorie embrace, face to face, and move in exaggerated motions to the melodramatic rise and fall of the music. Even in their overblown instructive performance, their connectedness is unmistakable.

Alberto steps across Valorie with his right foot, then brings his left foot toward her. They move to his right and stop, shifting weight back to his left. “Go on, try it, try it,” he says. And the circle of dancers moves again.

Each Monday night Paz and Hart drive from their home in Sunnyvale to share tango with everyone who wants to learn, from the advanced, invitation-only crowd decked out in dark suits and slicked-back hair, to dance-floor virgins in rubber-soled shoes, like me. As with many of the people who are filtering into the room, tango has enriched, changed and utterly consumed their lives.

Five years ago, Hart and Paz lived on opposite coasts, each unaware of the other, wrapped up in successful business ventures of their own. Today their careers lie abandoned, their lives bound to each other and to the dance that brought them together.

Since meeting and falling for each other, Paz and Hart have been an important part of a decade-long Bay Area tango obsession. This is the hottest tango spot in the United States, and some claim the hottest in the world outside Buenos Aires. On any night of the week, tango-obsessed dancers can hit a milonga (social dance) somewhere in the Bay Area. Homegrown teachers have sprung up to support the craze. And many Argentine masters work their way through town, arranging invitation-only classes through Paz and Hart.

The dance–close, passionate, sensual, demanding a physical connection–expresses a side of the human experience that Silicon Valley turned its back on. Engineers locked in a mental embrace with numbers, theories and codes have traded sensual experience for platonic flirtation with a machine. Tango, Paz says, can help fix that. “Silicon Valley is populated and run by engineers, people who have a love affair with the keyboard,” he says in a deep voice that masks a distant accent. Tango is refreshingly different. “The first thing you do is to embrace a total stranger, keep your mouth shut and listen to the music. You learn to listen to your partner, to know what they are feeling. It is a shocking and devastating experience. These moments of sheer connection are important,” he says, especially in a valley where people are increasingly alienated and cerebral.

DICK SIMONI, a Menlo Park architect, sits down at a long table dotted with glasses of wine and tall draughts of ice water. He moves a few glasses aside and puts his small canvas bag on the table. His back to the dance floor, he pauses to take in a stunning view of San Francisco’s rolling hills, fading into the gridlike outer Richmond. From the 19th floor of the Mark Hopkins hotel on Nob Hill, the city unfolds in every direction. Simoni turns his gaze back to the table and pulls a pair of leather-soled dance shoes from the bag, swapping them with his formal footwear.

At the sound of tuning violins and the sighing bandoneon, the Argentine accordion, people begin to mill about at the edge of the dance floor, picking out partners, anticipating the evening’s first dance to the live band. While most milongas have a DJ, Paz and Hart have booked Strictly Tango, a five-piece band, to bang out Argentine tunes every Monday night.

Like most of the men in the club tonight, Simoni wears a dark suit, his hair brushed back off his forehead. He looks around the room, enjoying the view, the potted palms and wood pillars that hem the dance floor. “We like to imagine this is a 1920s Berlin nightclub,” he says. “Today in Europe, it’s more underground,” he says, describing the warehouses he and his wife, Ginger, danced in during a recent trip to Switzerland, as the band starts playing and the dancing begins.

The band starts with a stereotypical tango song. It’s the one that I hear in my head when I think of tango, a jerky beat, soft and then loud. It has the rhythm of someone frantically sneaking up a staircase–a quick run, then a pause to check if someone is listening, then another burst up the stairs. It’s almost comic, reminding me of Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick, until suddenly the music slows, becoming sad, almost tragic. Even the fastest, most upbeat tangos the band plays have an edge of sadness and tragedy.

Simoni points out a couple moving past, their chests pushed tightly together, legs pushed out so they look like a triangle. “That’s milonguero style,” he says, admiring the couple’s performance. The tight embrace and subtle foot movements evolved from the tightly packed milongas in Buenos Aires.

A woman in a long black dress pauses at the table and asks Simoni to dance. Standing chest to chest with the woman on the dance floor, Simoni waits for the music to move him. Then, on the downbeat, he steps away, tangoing with the others, adding his own slide and shuffle of leather against wood to the quiet sound that flows just beneath the surface of the music.

Tim Yoshida watches another young woman whose arms are draped over the shoulders of a tall, older man. She stretches to reach him, but the couple looks graceful nonetheless. “She’s only had something like three or four lessons,” Yoshida says. “But she’s danced just about every song all night. She’s hooked,” he says with a laugh.

Yoshida, like a lot of dancers, talks about two things: the sensuality of the dance, and something dancers call the tango trance. Yoshida studied martial arts for 10 years before trying tango. After three years of dancing, he finds it fills the much the same need as martial arts. “In the beginning, you work on posture and try not to fall down,” he says. But once you get comfortable with the footwork, the dance changes. “You are torso to torso, hand to hand. It’s up to you to lead. If you lead and she follows, you become lost in the music. You are transplanted to another time and place.”

Sitting across from Yoshida, Caroline Duncan agrees. But for her, the spirituality gets wrapped up in the physical, sensual nature of the dance. “With tango, you meet a man right here,” she says placing her hand flat across her chest. “It’s a touching way to meet a man.”

Duncan takes a sip of her drink and looks out on the floor, watching for a minute as dancers pass. Everyone is engaged in their own world, creating their own steps. Some move slowly, deliberately, with long pauses. Others stamp by quickly, swinging and kicking feet in the air. Though everyone moves differently, the dancers flow together. Always the couples stay close, never leaving the embrace.

“It’s a dance for people who like to touch,” she says. “When you first start a dance, you press your shoulder up tight against them and listen to the music. You can feel the music, your partner’s energy. You can tell a lot about the quality of the person you dance with. It’s synergistic. Together you are more than two.”

The dance, she and others say over and over, got its start in the brothels of Buenos Aires. Some call it the three-minute romance. Though it quickly left the bordello for Argentina’s society nightclubs, the heart of Argentine tango never strayed far from its passionate working-class roots.

TIM RISES TO GET IN a dance or two with the young woman. As he leaves the table, Jim Maes, a slender, bearded man in a dark suit, approaches the table. He says a few somber hellos, then crosses to the other side of the room, where he sits alone with a full glass of red wine, watching the dancers spin past him.

Maes is a casualty of tango. Tonight he looks back on his five years of dancing with a wrenching mix of joy and despair.

Maes began dancing after seeing Forever Tango, a Broadway-style show featuring some of the best tango dancers in the world. “I saw it three times,” Maes says. “It brought tears to my eyes.”

Maes had a nearly instant reaction to the show and the dance. “I know that,” Maes said to himself as he watched the proud attitude of the dancers, the tough stance and macho clothes. As a teenager Maes had been a greaser, knocking around San Francisco’s Mission District. The tough, proud attitude reminded him of the street. The lure was irresistible. He jumped in head first.

Maes would take classes as often as possible, sometimes six times a week. “I fell in love with the beauty of the dance, the passion and the power,” he says.

Maes left his most recent job so he could dance more often. Tango has taken over his life, and Maes feels lucky to give himself over to the dance. “It’s a way for me to express myself,” he says. “It’s been a long, hard struggle to get to where I am now.”

But now that pride is tainted. “The dance is so seductive,” he says. At a recent milonga, Maes’ dance with a stranger went too far–extending beyond the dance floor. The relationship with his longtime girlfriend came tumbling down around him. Now he hates himself for what he did and for what he has lost.

Yet tango draws him back. “It has brought me so much joy,” he says of the dance. “But it has also brought heartache. I wish I never found it. I wish I could cut myself off at the knees and never dance again,” Maes says, looking at his untouched glass of wine.

Simoni walks over to offer Maes a sympathetic pat on the shoulder. An older woman extends her hand to Maes, offering a dance. He accepts, taking the floor. But he moves stiffly, his thoughts elsewhere.

MAES HAS AN UNUSUAL dedication to the art of tango. But for anyone to master even the basics takes time and some commitment. Learning to dance well is like learning to play jazz music. Tango is less about learning individual steps than about understanding body position, knowing what range of movement to pursue from any given position, and learning to give oneself over to the music. Like jazz, the form allows an infinite range of personal expression. It can take a lifetime to master. Women take about a year to feel comfortable, Hart says. Men can take two years before they are confident on the dance floor. For me, I think it would be longer.

As couples circle the room under Hart and Paz’s direction, she can’t resist giving me a little help. With her fishnet-clad legs bowed as if straddling a Brahma bull, Hart stomps away from me. Her hands rest on her hips as she swings her chest back and forth exaggerating a swagger. “Don’t walk around like a cowboy,” she says to me, a grin creeping across her face.

“You want to keep your feet together, place them right next to your partner’s as you move,” she says, grabbing my shoulders and moving me around with unwavering physical certainty. “Feels better, eh?” she says, cracking a smile and walking off toward another couple. I am left to work out the rigorous act of walking with my partner.

Though we attempt little more than walking counterclockwise, I feel as if just putting one foot in front of the other is beyond me. But I am assured over and over again that everyone feels lost at first. Even Alberto, who grew up in Argentina surrounded by the dance, felt awkward when he took his first steps less than decade ago. For the first six months he found the dance a trial.

Paz moved to the Silicon Valley from Buenos Aires in 1968 seeking a future in electrical engineering. For the next 20 years he worked for small high-tech video companies, finally founding his own in the 1980s. But by the end of that decade, Paz felt there was something missing in his life.

He began working at KIQI as a soccer announcer and eventually as a night-time DJ playing South American music. Every now and then he would spin a tango from the station’s collection and the phone lines would light up. The music brought back memories of home from listeners who grew up all over South America, and they wanted to hear more.

Soon he switched to an all-tango format. To gear up for the show, he took a two-week trip to Buenos Aires, snatching up books and music, absorbing the history and culture of the music. “I learned a lot of things that were already somewhere in my mind,” Paz says. “For the 25 years I lived in Argentina, I totally ignored the tango I heard every day at home. I liked rock & roll.”

What Paz uncovered was a rich history of music, dance and culture that was largely undocumented. At that time there were no English-language histories of tango. The first was published just a year ago. Even Paz, who tracks down the dance’s roots with a disciple’s fervor, feels uncertain about many of the details.

Italian immigrants and recently freed slaves living in and around Buenos Aires (which was a slave port in the mid-1800s) developed the earliest form of tango in the 1860s. Paz says that the dance may have originally been a spinoff of high society’s ballroom dancing which gave immigrants, penned up with little work and few resources, a chance to develop and show off their grace and skill. Initially, most of that showing off was done by men dancing together, because the flood of immigrants was largely male.

By the early 1900s, the dance moved from the streets to bordellos, where men lined up to take turns dancing with the women. The music developed an upbeat, seat-of-the-pants style, played by working-class musicians without the benefit of sheet music. From the bordellos, the dance began to spread upward through Argentine society.

Sailors took the form to Europe, where it caught on like wildfire. And once Europe embraced it, Argentine society grabbed hold of the dance, creating nightclubs and smoothing over some of the raunchier moves. When depression hit in 1931, tango went with it, falling out of favor for the first, but not the last, time.

A few years later, in 1935, musicians dramatically changed the songs, emphasizing the rhythms and making it easier to dance to. The crowds came pouring back. Tango hit its golden age from the late 1930s through the 1940s.

Though diminishing in popularity, tango remained strong among working-class people until the 1970s, when Argentina lived under a dictatorship. Paz, like most in his generation, just missed out on tango. The foreign influences of rock & roll were more appealing, and the tradition seemed on the wane.

With the fall of the dictatorship in 1983, a show called Tango Argentino was organized in Buenos Aires. Many of the old masters took the stage. The show toured the U.S. and Europe and helped to rekindle interest in the dance. When Forever Tango came to San Francisco in 1994, it was scheduled for four weeks and stayed for 92.

Now Buenos Aires is packed with tango tourists. The government officially sanctions the dance. People around the world from New Zealand and Japan to Germany and New York dance tango.

Inspired by his trip, Paz returned to Sunnyvale ready to play more tango music. Soon he was DJing milongas and classes, but he never danced himself. “I had the prejudice that tango was something you learned when you were a kid. In Buenos Aires if you weren’t good by 18, forget it. If you didn’t know how to dance, then a woman wouldn’t dance with you.”

After a while, Paz learned a few steps, but never really applied himself. Then, at a milonga one night, he realized he was the only Argentine in the room and he was not dancing.

That night Paz made a commitment to learn tango. Like so many other Argentinians, he was rediscovering what his parents already knew.

Within six months, he began to think there was hope. That was in 1993. Two years later, on a whim, he went to Stanford Tango Week and saw Hart leaning against a dance studio door.

WHILE PAZ WAS discovering tango, Hart was living a successful life in New York, running her own business, oblivious to the dance that would change her life.

One night while she was making a pasta dinner with a group of Argentine friends she met through her corporate event­ planning business, someone put on a tango album. An Argentine friend boasted that he would teach her tango. But it only took a few steps for them to realize that no one in the room could dance it. As with Paz, the dance had passed these Argentines by.

They promised to take lessons, and Hart’s interest was sparked. When she heard about Stanford’s tango event, a two-week-long, eight-hour-a-day tango celebration featuring some of the world’s best dancers, she had to check it out.

She showed up in Palo Alto just curious, not looking to change her life, meet anyone or fall in love. But then she danced with Paz. “Not till I met Alberto did I feel comfortable dancing. He produced a safe haven for me to dance,” Hart says. They danced and talked and got to know each other. At the end of the week they parted, keeping in touch via email and fax.

“Tango touches people at crossroads in their lives. There is something deep about the experience of connecting with someone. My mother had just died at the time I was introduced to Argentine tango. She died young and suddenly,” Hart says. “That made me realize that life is short. I am approaching my 50th birthday and suddenly I thought, where did 50 years go?”

Three months later, Alberto visited her in New York and asked her to come to Sunnyvale.

“I thought, am I nuts? I don’t even know this guy,” Hart says. She packed her bags and left New York behind.

HART AND PAZ TAKE the floor together after an evening of mixing partners. The couple share a dance–slow, deliberate, so close together that they snuff out the light between their bodies. They circle the nearly empty floor as others look on.

The dance holds a deep meaning to nearly everyone here. For Hart, a child of the ’60s who has run her own business, the issue is about fitting the dance with her feminist background.

“At face value, it looks as though it is traditional role-playing–a man’s dance,” she says. “But it’s not. The man navigates the dance. In following, you get to improvise. The man creates the space for you to dance in. Once that space is secure, it is a place for you to express yourself, to experience the music, to be feminine.”

Alberto finds the social nature of the dance addictive. “People come together and share three minutes of true 50-50 cooperation between a man and a woman. The body communicates. The man improvises and feels the woman’s responsiveness. It requires commitment, more than going out and listening to noise and drinking alcohol.”

Both Hart and Paz dropped everything to be with each other, and not long afterward they started a company, Planet Tango. They publish a magazine, El Firulete, and are in the midst of installing a dance floor in their home. They teach, broker lessons for visiting masters, arrange tours to Buenos Aires, and sell CDs, shoes and anything else related to tango.

“I’m living the life of a boho gypsy. It’s like being 18 again,” Hart says. “We are poor, but we make enough for house payments and to make a little pasta.” The couple travels almost half the year. In the next few months they are scheduled to teach in Honolulu, Alaska and Florida. Every summer they take a group to Buenos Aires, all to dance.

“It is an obsession,” Paz says. “You incorporate tango into your life. In many cases, it’s like a religion.”

As the floor clears, the band packs its instruments. Paz spins a few more CDs. A crowd watches from the sidelines as the dancers from Tango show off their skills. Some couples dance furiously, some slowly, with exquisite yawning movements.

The dance, which these people perform so well, seems to spark obsession in everyone it touches. Casual dancers are hard to find, and those who work at the dance are close. Tango, born at the end of the last century, fills a void that has opened up over the past hundred years. Once a release for the massive dislocation and upheaval of the industrial revolution, it now provides a vital link to that remarkably sensual world, a world that this century has left reeling behind it. Here, at the Top of the Mark, as I watch architects and mechanics, attorneys and students, lose themselves in the music and the feel of each other, the dance feels like an embrace of the waning century, a retreat from the gaping emptiness of the next millennium. Looking around the room, it seems obvious that we will need to bring tango with us.

As the song ends, Hart walks out onto the dance floor. It’s nearly 1am. She calls out loud and happy, “Last tango!”

From the December 24-30, 1998 issue of Metro.
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