Picture
Tango, as signifier of darkness and illegitimacy, of desire and counter-culture is more than a dance.
In its popular representation, Argentine Tango is described as a dance that evokes illicit sexual desire through a movement that often looks choreographed. But Argentine Tango is much more than this mythic evocation of a movement of desire. Tango is everything from a dance of solitude to a nomadic movement of cultural displacement to a strong signifier of national identity. It is a dance of encounter and dis-encounter, an embrace of repressed sensuality and a complex network of misunderstood directions.
The Tango I am interested in exploring here is improvised. In fact, it is the improvised nature of Tango that fascinates me and makes it possible for me to use Tango as an example of the politics of touch. Since the movements of Tango are always to come, it is impossible to speak of a Tango, of an ideal gesture or a contained negotiation: Tango works as an attempt to explore relations in the context of potential corporeal negotiations.
Although Tango could be introduced as the ultimate signifier of Argentine national identity, I do not approach Tango from this vantage point, preferring instead to locate it as an international crossing of human and political boundaries, as the politic of touch that shift all notions of inactive encounters with an-other. “Tango is a movement across time and space, an unruly politics that engages with the night world to re arrange its system of control, and through bodies that exist not for the outside world, but for the inner exchange between two silent subjects, moving quietly, eyes half closed towards dawn.” (Savigliano 1995-p.xvii)
Tango as an encounter it is a peripheral engagement with the world that introduces us to a different way of living with an other. It is a movement that offers the possibility of improvising our encounters. It is a dance that turns us toward an other to whom we might not speak. Tango takes places in the periphery of the social order. Tango is a dance that is about movement between here and there, about an exchange between two bodies, about the pain of disconnection and the desire for communication.

Add Comment
 
THE OTHER WITHIN 12/14/2009
 
Picture
I am currently staying in Buenos Aires for a period of research which will last for roughly two months. My own first knowledge of the place is minimal, however my research is concerned with drawing a link between the theory of Tango, touch and the body in constant movement.
Buenos Aires being the city of Tango and a place which history is deeply rooted in the concept of migration, represent the place where in the next few weeks I will attempt to extend my enquire, through exploring the city’s social, political and cultural life, .

The engagement with touch is not an exploration of something I could clearly define as a sensing, but as an encounter with the notion of a sensing body in movement.

One of the things that one cannot avoid when stepping foot in Buenos Aires is coming to terms with the events which has left indelible scars in the country’s psyche and soul and still now ripples through the life of its people.

In brief, during the late seventies, when the government was overthrown by the military junta ( 1976-83), roughly 30000 citizens, mainly left wing militant, women, children and other people totally extraneous to political events, have been kidnapped, tortured or thrown alive into the sea by the military dictatorship, because they were thought to be a ‘metaphysical enemy’ of the junta and a threat to the security and stability of the nation. They have came to be called the ‘Desaparecidos’

A pacific protest was organised by the mothers of the ‘Disappeared’. This involved the meeting of all their mothers and wives in the major square (Plaza de Mayo) where everyday they would walk endlessly around the main monument of the square in front of the government palace, in the hope to find out about the destiny of their beloved and to stop the kidnapping of more innocents.
Their symbol is a white handkerchief wrapped around their head.

For more info http://www.yendor.com

Last week I have attended the weekly manifestation of the ‘ Mothers of Plaza the Mayo’ which currently take place every Thursday at 15.30.

These are a few thoughts that came to me in the aftermath of the event.

Lifessness is movement how do dead stories move?
Can we have the power to present what in the present has no name?
Images of traces and traces of images.
There is nothing that was there and now is gone.
Add Comment