Appropriation

27 June

She demonstrates to us, her students. Closed eyes, not moving, just feeling the music. The piece is starting and there is the liminal moment of feeling and deciding, of gathering your emotions, of seeing if and how and when will they fit in the music. All is possible. There is rhythm, there is melody and there is a person about to become them. How? when? we don’t know, not yet. She is the tension before the storm, the shore before the wave. Tango might have forms and passes and structures and conventions, but they don’t matter. Not to my dutch teacher of tango, they don’t. And so she dances, her partner takes her away or she takes him away and there they go, dancing at, or dancing in music that was invented, that was created, that was put together long before they were born or they got together, by people that they would not understand.

I happen to be one of those.

Having born in Argentina, grown in Venezuela and living in The Netherlands for the best part of three decades already, I have been for a very long time defensive of my music and my identity and who I am and how anybody should see me. As every other latino living in Europe, more times that I want to remember I have been subsumed in one or another identity cliche, which I have fought as hard as I could. Said’s classic “Orientalism” documented and structured the matter. It is so wrong and shallow to be seen as yet another exotic member of something that does not even exist! As a matter of fact, it is a form of cultural appropriation, when we are made others by forcefully fitting us in descriptions that don’t describe anything but prejudices.

And so I wonder -also seeing my very dutch tango teachers dance- to which point does it all makes sense.

Even worse, I wonder if I have not wasted years defending the indefensible, the very same thing that has been done unto me. Why, in the name of any inexistent god, do I have the right to decide what anybody can and should dance? Isn’t that making people that I don’t know others, assuming that they can’t dance tango? Isn’t that what Delacroix made with his “Femmes d’Alger” or Mozart with his “Entführung aus dem Serail”? And let’s make it even worse. Have I not enjoyed Delacroix? Or Mozart?

Of course I have.

And of course here I am, at my fifty plus springs, learning from a -very- dutch couple how to dance the dance that is the pride and core of the identity of my kind. And here I am, pushing my patient and beloved -dutch- partner, learning that tango is not about pushing anybody anywhere, but gently understanding each other so that we together could enter some other space that we have perhaps inhabited, alone so far, now finally together. Here I am learning how to use my core muscles -those muscles that I become aware of by practicing japanese fencing- to talk with my beloved in ways that I did not know possible.

Learning by looking how a dutch couple dance tango.