Character Assassination Tango

I'm not sure why, but tango seems to be a nice and easy, low-fat vegan substitute for God. I don't mean to be heretical here, only to say that it sparks the same neurons and stokes the same wide ranging but predictable reactions in people that religion tends to do. For some, that might be agnostic or even atheistic. For me- holding true to my millenial roots - it's more of a wishy-washy wide-eyed "spiritual but not religious" sort of mysticism. When I dance I feel like my entire body is glowing and *that* glow is tango more than any steps or rules about who nods first to whom.I believe you learn tango to acquire the tools and control of your body to converse with the music and with your partner. After you've done that, it's glowing, radiant and transcendent and I don't care if you're doing ochoes to DiSarli, colgadas to Gotan or shimmies to Bob Dylan: it can all be tango if there's that glow factor. Oooooom.

Of course there are all sorts of other embodiments of the religious tanguero: the tango WASPS (who tango only on holidays and always dance properly), the tango born-agains (just discovered after straying to ballroom and now feverishly obsessed and unable to discuss anything else ever), the tango monks (who mix between the rigidly uptight ascetics and the Kerouac-zen festival wanderers), the tango cults (those small offshoots based more around the personality of their personal tango messiah than the dance per se, and which may one day end up in a shoot out with the law enforcement)... the list goes on. We've got 'em all in Seattle and as much so in Bellingham. But Bellingham seems to have a more explosive combination. Maybe it's just that it's smaller so all the building tensions combust more readily with less space to gad about apart from each other. Perhaps it's simply the mark of a young community passing from childhood to its own moody adolescence, but there have been a number of schisms and uproars in the community - rifts that bring out the absolute worst in people in the name of "tango."

I'm really only peripherally connected to the Bellingham tango community as Blue Moon's teacher emeritus and absentee dj, but it holds a dear spot in my heart. My first teacher was a newly certified ballroom teacher who had maybe a week or two more experience on me in any given lesson. By the end, I was more or less teaching him. Still my first real tango was with him and it was incomparable - we were in the kitchen basement of a dance studio on the eve of a ballroom competition; we danced to a waltz and in our socks. I digress perhaps, but I could feel an itch on his foot, we were so in tune and I experienced every sensation of a three month horrifically romantic fling and all its endings, pains, joys and gratitudes. My first partners were social ballroomers who mixed in elements of american tango and any other dance they might have known. Maybe it was best described as tango pantheism, something singular in a way that made it reputedly unsavory to the Seattle dancers. But darnit, it was fun. Nobody put on airs about their tango and I remember inventing what turned out to be nuevo while playing dance games with a willing tanguero/swing-dancer. Some made the longish trek to Seattle and returned tango missionaries, but for the most part there was an air of content - playfullness, personality, and ... some other clever word that starts with a "p" (it's early).

Yes, the community is more "sophisticated" now. It is more mobile community. When I first began, I was one of the first people ever to go to even the Seattle Tango festival and certainly one of the first to actually go to Buenos Aires. Now, the Bs As count is still low, but it is a regionally nomadic community with people fairly fluent in noting the relevant teachers, "masters", and milongas between Vancouver and Portland and abroad. It's a community flooded with imported tango shoes and fancy gear from festival tables. And there is some fun to the fluency. It is, however, also a community that has lost some of the spark in the eyes. There have been endless holy wars of Machiavellian proportions - false accusations of some fairly scandalous natures, teachers have been outsted from the community through underhanded mechanisms, blacklisting between events has become the norm, nasty rumors, and a whole lot of unfettered dogmatic zeal about the "true" nature of tango.


The B-ham Guardo Viejo still exists and they are still fun - you might not call what they dance tango (or you might depending on your religious inclinations) and you might not like their "non-sequitor" untandaed music. But gosh darnit, they feel the dance and sensing that zest in a partner or a dj is far better than any nicely executed move (even more so than a shoddily executed and far too complicated move by one who doesn't understand his own limitations). They are increasingly marginalized as the proselytizers grow in number and influence. There are also the rare masters. Those who dance the way you'd expect expert dancers to dance - few and far between, they know the steps, but more importantly they know the way to hold and hear a partner and make him/her feel the music and the connection in a way they'd never anticipated, while floating just inches from the floor and seeming to do all this effortlessly. There's a learning progression that my mediation teacher is fond of: you begin unaware and incompetent -> you become aware of your incompetence -> you eventually become aware that you are competent -> and finally you become so competent that you are no longer aware of it. These few-and-far-betweeners are of the final sort.. But as implied they are rare and transient figures in any dance community, let alone one so small as Bellingham.

At any rate, as gossip leaks out to me about the latest scandal and the latest "snafu" I can't help but mourn the loss of a small community's innocence. I do hope that in time maturity will set in and tango enlightenment (whatever that might be) can be reached, but in the meantime I would like to bid goodbye to the community that reared me.