8 hours ago
2
Dance can be life-changing – it’s a lesson we learn every year on Strictly Come Dancing, but it bears repeating. Last year’s winner, comedian Chris McCausland, the show’s first blind celebrity, defied expectations and changed people’s attitude to his disability, while 80-year-old presenter Angela Rippon demonstrated in 2023 that age is no barrier to dancing.
Over my two decades as a dance writer, I’ve tried a little of everything – ballet, ballroom, even breaking, but nothing has moved me like the Argentine tango. And I’m not talking about the version you see on Strictly – that’s the choreographed stage tango, with dancers kicking up their legs in performative tricks; few of us ever get to do that – but rather, the social dance style.
One of the theories about the word “tango” is that it comes from the Bantu African word for drum, tambor. Enslaved people were among the first to dance candombe, one of the forebears of tango, in South America. It’s a dance with a trance-like quality, which is also true of tango: at milongas, or social dances, couples glide anticlockwise around the room in an almost meditative state.
There was a lot of European influence on tango’s development, too. In the late 1800s, a large number of young men arrived from Spain, Italy and Germany to build Argentina’s railways. They were homesick, congregating in bars, gambling houses and brothels, where they listened and danced to the mournful bandoneón, a type of concertina that arrived with the German immigrants.
Tango gave them comfort, a sense of connection, at a time when they were missing their homes and the touch of their families; its melancholic music reflects that sense of longing. And the tango embrace, the abrazo, is the same word in Spanish for a hug. In my latest novel, I wanted tango to have a starring role. The novel has a dual timeline – one strand follows the story of a young dancer who uses her ballroom partnership to work for the Resistance in occupied Paris during the Second World War.
In the present day, my young protagonist, Miriam, explores the dance classes and ballrooms of New York and finds that tango, in the wake of a loss, is the dance that most speaks to her.
My very first encounter with tango, two decades ago, when I was 25, was a bit of a disaster. I’d gone to watch a tango show with an Argentinian friend in Mendoza, in western Argentina. In a room full of middle-aged Chileans and Argentinians, my friend made the mistake of revealing that I was from the UK, or more specifically, Pais de Gales, Wales. The compère was overjoyed at the discovery.
“This is Nicola,” he announced to the room. “She’s from Wales and she’s going to show us how to dance the tango.” A sea of expectant faces turned in my direction. I’d seen tango before, but I had yet to dance a step and I was reasonably sure I didn’t want my first lesson to take place in front of a roomful of strangers.
“No puedo,” I muttered – or yelled, actually – to make myself heard above the clapping and murmurs of encouragement. The whole room looked disappointed.
Clearly, I decided, I was going to need to do better. Shortly after “death by tango”, I took myself off for a lesson. By the end of that first session, I was hooked. Something about the tango moved me. I’ve heard it said that it’s the only dance in the world that’s not about joy. And even as a relatively young person I understood sorrow. My beloved father died when I was 11 and his loss left me with a lifetime of yearning ahead of me.
Before long, I did what any wannabe tanguera does: I moved to Buenos Aires. I found a hostel in San Telmo. There were safer, trendier areas I could have stayed, like Palermo or Recoleta, but San Telmo had soul and I’ve always been a sucker for that. You could hear the melancholic lyrics of the tango drifting from cafés and dance schools any day of the week, but always turned up loud on Sundays when the neighbourhood filled with visitors to the antique market.
As luck would have it, on Time Out magazine, where I found a work experience placement, no one else was much fussed about tango. The editor asked if I’d like to edit the tango section, updating the listings on the latest classes and milongas. I couldn’t believe my luck and began exploring the city’s most popular venues.
La Catedral on Sarmiento was where the in-crowd danced in an underground warehouse setting, while La Viruta in Palermo was more like a family wedding, with dancers of all ages circling the floor. Some milongas favoured traditional music, such as the crooning of tango icon Carlos Gardel, whose face shines from every piece of street art; others played Nuevo Tango, like the thrilling music of Astor Piazzolla, or the electronic tango of bands such as Gotan Project.
Then one night, in May 2005, everything changed for me. I was out in the city – not tangoing for once, but at supper with my uncle, who was in Buenos Aires for a conference. After our meal, I jumped into a cab back to San Telmo and the driver started to drive.
He was youngish, square-faced, taciturn. It was a journey I knew – not extremely well, but well enough, and from early on I didn’t recognise the route. I checked in with him once or twice, but he said I’d recognise it soon.
I wound down the window to get some fresh air to keep my jitters under control. I didn’t want the driver to know I was anxious. I didn’t want to offend him. It was just one more block, he told me, just one more turning.
Suddenly, as we stopped at some traffic lights, I realised the meter was showing a number far higher than the price of the outward journey. And I still had no idea where we were. I went to open the door, but, in a swift movement, the driver turned, manually locked the door and pushed a small handgun into my belly.
I don’t remember exactly what happened next. Trauma muddled my memories almost immediately. But somehow I eventually managed to push my head out of the window to shout for help. He was driving erratically, trying to pull me back into the car.
As we swerved, a red car on our right was so close, I remember thinking I could touch it. I must have reached out and pushed off it – perhaps it was this that softened my fall through the window. When I hit the road, my heels took the brunt of the impact. Both my ankles broke as I landed. But I was still breathing, still alive.
Someone called an ambulance and I was taken to hospital. The only time I really wept was watching the tango scene in Scent of a Woman on the hospital television. “No mistakes in the tango,” Al Pacino tells his partner in that famous gravelly voice of his. “If you make a mistake, get all tangled up, just tango on.” Something I’d taken for granted days before – the ability to just tango on – wasn’t possible for menow.
I was flown home on a stretcher, and spent the early days of my recovery at my mum’s house. Initially, I focused on physical recovery – moving from my wheelchair to crutches and then learning to walk again – but as I became physically stronger, the psychological symptoms got more out of control.
I relived the accident constantly, imagining it in various permutations, and I began to panic about more ordinary things, too. I saw danger everywhere and my ability to distinguish true risk from innocuous events disintegrated. In my fears and flashbacks, I lived other versions of my attack in which I didn’t retain control, in which I didn’t get away.
A turning point came when I was able to return to tango. Progress was slow at first. I danced in trainers and leaned too heavily on my partner, but the more I practised, the more tango returned me to myself. It was excellent physiotherapy – the controlled weight shifts and precise footwork helped enormously with balance, while the tango walks helped with that relearned skill.
Tango also taught me to trust strangers again. Typically, at a milonga, you’ll dance a tanda – a set of three or four songs – with your partner, which means it’s more than one rushed track: it’s a relationship in miniature. I’ve heard it called many things – a wordless conversation, or, as Kapka Kassabova puts it in the title of her wonderful book about tango, Twelve Minutes of Love.
As an improvised dance, it means you have to listen to your partner intently as a follower and, if you’re lucky, are listened to in turn. It’s perhaps unsurprising that tango is used therapeutically for a wide number of purposes, to help with everything from Parkinson’s to dementia.or as a way of warding off loneliness.
In my adventures on the dancefloor I’ve met countless people who have discovered dance after life-changing events – perhaps because dance is the opposite of death. But, unlike other dances, such as salsa or samba, which cheerfully bully us into a party mood, tango allows us to feel our grief, our yearning, our sorrow. And, somehow, in accepting those emotions, in tangoing through them in the arms of another human being, it is possible to find a kind of bliss.
The Paris Dancer by Nicola Rayner is published by Head of Zeus at £9.99. Buy it for £8.99 at guardianbookshop.com
