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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.

 


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