[Tango-L] Appropriate discourse

[TangoDC.com]

Hello list,

For no apparent reason, my inbox was flooded with the recent threads 
only this morning, 3 or 4 messages at a time. Now that I'm catching up, 
and have seen my choreography thread buried in rubble, I wish I could've 
been around to participate in the fray. But better late than never.

I feel that Alberto's post was a perfectly valid way to supplement the 
study of tango, to the extent that any secondary angles can be valuable 
at all. The four embraces mentioned, except perhaps the second 
("piercing") one (which probably suffers more from mistranslation than 
the others do), more or less loosely describe different types of 
embrace, as used effectively on the dance floor. And as initiated by 
either side of the partnership.

Since there's a general void where discourse about the tango's *content* 
is a propos, I welcome the citation. And since there's also a general 
skittishness about this dance, which has an overt and even de rigeur 
passion about it, but which so many people are afraid to call Sexual, I 
think it's refreshing to see that someone has actually found a relevant 
passage in an ancient treatise on sex. Alberto's post, whomever it was 
intended for, is a step towards more honest, more scholarly 
consideration of this dance. It would have its place in a book on the 
subject; we just don't have the book yet.

Now, if that post was taken in the wrong spirit because of the 
person-to-person email medium, that's another matter. I won't wag my 
finger at anyone for lack of apology, because that's their business. But 
I do believe the rest of us, here on the sidelines, can stop ignoring 
the elephant on the pista, and start telling the truth about this dance. 
The passion is in some sense fictive; it's a theater of emotions in 
which we indulge. But those emotions and those fictions come from 
somewhere, and longer we remain speechless about it, the less we can 
understand and make further inquiries about what we're actually doing.

Plenty of you, I'm sure, are perfectly comfortable keeping your 
knowledge private, even sub-verbal, even intimately personal. I'm not. I 
think we tell ourselves a lot of lies when it comes to tango, and I 
think they center on choreography and on content. The sexual psychodrama 
is there. It's all over the lyrics, and it's all over the dance floor. 
Sometimes it's even on the cover of Playboy. It's often (but not always) 
fictive. Discussing it frankly shouldn't have the air of uncovering a 
government conspiracy.

But perhaps it always will, and perhaps thinkers like Freud and Camille 
Paglia, as well as anyone who comes near the ballparks they play in, 
will always be attacked for their (admittedly provocative) lack of 
embarrassment when it comes to what we're made of. Perhaps there will 
always be a culture war between the decorum-obsessed white bourgeoisie 
and the open-about-everything "ethnic" parts of our species (Jews, 
blacks, Mediterraneans). Or perhaps we all need to consider whether 
telling the truth should always be a higher ethical priority than 
avoiding offense.

But I ramble. I was glad to see Alberto's post. It makes a nice 
complement to the few other literary texts I've found that illuminate 
tango technique-- the myth of Antaeus and that passage from Plato's 
Symposium about the original, four-legged, egg-shaped hermaphrodite 
humans. Viewing the Kamasutra excerpt beside other illustration-texts, 
at least, may reveal its value, and make it seem not so inappropriate as 
it is inquisitive.

That it's also kinda funny is, at this point, immaterial. Personally, I 
laugh because I'm delighted at the reader's insightful selection of That 
passage, what with the boudoir cookbook it's submerged in.

As for choreography, I'm still interested in what everyone thinks. I'm 
being deliberately vague about it, because I think the word flies off in 
several directions, and I don't want to color the responses-- provided 
there are any more.

Jake Spatz
Washington, DC