Tango: The new campfire

by Mitra Martin 2008

I am sitting in a comfortably carpeted hotel meeting room. There is a passionate young guy whose company has just been bought. Advertising in virtual worlds is his gig. If you want users to be able to buy Nokia phones for their avatars, call him up.

He flashes a picture of a campfire: warm, sparkling. Someone is telling a story. “Been to one of these lately?” He says. “Probably not. Today’s world has become very complex and isolating. People don’t come together physically to share tribal experiences anymore. We don’t have town centers; it’s all just strip malls. So connecting with other people has to be done virtually.”

Next to it, up slides an animation of a “virtual” campfire: a group of garish avatars awkwardly arrayed around a blob of frozen, pixellated red-orange. There is a chat window on the right hand side where ernie_888 is replying to tamarak. “This is today’s campfire. This is where we find the warmth of human relationships. Millions of emotion-filled encounters are happening each day online. If you’re an advertiser, you must be strategizing on how to monetize these in creative and seamless ways.”

***

Ten years ago, I went to my first milonga.

We’d been on the road more than two months, just me and Dave, the video guy. Our job was to find out and document how people from fourteen different countries felt about driving. We’d sat in dark rooms observing focus groups in foreign languages for almost a hundred hours. We’d visited gas stations of every size and shape and tried our fill of oddball convenience foods. We were both getting tired. In Hong Kong, we tasted the drunken shrimp; in Oslo, the cloudberry mousse. Little treats seemed justifiable and yet despite them, as the trip wore on I felt more like a drunken cloudberry myself; fuzzy, tart, falling apart.

I’d been handed this high profile project as a fluke; when the two women who were meant to run it, incredibly,  got into a fistfight  - before our eyes, smack in the middle of our open plan office - and were yanked from the team, leaving a career opportunity perfect for someone who had three months of nothing planned. The principals had looked around and saw me, the smart little introvert who insisted on her cute Princeton habits like wearing flannel pajama pants and braided pigtails to work.

I still knew nobody in Manhattan and was vaguely afraid of the people I worked with and of taking subways. Quietly I was trying to sort out – well, everything – in my walkup on 54th street where I read Sark and Rilke, and wrote inspirations for my solitude on the kitchen wall in pencil. Weeknights I would fix instant couscous and chicken for dinner, or something, and then go have tea at Barnes & Noble.
Jill asked me, “Would you be available to fly out on Monday? You’d be back by Thanksgiving.” I said sure; I entered the deep forest.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita mi ritrovai per una selva oscura che la diritta via era smaritta.  When I boarded the plane to Frankfurt in 1998, with my overalls and lemon-drops, with my volume of Letters to a Young Poet, my modem and my brief to go out and find out how to improve Exxon’s brand image globally through a discipline previously unknown to me called “qualitative research”; well, perhaps if the hipster sitting in the seat next to me had invited me to join his virtual campfire, I would have gladly accepted.

But ten weeks later, I went to my first milonga.

***           

Through connections, Dave had hired a pair of dark, confident,  well-dressed people to help us through customs in Buenos Aires. One of them kissed me deftly on the cheek when I arrived and his face was memorably soft. They bribed the officials and we loaded our tonnage into Fernando’s van.

It was a blooming city. Frankly I felt rather tattered. But the women there – the vendor who became my best friend for a week; the smiling druggist who discreetly gift-wrapped my parcel of tampons; the gorgeous in-room manicurist with the mink coat – were oddly nourishing. Their eyes were like curious doors that masked and unmasked the unmistakable fact that there must be some great secret party going on somewhere, where everyone had beautiful manners and some deep kind of fun that might even make morose Rainer Maria smile. Florencia took me to the old town. A woman with a black mane and a purse with gold hardware stood among others watching a little group of Tango street musicians. Her husband took her heavy coat and she slid into the arms of an old Tango dancer for a song or two.  “Does everyone here know how to Tango?” I asked Flor.

***

There is some controversy about the exact meaning of the word “Tango,” but the meaning that resonates most with me is: “a circle; a closed, private space that you must ask permission to enter.” Suddenly a natural at qualitative research, I asked everyone I met all about Tango and finally someone showed me the doorknob. He wrote “La Viruta—Armenia 1366” on a slip of paper, and said not to go before midnight.

In my life up until that night, I’d lived in a world full of lines. Ranked in a line and working to be first. Finally at the end of a hundred page line of humane letters, I turned in my thesis and lined up with the other graduates in the rain, winning the right to join new, more prestigius lines. Manhattan subway lines and lines at Starbucks. And now I found myself here at the beginning of a somewhat queasy career trajectory line, making lines in the sky to get from London to Tokyo and beyond, in order to educate some highly linear clients.

All those lines and the story of Mitra was still so half-baked somehow, somehow still needing so much work, so many things needing so to be worked out. I’d look out into the white wilderness beyond seat 7A, would really wonder whether the angels would hear me if I cried out. I was starting to realize that lines were mostly cold. Airplanes certainly were, and I never wore enough layers.

I never missed the campfire circle until I found it; and I never knew it existed until midnight that spring in Buenos Aires.

***

It’s a Thursday evening in May, 2008. I have to sneak out of the presentation a early in order to freshen up and grab my Tango shoes before class.  But anyway none of my clients are interested in monetizing virtual worlds yet, so I think I can afford it. Stefan and I warm up as our students filter in; some sputters and sparks, and soon the familiar glow emerges from somewhere near the center of the circle of our arms, spreads slowly beyond its perimeter.

By the end of the night, the students have each, more or less, secured permission to enter their own cozy four-arm circles and started to generate the unique form of interpersonal heat and light that this technique gives us access to.  A circle made out of circles takes shape – and all the little sparks throw cousins into the heart of the room’s where a well-behaved central blaze starts to dance. The warmth within our tribal circle is palpable and its edges are clear. Outside it’s dark, the freeways are parked, cars are lining up for gas.

***

Most milongas have candles on the tables and an empty space in the middle of the dance-floor where the imaginary, communal blaze nests. It’s just pragmatic; it’s easier to protect your partner and other couples when you dance toward the outside of the circle. Once in awhile a pair of wild and virtuosic hotshots will venture fiercely into the middle of the room, dive into the flame, embody it. But overall, the couple dancing Tango is a circle operating in synchrony withother circles, forming a harmonious and musical part of the circle that is our community: our colorful, respectful, intergenerational, well-heeled community. Like any community, it has its flaws and limitations, its blindnesses and dangers. But the opportunity it offers the individual to grow in self awareness through deep and diverse connections with others totally different from themselves, is unparalleled. Also, the opportunity it offers for women to wear creamcake-rocketship shoes cannot be beat.

The man with the square glasses was right. People do need the warmth of safe, heart-to-heart connection with each other and with a tribe. Today, in cities all over the country, Tango is one of the most powerful tool  we have to create this out of the disconnected shreds of our isolating, motorized, digital lifestyles. The Tango is there, it’s in your own town, and there is so much more to it than the simplistic and bizarre media representations that today’s social dancers barely acknowledge. It’s warm and fun, but it will not come to you; it will demand that you pick your way through your personal crazy forest and to follow its subtle light. This is the first step, and it is a significant one: an affirmation that you are ready for the challenge of truly becoming a part of something bigger than yourself. I wish you strength, courage, persistence, peaceful borders, and numinous dances. Beautiful circles are in store for those who seek.

Among other things, Mitra Martin teaches Argentine Tango in Los Angeles with Stefan Fabry. Join her "virtual campfire" circle here. Or find her on Facebook.