"We're out of step. We disagree. What's right for you, is wrong for me... you wonder how we made it down the aisle, well I like your style."
Barnum, The Musical
After twenty-three years of marriage, it could be easy to fall into a comfortable rhythm. Or fall completely out of it. Twenty-three is an unlucky number for my husband, and while we had made the most of two years sailing round the world en famille, playing Cicada on our catamaran La Cigale, named after the La Fontaine story riffing off Aesop's fable, since then we had both been back on laborious Ant mode, giving everything to work to keep the proverbial boat afloat. Time to turn the energy around and have some fun. This year's anniversary was saved by a pop-up on Instagram. An evening of the Seven Sins of Tango by Candlelight by London Concertante caught my eye, the mood conjuring up Pedro Pascal's recent viral video, reciting in Spanish the love scenes from Romeo and Juliet, transposed into his native tongue by Chilean poet Neruda (click here). This could be just the algo-rhythm for us to find our groove. I instantly messaged my husband. Fancy going to this?
He replied with a link to a male revue called "Forbidden Nights" at Clapham Infernos. "Thought this circus might be more to your taste." Pop went the bubble. No it bloody wouldn't, I thought, with a sense of humour failure. I'm not some sort of middle-aged hormonally overloaded bungalow bunny who needs to drool over Magic Mikes for kicks. Then I took a step back and paused. Oh... wait... god... am I? Is that my lot now I've turned 50? ...And is that so wrong, anyway?! From Seven Sins to Forbidden Nights is just un pasito adelante after all, or un pasito atrás, quizás. I thought about it for a moment, checked in with both my angels and little devils, and found my answer: "I'd prefer tango."
Tango means so much to me. As a hispanophile, there is a poetry of movement that speaks to the yearning of my heart. I love the push and pull, the power play with boundaries, the flicks and the fire, the intensity. It speaks to my restless spirit, that impish chispa or spark, that flamenco dancers refer to as duende. As young lovers in our 20s, newly fiancéed, we took lessons from Paul and Michiko in the crypt of a church in Farringdon, with a view to it being our first wedding dance. They were extraordinary. Paul was so gracious and debonair (he had taught Al Pacino tango for the film "Scent of a Woman") and Michiko was sublime, precise, sinuous and steeled. We could be dancing to anything from Gardel to the Jungle Book, and I loved watching them take a turn to illustrate a move. But they had this rule of changing partners for each dance, and my fiancé and I barely ever caught a turn together, so after six months of lessons we decided instead to improvise some swing ceroc for our wedding dance, in which we were so practiced from numerous family weddings on the Continent.
A few months later that summer, we arrived in Valparaíso, Chile, for the wedding of friends, my former flatmate, a Chilean actress I had lived with in Spain, and an Argentine director. The whole crowd were experienced performers - actors, ballet dancers, musicians - all well versed in tango, and so when moment came to dance, this gringa grabbed her husband's wrist and dragged him to the pasillo outside to dance, unobserved, so I thought, until I lifted my head from his shoulder to find the entire wedding party had decamped to watch us, and then applaud. What can you do but laugh, really? My first lesson in clowning around with tango.
23 years later we arrived at the baroque beauty that is St George's Church in Hanover Square. Only we were two hours early, as it turned out they had two shows, and we'd booked the wrong one. Still, the lovely usher took pity on us and said they could squeeze us in. We took a pew at the back. I looked around, disappointed by the visibility. Then I spotted a gallery upstairs. I slipped back to the foyer, wondering if this was pushing my luck (but worth a shot)... could we move upstairs? She said we could give it a go, if there was space. We nipped upstairs, slipped right round the side and ended up with a fabulous view of the orchestra, all in different colours of velvet jackets: mustard, burgundy, royal blue, emerald green, cut through with a slash of scarlet dresses. Vibrant. The colours of my life, as Barnum once sang to Mrs Barnum, at least for the evening.
The Seven Sins of Tango has seven musical chapters, each inspired by one of the deadly sins. From where we sat, we could see the dancers appear in the wings, already in character, strikingly composed. He was a slick porteño, immaculately suited, all contained power and watchful precision. She had three costume changes, gratifyingly, each one completely different in style: flamboyant, sensuous, sparkling, complementing the narrative arc of pecadillos. But it was the chemistry between them that gave the evening its impact. Their choreography did not simply decorate the music; it listened to it, teased it, answered it back. A flick of the foot, a sudden pause, a hand offered or withheld, a turn that seemed to surrender and resist at once. They brought each selected piece to life through expressive choreography that caught the emotional intensity of the score: desire, provocation, pride, playfulness, danger. All utterly eye-catching, all gravity defying, and there we were in the gallery, just the two of us in our section, marvelling at it all. Reconnecting. Remembering. Admiring the virtuosity of the music and the electricity of the dance.
They kicked off with Lust. Hallelujah! But in my excitement I knocked over my bottle of sparkling water. Thank god it was just water, but I still had visions of it dripping through the floorboards to a statue below and felt a Derry Girls moment coming on. If you've seen the episode with the miracle of the weeping virgin you'll get it...being brought up by Irish nuns, including a sardonic Sr Michael, it's very close to the bone. You can't take me anywhere!
Then came Gluttony. I felt smugly virtuous having opted for water over wine (for once), but in church there are magic tricks for that and the evening certainly produced an intoxicating effect as we were transported by both music and spectacle. There were also moments when the musicians took centre stage with virtuoso playing from strings, accordion and piano in dialogue with each other. Together it all whipped up the charged intensity I had longed for.
Afterwards I picked up a CD of London Concertante's Gypsy Strings, playing as I write now, full of life, mischief and joy. We then went out to a wildly romantic Italian restaurant round the corner for ridiculous cocktails and aphrodisiac arancini, before taking the Vespa home through streets still strung with Pride bunting, the embassies proudly flying gigantic rainbow flags. Inclusivity through diversity, and my mind todo un Libertango, the show finale.
Piazzolla was fifty when he recorded Libertango, music that broke the rules of traditional tango and declared his freedom from the old form. He had long been reviled by purists for dragging tango away from the dance floor and into something stranger, sharper, more rebellious. Today, Libertango belongs to everyone who understands what it means to refuse the old form and insist on your own.
It struck me then that circus and tango have always spoken to each other. Both grew out of liminal spaces: port cities and fairgrounds, bordellos and backstreets, travelling families and immigrant rooms, the places where people live at an angle to respectability. Both took bodies the mainstream world preferred not to look at too closely and put them centre stage. The acrobat, the clown, the sharp tanguero, the sequinned sylph: all of them saying, look again. There is grace here. There is discipline here. There is suppleness. There is desire, danger, wit and art.
Perhaps that is why both forms feel so wildly alive to me. They are not about fitting in. They are about turning marginality into theatre. About making a virtue of imbalance. About finding, in the push and pull, the possibility of flight. The surrealists understood this, of course. Argentine poet Oliverio Girondo wrote in Espantapájaros (Scarecrow) that women who do not know how to fly are wasting their time trying to seduce him. Angela Carter's winged aerialiste Fevvers embodied it in Nights at the Circus, half woman, half myth, refusing every neat category offered to her. And artist Leonora Carrington knew it in her bones, with her moon-women, horse-women, wild women and dream creatures slipping the leash of the ordinary (see Chapter 235: The Luminous Spell of Leonora Carrington)
Flight, after all, is not only acrobatics or letting go the trapeze bar. It is refusal. Refusal to stay earthbound. Refusal to be sensible. Refusal to accept the shape the world has handed you. So very circus. So very tango. The colours of my life. Barnum, encore.
Ah, it was an evening to make us dream of picking up tango up again. Buenos Aires had already begun to call to me. Last year, while creating a bespoke cultural and linguistic crash course of ten lessons for a private student travelling to Argentina, I found myself wandering, virtually at least, through San Telmo, La Boca and Almagro, following the music again through the city’s historical and colourful quarters. Then one of my sisters went at Christmas, and my sense of FOMO sharpened. I have sent others there in my imagination often enough. One day, ¡ojalá! I'll go and explore todo el tango.
Time to post now this now. Tuesday, 23 June. Lucky for some!
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