When it comes to learning tango, Spanish speakers, and especially Argentines, have an advantage over us. Sure, when they walk into their first few dance classes they have, just like us, problems with coordination, using their chest to lead, extending their free leg and maintaining a comfortable embrace. But they have a lot less difficulty with the music and the lyrics than we do.

If you are a native speaker of Spanish, you will immediately understand the lyrics of the tangos you hear in class. Maybe not the expressions in lunfardo, the Buenos Aires slang, but you will still have a very good idea of what a song is about. And if you are from Buenos Aires, you will even recognize the names of the local parks, cafes, streets and neighborhoods mentioned in many tangos, valses and milongas. Just imagine dancing to tangos written in Polish with references to the city where you live: wouldn’t it be easier and more fun to dance to them? Wouldn’t that music feel closer to you? You cannot grow up and live in Buenos Aires without hearing tango, even if you’ve never danced it yourself. It’s on the radio. It’s on the TV. You hear it in the stores and on the street. Maybe your parents or other relatives played it at home when you were little. Either way, you’ve already heard many, many tango songs before your first ever tango class, you understand the language they’re in and know the places they talk about. The songs talk to you, and you understand them.

We who begin to learn tango outside of Argentina, speaking a language other than Spanish are missing all these experiences with tango music. Often, our first tango class is the first time we ever hear classical tango music and it sounds unfamiliar to us. Of course, we would prefer to dance to music that feels familiar to us, music which we understand. So we have a choice: adapt the music to ourselves or adapt ourselves to the music. Many of us are used to music with a steady, clear beat that is carried by drums – such as pop, rock, hip-hop, salsa and many other genres. It is natural to want to dance to music in which we feel the beat and know when to step.

One option, then, is to have milongas where a good portion of the music played is not traditional tango music. Today, there are milongas in Europe where up to half the evening consists of alternative, nuevo, fusion, folk etc. songs. This keeps many dancers happy because they can feel the higher energy level and the beat of a song without having to go through a long learning process, without having to develop an appreciation for something that’s unfamiliar. For many young people, “old” tangos sound all the same, and have too little energy. New, alternative songs are the ones they find really fun to dance to. This is the path of least resistance – dancing to what is new, cool and instantly enjoyable.

The second option is to take the time and the effort to listen to classical tango music, learn about it and develop an appreciation for its complexities. If you are lucky, you will not be completely alone in this work: your dance teachers and local DJs can help you. (Please raise your hand if in your tango classes your teachers regularly mention which orchestra they are playing, or even talk a bit about the characteristic style of the orchestra or what a given song’s lyrics are about.) Some tango teachers have noted that it usually takes young people 2-3 years to start to “see beyond” the figures and appreciate the complexity of a tango dance in which music is expressed just as creatively with simpler steps. I think there is a similar learning curve for tango music: it takes a few years of dancing to discover the beauty and complexity of Golden Age tangos. But tango teachers and DJs also have a responsibility to the students and dancers. A beginner student can be taught not just steps, but an appreciation for the music he is dancing to. DJs can create their tandas paying attention to which orchestra recorded each song with which singer in which year, creating a consistent mood in each set of songs.

But as a beginner, you need to be active, too: ask other dancers or your teachers and DJs questions about the music, search on the internet for more information, build your own library of music and take some time to listen to it. There are even websites and blogs with English translations of tango lyrics, so if you speak English, you can learn what a lot of songs are about.

Still, this is a whole lot more effort than dancing to Libedinsky, Gotan Project, Johansen or world music, so why do it? Why spend hours and hours trying to learn about songs that were recorded 60, 70 or even 80 years ago in a different language in another part of the world? The short answer is: because Golden Age tango music is an integral part of the experience of dancing tango. Or, to put it differently, the technique and “feel” of close embrace social tango dancing comes largely from the music itself. (It is also influenced and limited by the crowded conditions and social rules that developed in the 1930s and 1940s in Buenos Aires, but that is another story.) The goal of a social Argentine tango dancer is to move to the music he loves, to express the melody and the beat and to share this feeling with his partner. A social dancer wants to enjoy dancing with his partner, not entertain an audience or demonstrate his superior speed or skills. Social tango is a very different dance from what you can see on stage in a tango show or in a demo at a tango festival.

* Tango waits for you (Anibal Troilo)

I was standing in line to get coins (I do this a couple of times a week, since they’re in extremely short supply, but are the only way to pay the fare on the buses), when an Argentine man in his late seventies began chatting with me. We kvetched for a while about the long line and the bad service, then talked about the economy, life in Buenos Aires and in Argentina in general, the weather, being a tourist here and in Europe, plus a few other topics. He spoke heavily-accented, rapidfire porteno Spanish, but I understood the better part of what he was saying, and he had no trouble understanding me, so we continued to talk outside the bank. It turned out that despite his age, he was still actively working with tourist agencies around the world to bring tourists to Argentina, and continues to travel to Europe and Asia regularly. He talked about the neighborhood where we were, saying it was called Villa Freud because of the high concentration of psychoanalysts and psychiatrists living there and said it had become one of the most expensive places in the city to buy an apartment. Then, when I explained that we were here for tango, he said that he used to dance, but doesn’t anymore because of his age. So we started to discuss tango, I told him how it’s danced and taught in Europe, the USA and in Argentina, my perceptions of milongas here, alternative music and the increasing interest in Golden Age tango music around the world.

He said the same things I had heard in private classes as well: that to dance tango, you don’t need to do a lot of complicated steps and acrobatics, instead, you must listen to the music, the lyrics of the song you’re dancing to, and dance to the compás and the cadencia with your heart. As we continued to talk standing on the sidewalk in front of the bank, he quoted several lines from Naranjo en flor and then from Volver, saying that they were beatiful poetry that one needs to be able to understand and appreciate in order to dance to it:

“Toda mi vida es el ayer
que me detiene en el pasado,
eterna y vieja juventud
que me ha dejado acobardado
como un pájaro sin luz.”

“Volver . . .
Con la frente marchita
Las nieves del tiempo
Blanquearon mi sien”

I said that as a foreigner I found it hard to understand some tangos because of the old lunfardo (Buenos Aires slang) used in them. He suggested that I ask local teachers about these, so I can really get the meaning, and, therefore, feel what the poets meant when they wrote them.

He also talked about the importance of the embrace and how he much he liked the elegance of dancing tango de salón at the milongas where everybody used to take great care to dress and look their best. I was starting to wonder if he was one of the milonguero types who stay up all night to dance and womanize, but no, he’s been together with his wife for over 50 years.

He said society has changed a lot, for the worse, that the city is less secure, human, and friendly than it used to be. He used to go to the same bank for several decades, where he was on a first name basis with the employees, and before talking business, they would always have a bit of small talk about what they had done since the last time they had met. Now you get impersonal service and long waits in line, with special service reserved for the bank’s “Privilege” clients.

He mentioned an address, Boedo 777, where he used to dance. I told him we had been taking classes just two blocks from there with Jorge Dispari. That part of Boedo, near Avenida San Juan, is a very famous tango neighborhood, where many well-known figures of this dance were born or lived for a while, with name plaques on a lot of buildings and street corners in their memory. There is actually a tango titled Boedo y San Juan, written and composed by Enrique Cadicamo, who grew up in that neighborhood. Like many tangos, it describes a nostalgic longing for the past, a love of the streets where the poet grew up, and the changes in the neighborhood as the old streets and buildings disappear . . .

We talked for nearly an hour (including the nearly twenty minutes spent waiting in line). As we said goodbye, he wished me a pleasant stay and said he hoped I will want to come back again one day.

In milongas in Europe, one can see quite a bit of energy and sometimes even acrobatics on the dance floor, but less of the simple pausing and dancing to different instruments within the same song that can be observed in milongas in Buenos Aires. It is these qualities that can give a milonga its flow and special energy, so I was very happy to find several videos of Sebastian and Mariana performing to La melodía del corazón. As far as I can tell, these are not choreographies, rather, the dancers know the music very intimately and improvise each dance in a way that expresses the qualities of the various parts of this song.

Sebastian Arce & Mariana Montes - Dublin performance:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcJxPHeyhuk

Watch how the quality of their movement changes two minutes into the video, when the violin solo part starts — it’s almost like slow motion, but watch Sebastian’s left feet for just a second at 2:13.

Sebastian Arce & Mariana Montes - performance at La Viruta:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWZIdfmcDUU

Here, the violin part starts at 53 seconds — again, note the flowing, soft movement they switch to immediately. At 1:07, they take a few quick, playful, rhythmical steps, then immediately return to the previous quality, slowly transitioning back to more complicated, faster movement over the next 15-20 seconds.

Sebastian Arce & Mariana Montes - Sitges performance:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaY3IwlIg9s

Unfortunately, the first few seconds of the song are cut off, but you know what to look for. The changes are obvious at 0:27 and at 0:41. Here, instead of a gradual transition into more energetic dancing, they preserve the flowing quality until the end of the violin solo.

Sebastian Arce & Mariana Montes - Moscow performance:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=rLIN5m3gM7g

One more beautiful interpretation of the same song. Again, note how the changes in the quality of their dancing follow the changes in the music.