Hold Me Tight and Tango Me Home by Maria Finn Page B

One time he stopped and said, “You’re holding back. What do I need to do?”
    “I guess I don’t want to make a mistake,” I said.
    “You know I don’t give a damn if you make a mistake,” Marcel answered.
    Ahhh, Marcel!
    After dancing with Marcel, I sat on the metal folding chair and noticed a tall, handsome man I hadn’t seen before. When he danced, he took up the floor, heading toward the center of it, laughing with his partner as he made up new steps. Later, I saw him up close and noticed his stunning cornflower blue eyes and sharp cheekbones; when he asked me to dance, I mumbled something about being a beginner.
    “It’s okay,” he said.
    “No, I really mean it,” I answered. “I just started.”
    He dragged me through a few steps and, though I thought I was following okay, after three songs, he frantically scanned the room for another dance partner. But tonight, for some mysterious reason, few women had shown up for the practica. As he swiveled his head and saw me looking at him, I shrugged and said, “Sorry, looks like I’m the only available woman.”
    He laughed, I laughed, and we danced some more together until we started chatting.
    “I’ve been dancing almost two years,” he told me. “Okay, relaxyour foot right there on the floor and let me just drag it over with mine.”
    He slid my foot a few feet away, I shifted my weight over to it, and we stepped to the side basic.
    “Why did you start tango?” I asked.
    “I’m a modern dancer, but when I was in Buenos Aires I met this whole tango community and it felt like a family,” he said. “Now I’m making a film about gay tango in Buenos Aires.”
    Handsome and friendly. Of course he was gay!
    “A documentary or feature?” I asked.
    “A feature,” he said. The practica ended, so we stopped dancing and stepped into the hallway to talk about his film. “I have the trailer shot and I’m using it to try and raise funds to make the rest of the film,” he said. “But I really have to work on the script.”
    “I’m a writer,” I told him. “I could take a look at it.”
    “That would be great,” he said.
    As I punched his name, Peter, along with his number, into my cell phone, we noticed that students from a performance workshop had entered a dance room and were standing at attention, ready to rehearse a routine that Dario had choreographed. Dario had studied ballet before tango, and he incorporated this into his creations. A few pirouettelike turns happened between the ochos, then a pas de deux bled into a standard tango; then the dancers extended their legs behind their bodies, a hybrid of the ballet arabesque and the tango
boleo.
Dario’s vision might have been pushing the tradition of tango, but in France, some claim the ballet primed the masses for the tango.
    The Parisians, those cosmopolitan trendsetters, with their penchant for the sensual, made tango vogue in Europe. The dance was first performed at the Paris World’s Fair in 1878, and Argentinean tango musicians went there to record in 1907; but these brief introductions were mere tremors of the quake that was about to hit.
    According to British author Artemis Cooper in an essay in the book
Tango!
it was the Ballets Russes under Sergei Diaghilev and the “explosion of talent, sensuality, vibrant music and exotic colour, which left its mark on almost every branch of fashion and the arts.” This ballet company created a craving for the exotic, the foreign, and the previously forbidden. By 1913 tango was the favorite pastime of Parisians: tango trains, charity tangos, outdoor tangos, and champagne tangos proliferated. The craze manifested itself most fiercely in the tango teas. In Paris, no hostess would invite friends over for tea without clearing a space and hiring a piano player and dance instructors. In London, society people invited tango teachers to their country homes to facilitate tango teas, and tango became
the
dance at seasonal balls.
    In 1915 the Englishwoman