Dancing Tango

Tango, in its most creative appearance, is a dance of the close embrace. This is not the elaborate stage tango one often sees on television or online, but Argentine tango or salon tango. This kind of tango is focused on traditional music and moves, with a partner with whom one creates a dance based on that music and those moves, but which is not confined by them. This works best when there is connection and communication between two dancers. But tango also takes up what Hannah Arendt has called the universal ‘urge toward self-display’. This implies the existence of a spectator. Thus, every subject is also an object appearing at some time and place to some spectator. In turn, this presupposes that living things depend on the world as the site of their appearing, their blooming, and their eventual fading away. Only this, Arendt claims, guarantees our reality in a manner that consciousness alone — both feeling and thought — cannot. This chapter explores the implications of these conditions in the context of the history of tango, its music and dance.