Why Tango is Not Macho

Or, how Tango can lead to World Peace

Last century, in the early ’70s when I first went to college and began to learn about the inequalities between men and women, I had the audacity to come home and at gatherings of my traditional patriarchal family, share my raised consciousness.

The changes I thought the world needed went over like a lead pizza. I took a lot of ribbing for years. But what my brothers, uncles, and, most especially, my father, did not realize was that I was talking about men’s liberation, not women’s.

So much water under the bridge now. Thanks to women (and men) who persevered despite ribbing and worse, the world is a better place today (and it could still use a little improvement). Oh, and, and not to undervalue my wonderful nephews, but all four of my brothers were blessed, appropriately, with first-borns who were little girls. (If you don’t know what havoc this can wreak in homes of Sicilian patriarchs, you must read the first chapter of Tony Ardizzione’s In the Garden of Papa Santuzzu.)

Thankfully, too, my brothers love to dance, so I want to tell them and other men, about tango, because it is truly a place of liberation for men who get it. Tango, granted, has roots deep in machismo, in men one-upping each other to seduce women, men trying to dominate women. An oft-seen image of tango is a sort of taming-of-the-shrew embrace. But this image must be seen with new eyes.

For one thing, that embrace is now a caricature, an art form, a spoof on its old meaning. It’s wonderful that we preserve it for the stage. For another thing, the dance has evolved in the crucible of time with our collective psyche. And I can tell you, having danced thousands of circles on dozens of dance floors in Buenos Aires, the birthplace of tango, there are so many men who understand the beauty of the give and take of male and female energy in this un-paralleled dance of improv, and who give themselves over to this dynamic, heart and soul.

To be sure, there are still those men who are stuck, who never rise above the dichotomy of lead and follow to truly produce a dance. But we (tango-dancing Buddhists) are here to save them, to teach them. The way to do that is, not to castigate them, which will only drive them further into their own misery, but to show them what it looks like when we dance with men, like say, Nestor.

Nestor was a man I had very little verbal conversation with but who expressed so much to me through the dialogue of tango. He was the first of several men to say to me after a rapturous tanda (a tango set of three or four songs) that left us breathless, “I’m following you.” And I knew what he meant. He was a truck driver. He was a dream. The connection, the exhilaration cannot be overstated or even grasped in words. We both followed some higher power.

There was Domingo, an elderly man, with a demeanor of great dignity and a bit haughty looking. But when he entered the dance, he met me fully. He loves to do this step, a repeating volcada (from the verb “to spill), I’ll call it, but he won’t do it with everyone. He must trust and I must trust in our shared axis, or leaning body weight. It’s a step where you give up your Self completely. A hair’s breadth deviation fails to accord with proper attunement, we say in a famous Zen sutra. In other words, one false move and ‘Mingo and I would be carne cortada, or minced meat, as we would crash to the floor traumatically. What trust, what elevated belief in strangers, this dance called tango permits one.

There are many more examples of men who dance tango and who get it—the connection between head and heart, which is the connection between male and female aspects.

On that note, let me digress a moment: My brother, Jim, who seems to be having more and more spiritual awakenings as he ripens with age (and with his three wonderful daughters!), recently told me a story that stresses this vital connection. Jim and his wife, Inez, were in Hawaii, atop Haleakela, the simmering volcano of the Big Island. They had met, Hale Makua, a longtime spiritual leader of native Hawaiians, a visionary kahuna of wisdom and courage, who had served in the Vietnam War (and who died tragically in a car accident shortly after Jim and Inez met him). Jim and Inez asked Hale Makua, “What is the one thing in the world we could do to make it a better place?”

With no hesitation, Hale Makua answered, “Let women have much more to say about the direction of the world than they do today.” Hale Makue went on to explain that what he meant was that at birth little baby boys and girls are the same, meaning that their hearts are connected to their brains. But with acculturation boys, who eventually become the men who direct the happenings on this planet, are encouraged to cut off the brain from the heart. To wall off the heart.

Who among us doesn’t know the all-too-familiar syndrome?

My own father, a lifelong hawk who was militaristic about toughening up sons and tamping out “softness,” made progress as he aged, toward healing from this wrong-headed approach. Which, I have no doubt added years to a life that should have been much shorter. But still, he died of a “broken” heart—that is, of a condition that literally cut off the oxygen supply to his heart.

And so, back to my thesis, that tango, a dance of heart connection, is a means to world peace by affording a state of liberation for the individual. It teaches men (and women) that you cannot dance it well if you cut off the blood supply between these two vital organs, the heart and brain, between the male and female aspects. The connection in tango is inter-and intra-personal. You must be whole within.

So, men, next time you feel the split between your heart and brain, don’t just sit there. Spring for some tango lessons instead. Stay with them through the initial discomfort of intimacy with other—which is really intimacy with your feminine side, reconnecting your heart to what is vital, what is life—and then let me know if you still want to go to wars.