El Tango, or Why on earth am I doing this?

Tango seems to provoke many reactions.

People who watch it see it as erotic or hokey or scandalous or angst-filled.

Those of us who dance it, however, have a whole thesaurus of adjectives for tango, depending on where we are with our dancing, with our lives, with our bodies, with our spirits. A good dance can leave us elated for hours; poor ones can equally depress us. The elation -- the "tango high" -- drives us to improve, on the theory that becoming better at it will result in more good dances, and more tango highs. The vocabulary of addiction is appropriate here. But as addictions go, tango is healthy.

Argentine tango, (as opposed to ballroom tango, such as that seen on "Dancing With The Stars"), is a lead-follow dance that, in its social form, is completely improvised. There are infinite combinations of patterns from which a leader may choose to express his sense of the music being played, the partner being danced with, his particular attitude of the moment. (Women can lead, but usually men do.) In a simple analogy, the leader speaks the tango "language;" the follower hears and interprets it. A good dance is an intimate dialogue.

My initiation to Argentine tango is fairly classic. I had always been intrigued by the dance. I was newly divorced and needed to do something outrageous to prove to myself, I guess, that I existed. By chance I learned that Portland had one of the strongest tango communities in the country. On a whim, I signed up for beginner classes where I was embraced by a series of males, with none of whom I had to have more than passing conversation. It suited my mindset to a tee. I found that I felt rather giddy after these classes. I chalked it up to a pheromonal rush. Little did I know that I'd met the candy man.

Naturally, I wanted to learn more, so I took classes and workshops and tried mightily to figure out how I might convert my swimmer's body, which had no relationship with gravity and had strength in most of the wrong places, into a dancer's body.

And I began to really pay attention to tango music. That was like progressing from hash to heroin. Tango music is different from most other social dance music because it's not driven by percussion and it has the elastic dynamics typical of classical music. As a wee (and only) child, I used to amuse myself for hours dancing to my mother's light classical records -- things as varied as Saint-Saens "Dance Macabre" and Morton Gould's "Rumba Fantasy". So, while the technical aspects of tango continue to bedevil me, dancing to tango music feels very natural, and as exhilarating as being seven again. Hard to beat that.

And I'll bet you thought it was all about shoes...