Every year NECCA puts on a holiday circus show called ‘The Flying Nut.’ It is a circus-based Nutcracker, sometimes using the Tchakovsky music and sometimes not. Last year, they did a Tim Burton-themed Flying Nut. This year, we are doing one based on Casse Noi Sette, a French Opera where the son falls in love with his mother. Jamie tried to convince us it was a platonic love. Essentially we are doing an Oedipal French Opera Nutcracker. Sounds fantastic.
I have been cast in the doubles trapeze Russian dance piece, the music of which we are looping so the crazy Tchakovsky music, rather than being a minute and a half, will be at least three times that. We have all agreed that over the next five weeks we are going to go insane from hearing it so often.
The best part about this year’s Flying Nut? There is to be a doubles trapeze-tango piece. This means that we all have to learn how to tango.
Yes, ladies and gents. I get to tango. In two three hour lessons. Adelante!
Our instructor, Daniel, has been dancing the tango since the 1970s, mostly in Buenas Aires. He has milk chocolate-colored skin, with hair that is beginning to gray and a short, trimmed moustache. Heavy set, wearing jeans and a polo, he somehow reminds me of a refined bulldog. His smile is wide and generous, his hands thick but manicured. “To understand the tango,” he says in his rich, sensual voice, “you must go back in time, to the 1940s, the golden age of tango. During World War Two, Argentina as neutral and selling weapons to both sides. There was only one place to party during WWII, and that was in BUenas Aires, and that party was the Tango.
“I am a radical in the tango teaching world,” he continued. “You see, in the 1940s, if you were a man, you didn’t just go out and ask a girl to tango if you didn’t know the dance. No! That would be rude! You would go to classes, where the experienced men would lead you, and the green dancer would be the follow. To learn to tango, you had to learn both parts; the man had to get a feel for what it was like to be the woman. They would practice, three hours a night, six nights a week, for six months before a new dancer would even conceive of going out to an actual malanga—the social tango dance scene. When that night came, he would put on his suit,” he begins to mime the occasion, his voice dropping, “and fix his tie, slick back his hair, and look at himself in the mirror and say,” he pauses and looks at us, “’I am ready.’
And then! when he got there, he’d go up to a woman, and ask her to dance. And she’d say ‘No!’ Getting a woman to actually dance with you, especially a good dancer, could take years! It was not like today, where you ask someone to dance and they say yes, and then you dance and you could both be horrible dancers or good dancers, no! It took practice and patience, and the woman had to see that you were a good dancer before she would dance with you.
Now the woman, on the other hand, had to be 18 before she could dance. But often times at sixteen she would start wheedling with her father, and asking, “oh papa, could I go tango?” and the father would steer her to the living room, put on some tango music, and dance with her, and then say, ‘she is ready.’”
We all laugh. He grins at us and then continues his enacted monologue while we watch with bated breath and smiles on our faces.
“And so, the woman would put on her dress, and do her hair, and when she got to the dance, who did she dance with? A male friend of the fathers; a male friend of brother, a male friend of cousin, a male friend of uncle—all trusted, vouched for men—and after a month, the father would marry her off to one of those men.”
We roar as though he has just released a punch line of a joke. I, meanwhile, am trying to decide if he’s gay, or just that flamboyant of a person.
“So you see, when post-feminist woman come ot class to learn the tango and experience what it was like to be a woman seventy years ago, I say, “No! you are not here to learn what that is like because we are not going to marry you off in a month to a man you meet at the tango. I’m sorry, honey, but that is not how it works. You have a job, an education, you make your own money and do your own bills and have people, men, under you who you can now order around if you so desire—you are not here to become a woman of old. For one thing, you don’t know how! In tango, in machismo, the woman tells the man, “oh, I like it when you do that, do it again,” if he dances right. She makes him think she likes her. And he puffs out his chest and dances around the room knowing that he is in command. He is like the commander of an army. He has the biggest horse and the biggest feather in his cap and the biggest sword and where do you think that commander is?”
“At the front of the army?” we ask.
“Yes! At the front with the entire army behind him because HE is the Man! And when he yells charge—adelnate, in espanol—where do you think he is?”
“At the front of the charge?”
“Yes!” He leans in conspiratorially and whispers, “it shows you that there is a little dumb in machismo, no?”
We laugh again.
“So when we get out on the tango floor, the woman is behind her fan, urging the man on. And if he does it right, the she likes it! Then she moves in close, and makes a little sound, like ‘oh’”—the orgasm noise takes us all aback. Emilie is beet red at this point; ‘so much sex’ she whispers to me. ‘I can’t take it!’ “And when the man hears that, he makes a little noise, like ‘grrrr.’
“So, get a partner. Choose a lead. Steer him or her around the room, and leads, she is your china doll, your porcelain, made of glass—do not bump her! You can be bumped, you can crash, but you cannot bump her! You see, if she gets bumped, if the man messes up, the woman will take out her fan, and give him a slap in the face—how dare you!—the lead is always the one who is wrong if anything bad happens to the follow, if anything goes wrong in the dance, it is the lead’s fault, and he says, meekly, “I am sorry.” So follows! If you get bumped, tell your lead, ‘how dare you!” but if he does well, give him the sound, draw him in, and show him that he is a man. That is your power!”
We spent three hours with this man, as he watched and talked. Aimee was there, helping demonstrate the basic steps of the tango—walking backward, walking forward, the ochos (figure eight steps that the follow does), and the grapevine right and left. I didn’t know that Aimee could tango, and though her biceps are far bigger than Daniel’s, her grace is unmatched by any in the room.
“Practice these steps, “ Daniel told us at the end. “Because Pro-Track is being taught by another friend of mine, Jackie, and we are having a competition to see who can tango the best at the end of the two weeks that I have you for.”
“It’s on!” Someone says. We all laugh, and then disperse. “Thank you, Daniel,” we say as we leave.
“That was some of the most fun I’ve had since I’ve been here,” Jay told me as we walked out the door. The cold wind, tasting of snow and wood ash, hits our faces. I breath in—the taste is delicious.
“Dude, we are learning to tango!”
“From the man with the biggest horse and the biggest feather and the biggest sword.”
‘Adelante!”