August 2024: Dear Tango,

As I enter the second half of my life, I take solace in your rebirth, see my passage beyond 50 as the start of something new. Of course, newness is but a concept, and who knows that better than you? If I turn back, the seeds that became now would spiral clockwise 20 years—like a most famous tango lyric come to life: veinte años no es nada. They’d have sprouted into fields thick with yuyo verde, the determination of all that emerges in and out of place. Breathing the duality of your embrace, I look forward, beyond the frame of the one who leads, in order to look back. Like a Borges character or a high-COVID-times kindergartener peeking beyond a machine, expecting flesh and blood on the other side of a screen of Zoom squares. When we are in sync, tango, the feeling is not unlike parenthood. The love grows, deepens with time. Even as the relationship becomes more complex.

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In 2002, I went to my first tango event in Philadelphia, just days before beginning graduate school in anthropology. Tango soon became my work, and through the early aughts, I conducted fieldwork on tango dance in the U.S. and Buenos Aires. By the 2010s, I was a young mother with less free time and less desire to leave the house after dark. I grew frustrated with the struggles many women confront in tango. I dove into lessons in leading, only to pause in the wake of COVID-19, a time that fueled reflection, in the absence of gathering to dance, on tango’s evolution. Tango as dance promises little more than potential—for connection, bliss, trance, transcendence, whatever we wish to call these moments that shift our experience of self

and bring us into communion. If these moments bring vibrant life, they ultimately evaporate. But their memories take root in the body. Reconciling this residue to the shifting terrain of multiple pandemics, aging bodies, culture’s ebb and flow, I plumbed my 20-year+ love affair with tango in my Cambridge Companion chapter and NEH presentation. Below are some portraits and reflections.

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A Philadelphia Milonga, 2018

I arrive at the milonga late and tired. It is a quiet night, the leaders I hope to dance with are not there, and I resign myself to socializing. I sit at a table with two women who are older than me. A man I have never seen before appears on the periphery of my vision, and despite my effort to keep talking, his cabaceo is unrelenting. After we dance a song, he places a hand on my waist as we talk. I wiggle away to increase the space between us. He then takes my hand, not to dance but to hold on to me while chatting between songs. I pull my hand away. “Thank you,” the polite tango exit strategy, is on the tip of my tongue, but instead I say, “I don’t even know your name.”

I wonder if the women I chatted with had danced much. If he’d invited them earlier or if he would have asked them had I not been there. I wonder what gave him the impression my agreeing to dance meant he could touch me as if I were his date. In a moment, I will embrace him and rest my chest against his. Perhaps that confuses him, and perhaps confusion is a pretense. The incident itself is nothing. The behavior could have been—has been—much worse. But nearly two decades into tango, it nags at me in a new way. My tolerance is low. I have been at this too long. I am too old for this, I think.

Like most followers, I have wrestled with leaders on the dance floor and in classes. Indeed, I have been “dance-raped”: groped, harassed, made to feel uncomfortable or unsafe, had my physical and verbal cues ignored. I have also been desperate to dance—to lose myself in the moment, to embrace someone on a crowded dance floor, and to move together to music and lyrics from another time and place that I gradually adopted as my own. Only years into my practice did I begin to reckon with my capacity for desperation, my desire for experience for its own sake. I let things roll off me like water because I had arrived remarkably unscathed.

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A U.S. Tango Festival, 2012

Two young men who usually partner women perform together, exchanging lead and follow. All of it leaves me speechless—explosive jumps and turns, subtle weight shifts, the absence of stasis in each pause, the way they devour the space, even in the milliseconds when a leg or foot or a torso hover above an audience member’s head—and a bit discouraged for being so outdone by these men who dabble, at best, in following. They invite a handful of men friends from the audience to join in a song. They sing for two minutes about penises and how blessed they are to have them. Never in question, the masculinity of the man who follows has nonetheless been restored. This lovely surprise—the possibility of their duet performed with none of the face-saving humor some men scrabble to perform in public moments of same-sex closeness—evaporates with the song. What we are left with is more of the same.

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Skin Hunger and Distanced Walks, Winter 2021

My new tango walk is at a distance. I rotate among tango friends as I once switched partners at the milongas. We meet in groups of two or three in parks, on city sidewalks, and in

beautiful graveyards that call to mind pilgrimages to Recoleta and Chacarita cemeteries in Buenos Aires. Swapping stories with a friend one day, we lament the labor of navigating relations with men dancers and teachers. In the pause, she finds clarity, strength, and emotional reserves, and she questions what space tango will occupy in her life going forward. As the pandemic drags on, moving discussions of skin hunger meet illuminating treatises on the preponderance of unwanted touch we are socialized to endure.

In the wake of #metoo, I began to notice the appearance of community agreements designed to yield safer, more welcoming environments. Given the intergenerational, intercultural nature of tango, I question the potential for consensus, for organizers to govern behavior in an interpersonally murky environment, in which they have a financial investment. I stumbled across an online article about safety, pleasure, and connection in tango and memories resurfaced, like the time I finally watched videos of a professional who was notorious for abusing his partners; I sat transfixed before the screen, unable to look away. Another day, I screened the documentary/ musical Un Tango Más, in which María Nieves describes the hatred that fueled and empowered her later dancing years with Juan Carlos Copes, the romantic and professional partner who betrayed her more than once during their celebrated career. In the film, two young dancers watch historic footage of Copes and Nieves, to prepare to reinterpret them in fictional flashbacks, and they comment on the famed couple’s “connection within their disconnection.” More recently, I watched a former maestro manhandle and bark at his wife and partner before abandoning her on the dance floor in the middle of a performance. In a separate video, two young men dancers dissect the incident like an Olympic sport, repeating the violence in a play-by-play loop. As dancers around the world weigh in on the incident, I wonder at the space between proclamations

and change, whether the performance of the public square can heal all this pain, how we are always moving forward against the deep grooves of time and culture.

Born of pain and sorrow, dislocation, marginalization, nostalgia, and myriad violations and beauties alike, tango transcends these foundations even as the themes reverberate through the mythology of its poetry, music, and history. More than twenty years in, I question whether tango’s magic, its confounding potential to bridge fathomless divides in the moment, transcends prescription. As time drags on and I reflect on tango in the abstract, its mysteries and its humanness loom large.

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November 2024: Dear Tango,

I’m so glad I invited myself to that dinner last summer, to discuss what has become a meaningful next chapter—bringing tango to individuals with movement and neurologic disorders with the Tango Therapy Project. I remember when I first heard about tango therapy more than a decade ago, and I was both delighted and dubious. I’d dedicated a whole chapter of my book to the suffering so many dancers endure in pursuit of tango’s elusive, never lasting high. The words of a brilliant friend who I lost during COVID echo in my brain—of course tango is therapeutic, you just have to remove it from the social context, because the scene asks for ego. None of us are immune from that. Adapting you, tango, I reconnect to your essence: Embracing someone. Moving together to music. Sharing time and space. Our students’ eyes light up when they hear the beat or walk to the music with a partner. They exclaim with delight “I’m dancing!” and I exclaim right back “You are!”

You have given me so much, tango: a life abroad, a child, human connection. Democratizing you, I find purpose. Diving again into lessons in leading, I return to you