What Argentine Tango is like...

Things I have recently discovered that tango is "like"¹:

Tango is like... improvising music

You're moving within the freedom of a framework, and attempting to make yourself transparent and predictable to your partner while simultaneously bringing out the beauty in your movements. It's about precision, but also about compromise. It's about training your muscle memory enough that you can turn off your brain and just flow, because that's where the art appears.

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Dan, wearing a black t-shirt and tracksuit bottoms, playing an upright piano.

Tango is like... spinning tops

A table full of spinning tops can be in a state of stability, but it looks like it's only one little bump away from a catastrophe. Other forms of social ballroom dance are more like... dodgems. Both a tray of spinning tops and a bumper car ride are much safer than they look.

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Three wooden spinning tops lying on their sides.

I suppose the difference is that if you look at a still photo of bumper cars, or couples dancing a waltz, then you'll still be able to tell which way each participant is probably moving. But take a photo of spinning tops or tango dancers... and your assessment of which direction each is moving is little more than a guess!

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Legs of a couple dancing tango on a polished wooden floor.

Tango is like... an emergent phenomenon

The elegance of an an unrehearsed dance comes about almost as a side-effect of its component parts. Through their body language, the partners make space for one another's feet, vacating a spot right in time for the other to step into it without premeditation or planning. There are few rules, and they're more like guidelines: you'll typically alternate which leg you step with; you'll mostly move in some exact multiple or division of the music's rhythm; you'll generally see the leaders go "forwards" while followers go "backwards"... but every single one of those is open to reinterpretation and reimagination.

I was practising ochos with a fellow beginner yesterday when she suggested I inject a step that completely modified the shape of our movements as observed by anybody watching. It wasn't what we'd been taught. It wasn't what we were supposed to be drilling. But it worked and I was at-last knowledgable enough to reverse-engineer why it worked³! A wonderful little rule-bending moment.

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Dan, a white man with a goatee beard and blue ponytail, wearing a monochrome leaf-pattered shirt, sits at a table full of beer and wine, squinting quizzically at the camera while dancers shuffle around a dance floor behind him.

My point is: my partner didn't necessarily need to know whether or not I'd added that step, even though it transformed how we collectively appeared to move: it didn't materially change her steps. In that way, with those steps at least we were both "doing our own thing" within the framework provided... and the dance together emerged organically from it.

Two people dancing tango are a little like a flock of birds: each doing its own thing within the established rules but collectively acting with the grace and unity of a larger super-organism. And that, to me, feels like magic.