Susan Buckland: Two can tango

COMMENT

Dance has me in its grip again - tango this time. And unlike my previous foray into dance with flamenco, I am learning to follow the leader. Which, in tango, means the man.

It's actually a relief to go with the flow. While he is navigating us through various steps I can think ahead to the moment when he pauses, that quintessentially tango moment when accomplished female tango dancers do exotic flicks and brushes with their legs. Watching my teacher Carl and his dancing partner is incentive enough to learn this sensuous dance of Argentina. They glide together round the floor with seductive synergy.

I can understand why the Australian writer and television personality Clive James announced in an interview when he visited Auckland recently that he hoped to find a milonga (tango dance). James is a passionate tango fan.

The dance has spread well beyond its birthplace but even though New Zealand shares the same hemisphere, the dance still belongs to Buenos Aires.

It was there that Tango captured my imagination. In one of the community clubs that dot the city neighbourhoods I watched men and women, some barely out of their teens, others old enough to be their grandparents, dancing to the thrum of the music.

Club Almagro, it was called. People had gathered, as they do on many weekends, to socialise at a Saturday night milonga. The wide range of ages didn't seem to matter. Nor did it matter that some would have been dancing together for the first time. Tango carried them unselfconsciously around the floor in suspended intimacy.

Before leaving Buenos Aires I had to see some more of the dance. In San Telmo, a heart and soul tango quarter, I found Bar Sud. On the cigarette-stained walls were nostalgic photos of Carlos Gardel, the tango supremo who took the music to the world.

I slipped on to a bar stool and ordered a margarita. There was just enough room for the pianist and accordion and patrons to take their turn, couple by couple, to dance on the wooden floor. And how they danced in that small space, lost for the length of the music in a world of their own.

No other dance, they say, connects two people more closely than the Argentine tango. It evolved more than a century ago among the working-class male migrants of Buenos Aires.

Alone in the new country and yearning for female company (including their mothers, if you listen to the lyrics) they found their way to dance, that wonderfully releasing form of human expression, and to a fresh, bold new interpretation that has become synonymous with Argentina.

To experience the soul of tango - el alma del tango - a tango maestro I met suggested I should imagine myself as graceful and beautiful as a jungle cat. That will take some doing.

But I am learning, as those Argentinian migrants did, especially when they were obliged to dance with one another, that it takes time for followers to tune in with their leaders.