4519  Appropriate discourse

Date: Fri, 21 Jul 2006 13:58:15 -0400
From: "TangoDC.com" <spatz@tangoDC.com>
Subject: [Tango-L] Appropriate discourse
To: tango-L@mit.edu

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