Abstract
Argentine tango tends to be associated with highly gendered images of women and men locked in contorted embraces. These images constitute a tango imaginary that is removed from the lived experience of the dance. Remaining close to the experiential core of tango, this paper provides a Heideggerian-inspired phenomenological account that re-imagines tango as a mode of being-in-the-world. By situating us in direct and constant relationship with an attentive partner and furnishing a complex grammar of constraints, tango generates a frame for creating and sustaining worldhood. By examining the how of dance, the kind of experience it offers up, we approach the dynamic emergence of Being. In what follows, I draw on my years of dancing tango to elaborate an understanding of the experiential dimensions of the dance, and how these relate to the development of shared focal practices that disclose insights associated with embodied being-in-the-world.
Highlights
The tango is probably not important; its only importance is what we give it
Tango serves as an exemplar for fostering and strengthening these dimensions via an embodied epistemology of tacit skills, an axiology that discloses internal and external degrees of authenticity, and an ontology that echoes Heidegger’s sense of Being as a vibrant mode of being-in-the-world. This is evident in the centrality of the embrace in Tango as a composition of motile relationality that locates us while actively sensing another being. Moving together within this embrace, we find ourselves affected by a mood that perfuses our lives
This imaginary is more concrete than the aforementioned ones, as it is based on the combination of motor schemata and poetic images that contribute to a teaching-learning strategy for tango as a practice. Tango affords in this practice the emergence of corporeal agency through providing a place where one may take a stand, both literally and figuratively. Arriving at this place, which in tango means the embrace, the partners are overtaken by the connotations of the music and the atmosphere in simultaneously calling upon and creating imagery that helps to orchestrate the movements of the dance
Summary
The tango is probably not important; its only importance is what we give it. I invite you in what follows to dance a tango, which is to say, to appreciate a way of being, a mode of Being, and the subtle aspects of a bodied-state unconstrained by everyday grammars of Time, Space, Weight and Flow.1
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