MANDAG DEN 19. SEPTEMBER 2011
In tree weeks I´m heading for Buenos Aires, Argentina. 4 months studying - and people smiles at me when I say - Tango.
Tango: The one and only dance where the woman let herrself seduce into the arms of a man and be swept away by the dramatic story told by the musik. The story made between man and woman without a word.
People loooves tango. Tango makes the woman devote to a man. From one minute to the other she finds herself drifting in a dream. Tango is; history made between man and woman without a word.
But what if you do not like that? What if, you wanna be in charge? lead the steps. What if it doesn´t come naturally to devote yourself into the arms of a stranger?
Or what if, your a man and don´t wanna be in charge. Lead the woman and make her safe. Tango demands a hole dame much of the leader. He decides, and he has the full responsibility if things goes wrong. If she is to fail its because he didn´t show her the right steps.
That´s why my mission in Buenos Aires is not tango. My mission is Queer tango.
One lady once told me: ”Queer tango is the ultimate freedom. Sometimes you want to lead and decide the steps, other times you just want to close your eyes and be led in the arms of another. In queer tango your gender doesn’t decide your role in the dance. Instead you choose to dance how you feel,”
The ultimate freedom... freedom from what? Stereotypes, pre decided gender roles, expectations. Queertango gives you what you had and then it gives you dobble up and some more.
What more it gives you and how people respond to it? That I look forward to learn in Buenos Aires. I expect it not all to be good.
Before I go - let me show you this one video that leaves the score: 1- 0 to Queertango: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYlPqempL2U
ONSDAG DEN 2. NOVEMBER 2011
"So where have you actually seen woman lead in tango?" I ask the lady sitting infront of me. She leans towards me, looks around to make sure no one is listening and then say in a low voice... "the thing is....there exist Milongas for gays".
I have so far been out almost every day or night dancing at milongas, taken technique classes, taken private classes. I have danced with old smelly men, young girls, big ladies, and handsome guys. I think I got addicted now - to tango.
It´s a weird disease actually, this tango addiction. It can be very unpleasent sometimes. A person take you in its arms, it smell of bad breath and sweat. Then suddenly it moves and I have to follow, if not it will look reproachfully at you, embrace you more severely so you have to get even closer and gets its sweat on your shoulder and stomach. That´s the moment when you think: What the H... am I doing here? I just wanna get away from this person telling me that the woman doesn´t really have to learn the steps, she just have to be a good follower to the man.
But just then, you can´t help your self, you try just another time and this is were the real disease sets in! It´s in this specific moment where the drug runs through your blod and you forget everything around you. You have falling into the perfect embrace of another person and is floating around on the dancefloor. If only I can give this feeling to another person I can make everyone smile, make them feel like flying. Wouldn´t that be something?
The story tells us, that in the birth of Tango men would dance with eachother in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. They would practice with eachother to be able to leed the ladies into the perfect embrace. Story also tells us that this stopped as the tango got more popular and more woman started to dance it. After this the best way to learn to dance was from a couple teaching both roles. Woman showing woman how to dance, men showed men and together they showed how to dance together.
It seems to me though, that it was always allowed for the man to know the steps of the woman. It simply made him a better dancer if he knew how the woman would react to his leading. Also it made him more atractive as a teacher. Instead of paying two people to teach tango you had to pay only one that knew both roles.
This fact have made a lot of female teachers learn how to dance the mans role. Living of being a dance teacher they had to be able to compete with the other teachers on the tango marked.
This is what I experience now. The teachers of traditional Milongas knows the steps from both roles, though few will actually dance both in public. Being able to dance the opposite role from your gender seems a world apart from actually using it in public. Public change of roles has to do with something totally different than the teachers reason to learn both roles.
I will continue with this in my next blog.
Until next time a small picture from my last milonga. What you see is the H for Hombre (man) meaning that this table is for men only. Then you have tables for woman, for singles and couples. Me and my male dance partner had to move 2 times before we got it right. We finally got seated at a couples table :)
MANDAG DEN 21. NOVEMBER 2011
"I´m afraid, what do I do if a man invites me to dance? Do I have to dance with him?" I heard a man say to my friend.
...
"This is not Tango. Tango is the slow walk of a man and woman, the sence and the feeling that occurs in the embrace between a man and a woman. It´s just beautiful. I see it can occur between two men but that´s not Tango."
I ask myself what is the man in the Tango?
...
I accepted a tango the other day. I met with the person, let myself into the embrace and slided away into the dance. It was beautiful! I was floating away into an embrace that made me forget this world and time. I felt so relaxed and light, It was like my body just floated into the steps of the other person. I trusted my whole balance and weight onto my partner, leaning down against the floor, no doubt to let one leg float so I was only touching the floor with the front of my right foot. - Then the music stopped, I woke up and stepped out of my dream embrace. My dance partner left me alone on the dancefloor, finding my way back to the this world. I looked at him. Looked at his painted eyebrowns, his feminine facial features, his female body in a masculine disguise. ... And then I blessed this place for forgetting the cis-normative and binary world, if only for a moment.
ONSDAG DEN 7. DECEMBER 2011
When I arrived to Buenos Aires some months ago now, I was taught that traditional Milongas had all these rules. Rules of where to sit, of how to dress, how to ask woman to dance - because mind your steps woman, you will never ask a man to dance! Books are written about the rules, the hidden rules, the obvious rules, the rules everybody follows. Or do they?
Who is actually telling us what to do and what not to do in a milonga? The people who actually goes up to you telling you that you did something wrong? Mostly that would be the owners of the milongas. I had my ears full of stories where people of same sex dancing together at a milonga was asked to leave. Or actually, it was the same few stories I heard again and again. When it came down to it, not many had tried to be asked to leave a milonga for dancing queer.
So who are the real people telling us not to dance same sex in all the traditional milongas? The answer must be: The eyes... The eyes of the suroundings watching you. Making you nervous because you know, when you take your dance partner up there, in the spotlight so everybody can see you, watch you and put a note in your forhead saying: GAY. This is what makes you stay away from the traditional milongas. It´s what makes you think that if you actually do it, you have to be more than a fine dancer.
So I went. I went to find out how the eyes would look at me if I danced with a girl at a traditional milonga. I´m not a good dancer, I must be what you would call a Newbee having danced less than half a year. So I knew I would not get the respect of the Milongueros because of my dance style :)
First I went to Peru 571 on a Sunday. A normal night with a mixed crowd. I was shaking, I actually didn´t want to do it and luckely some friend, also dancing queer tango, broke the ice for us and went out first.
I didn´t want to look at peoples faces so I closed my eyes and thought myself into another place. But after a while I kinda forgot that we where different from the other couples and I forgot to look at the other people around me.
Second time I went to Plaza Belgrano. Famous for being one of the oldest places in Bs As (I heard). A lot of men! Pretty difficult to avoid being asked to dance which is both nice and a little heavy - don´t start a serious talk with your friends there, you will be interrupted :)
This time I didn´t forget to look at the faces. I was prepared! Prepared to look them in their eyes, smile and give them all of my positive energy.
What happened? I got a little disappointed actually.... Because nobody looked especially at me and my female dance partner. Whenever I thought: Now, now they notice us, it was because another couple dancing close to us was making some fancy steps. After a while dancing at this Milonga some people did actually notice us. Some smiled, I remember a old couple looking very weird at us, more surprised than anything really. And then the guy in controle of the music, he saw us and his face changed to a huge smile while giving me the tumbs up.
So what´s the rules here? Who is telling me to do what?
I went on with my little rule adventure. Next stop was "Ideal". A place where one of the stories about one queertango dancer who was thrown out 5 years ago. Now this place, this certain day, should be accepting queer dancers.
We were the only little group this day dancing same sex together at this place. Again my hands where shaking even though I knew the owner was accepting, and more than happy to have us there it seemed. Why was I still nervous? Because the suroundings wasn´t use to see queer tango. This time I noticed it at the first dance. People watching us, taking fotos. But then again, there were a lot of foreingers this night taking pictures of everybody. And as the night went pass I was again not a good enough dancer to keep peoples attention and they changed their attention to the old man dancing breath taking in the other end of the room. - 5 min. of fame I guess! That´s what you can get for comming up with something new. But if you are not a good dancer, you can´t keep their attencion - not even with a note in your forhead saying: GAY.
LØRDAG DEN 17. DECEMBER 2011
Where was I? Right, tango teachers being able to dance both roles because it made them more atractive and talented teachers (read my previous blog: 100 milongas in 100 days).
Learning both roles was a question of learning a technique, being a better teacher and being able to teach both men and woman.
So when and how did the change of roles as a social and public phenomenon begin?
If you know some tango history you also know, that the Tango was born in the lower class of the argentine society. You know it was hidden away and a place where men from the higher class would lie to their wifes to go and dance with their young lowers in the suburbs of Buenos Aires. Love and passion made history and created a dance that survived and turned into a living legend.
The history repeats itself 100 years later. Tango between same sex was born hidden away from the public in the subculture of Buenos Aires where you would lie to your family to go and dance with your love.
Its all very simple actually. A person falls in love with a tango dancer of same sex and starts to think: How to dance tango with the one you love when love between same sex is forbidden? You create your own hidden place where everybody can dance with whoever they want. And so it began - changing the tango into the gender free dance that it was actually born as, but 100 years of moral educations made so difficult to return to.
The first hidden queer tango places in Argentina was born more or less 10 years ago. The name queer was first related to the phenomenon years later, and still people discuss whether queer is the right name for this type of Tango danced without predetermined gender roles.
But Queer tango has to do with a lot more than love between people of same sex, it has to do with persons with an indifferent view at gender roles. People who are blind to gender and to the moral public education. People making weird normal and everything natural.
It has to do with a generation longing for a place to express themself, it has to do with international influence it has to do with a society changing faster than you can ever imaging. Some say its about loosing values other say it´s the creation of ultimate freedom.
The people who 10 years ago started a journey in search of new gender identities, freedom of expression, and an end to a lot of prejudices, who put their face in the public spotlight to change a public moral education in Argentina, have now let go of what they started and left it in the hands of the public to take to whereever it will go.
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