Carlos Gavito
1
A couple dances tango in the center of the dance floor, and there is something about their understanding that captivates and interrogates us about why they, and not some other, captivate us. Many times, while sitting on the sidelines of a dance floor, I have been dazzled by the movements of a couple, and it is not just about the steps or posture; it is something else, something difficult to explain.
The only obvious thing, for me and for those who observe without even knowing what they are seeing (the steps, the movements, the expression), is that even if we understand the message, we do not decipher the language in which they communicate so articulately. It is not really our fault. The understanding between them is their own and exclusive language, so exclusive that it would require a great writer who could take the breath of life and describe without affectation the seduction I refer to, the rush of personal expression that happens in a fairly concise setting: the inside of an embrace.
And I write “inside” as if the embrace I refer to were accessible, capable of showing us the reason for its particular attraction. Is it simply understanding, skill, intention? What we know about an embrace is that, to paraphrase Whitman, it contains multitudes and is perhaps the shortest way to reach someone’s heart. We embrace to love and to be loved; we embrace in the face of pain and grief; we embrace to comfort and protect; we embrace when we reunite, when we want to feel at home; it is our magical word when language is not enough. Even two men who have sunk into the abyss of the cruelest violence emerge from their particular abyss to seal the experience in an embrace. And we must be grateful that human evolution has been so wise as to make it clear to us that hugging and lying is an almost impossible gesture. What would become of us if our alarms did not sound at false embraces? We would be stabbed in the back a thousand times. The embrace is a truth we say in secret.
But in tango, where people embrace to dance, there is a problem. Interestingly, one has to learn to embrace. And the predicament is serious: two people suddenly have to come close to each other and embrace. It sounds easy. But this couple, who intends to dance with one heart, must make the heroic effort to create a single mythological figure, a figure with four arms and four legs; a creature with two faces and two egos with their own phobias and insecurities that, when they unite in the embrace, also include something of their prejudices and their definitions: about who they are and who they believe they are; about what they believe about tango and what they actually do with it. It seems as if, despite all its beauty and mystery, in tango the embrace is capable of including something more than just dancing; capable of telling the truth but also, and in cruel moments, capable of lying.
2
I would like to think that everyone, when they embrace, is as if they wanted to whisper a secret to the person they dance with…
— Carlos Gavito
3
Many years ago, I had the opportunity to see Carlos Gavito dance. His fame preceded him, but my inability to dance was compounded by my ignorance of his importance as a dancer. I remember his presence and his elegance, but at the time when the new tango made a triumphant entry, trying to understand why he was so important would have been a useless effort. We can say of Gavito, as the Mexican poet López Velarde would say, that “his soul is parallel to his body”. “When he charges towards his partner,” Velarde continues, very ad hoc, “he rears up and preens himself.” There is indeed something of a billy goat in his initial posture. He does not approach his partner but seems to charge at her with an energy that, contained, always seems on the verge of exploding. However, he does not waste that energy. On the contrary, he knows how to lavish it only when necessary, when the music demands it. Step by step, expression by expression, Gavito pauses and contains the music, not the other way around. Perhaps for this reason, some have said that Carlos Gavito’s style is minimalist, in the sense that it appears simple and economical in the means with which he and his partner express themselves, the geometry of their pauses, their silences, and their containment. And although minimalism can function as a synonym for “minimal expression” (and nowadays even for a certain urban asceticism, but that is another matter), it is actually a more demanding artistic requirement than the descriptive realism it opposes. Although its constituent parts may be simple and elementary, a minimalist art is always more than the sum of its parts. Confusion, as usual, does not arise from the definition itself but from our inability to understand the vastness from so few glimpses. The minimalist creator, if he intimately knows what he means, is not at fault. It is the spectator who tries to attribute his own limitations to an artist who is by far uninterested in such debates. Something similar happens when observing Gavito. We see the brushstrokes, we note the containment, we underline his silences. His motionless presence fills the stage. As he approaches his partner, he does so with precise steps, and before surrendering to the embrace, he already dances, he already transmits. He opens his arms and allows his partner to anchor herself to him as if it were the last dance, the last man, the last chance.
An embrace is created, and within it, doubts, misunderstandings, and contradictions are reduced to their minimal expression because the two people hugging at that moment have no doubts about who they are. That security allows them to free themselves from prejudices, insecurities, and distractions. Then, although the first dense notes of the music begin, the silence of their embrace follows. In their negotiation with the music, they do not doubt for a single moment what they give and what they receive. It is a fair transaction. Merged in the interpretation, the couple breathes, remains silent, and adapts to each other. The tango thus unfolds from beginning to end without restrictions, vanities, or mannerisms. They are already dancing, and the viewer barely glimpses a bit of the entire history, culture, and experience involved in that moment when they embrace in tune with the music and in containment with themselves. It is more than minimalistic; it is an Edenic, primordial style.
4
I began dancing tango out of love, or so I want to believe. Would it be more honest to say it was out of jealousy? Perhaps it was both. It’s hard to tell from a distance. Whatever it was, I wanted to imitate those men who embraced Ella and made her spin, move side to side, kick her leg, fall under their control forward or backward, or turn her into a living statue with their powers.
With my limited powers, all I could do was make her frown or look off into the distance as if she were miles away. Anxiously, I tried to move with her to someplace, avoiding as much as possible not to crash into another couple and looking for a way to bring her back to me.
My predicament must have been so apparent that at the end of a tanda, the organizer of the milonga approached me to talk. “Don’t dance with your girlfriend,” she said, “dance with everyone else.” This turned out to be both the best and worst advice I had ever been given. From that evening on, I stopped trying to dance with Ella. Instead, I found satisfaction in breaking my back dancing with anyone who agreed to do so. And relieved of the pressure I imposed on myself, I could finally try to emulate what I saw on the dance floor. I committed some atrocities, yes, but who cared? Soon, I even began to develop my own “opinions” about what tango was, about what it felt like, and what should be done. The only tango CD I owned, by Pugliese, played over and over on my computer. As she left me, tango took me; a more than fair transaction, I would say.
One night I went to pick her up at the airport. She looked impeccable, as always, but there was no sparkle in her almond-shaped eyes. When we arrived at her apartment, she began to tell me about a new style, “new” indeed, new tango, which for me was not only incomprehensible but absurd. In the middle of her living room, she asked me to take her hands, shift my weight backward, and try to spin on one foot, creating centrifugal force with the movement. On the third attempt, she stopped, exasperated. “You don’t know how to do anything,” she said. “I don’t understand what to do. I’m trying to share something with you, and it’s just not working.” Centrifuged towards very different lives, it’s true that she couldn’t share anything with me.
Later that night, lying on the couch, almost in tears due to my own incompetence, I knew that everything had ended, even though she didn’t say it to me. Our short love story, even shorter when it came to tango, lasted just over a year. I don’t remember ever embracing her with the love I had for her, but I’m sure that if I had tried, I would have encountered all my insecurities and all her doubts in the space left by my outstretched arms. It wasn’t an embrace like a bottomless barrel.
In a certain place, Gavito is quoted as saying that he even tells the woman when to blink. Of course, the grandiosity of this image should not be taken literally. However, it is true that his presence tended to overshadow everything around him. The music, the stage, and even his partner seemed to be at his disposal. And there’s no reason not to say it: Gavito was undoubtedly a virile presence, and his “simple” style of silences and restraints was matched by his dominant expression, which was clear about the effects he caused in his partner.
This masculine image of Gavito — if not Gavito himself — belongs to that old brotherhood of men proud of their virility that abounded so much in 20th-century art. There are many examples of this, but the most complete one, which naturally associates with Gavito’s posture and austere naturalness, is undoubtedly Hemingway. Hemingway, who was attracted to bullfighters and boxers — holders of the maximum temerity in his eyes — would not have looked down on a dancer like Gavito if he had known about tango. Without knowing about tango, it would not be absurd to think that Hemingway would have understood it like no other. For example, when describing the bullfighter Pedro Romero in “The Sun Also Rises,” one could almost say that Hemingway is talking about Gavito:
Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like cork-screws, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. […] Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure…
The purity of lines, the “real emotion, always straight and pure” — Hemingway, who claimed supreme virility, did not like grandiloquent words or convoluted phrases. Similar to Gavito’s seemingly simple steps, he also wrote phrases where emotion could do without exaggerations and flatness. His adjectives are pure, and he needs no more words than “still” and “calm” to offer us the figure of Pedro Romero.
Associating Gavito with Hemingway, however, only reinforces the idea that tango is essentially a macho expression. But while both embody the image of a solid, self-assured man, their ultimate purpose is certainly far from this conception: to connect with another, either through words, “the true phrase” of Hemingway, or through the secret one tells their partner through the warmth of an embrace in dance. In his way, Gavito sought to write his own “true phrase” in the language given to him, the language of tango.
6
For Hemingway, the reader; for Gavito, his partner, since nothing of the above would make sense without that which completes them. Marcela Durán completed Gavito’s embrace, offering both the resistance of her own style and a histrionic yet effective commitment. If Gavito is the necessary initial energy, then Marcela Durán is the story, the narrative that gives meaning to the energy that flows from her partner.
One of the most famous choreographies of the Forever Tango show must be the one danced by Carlos Gavito and Marcela Durán to the rhythm of “A Evaristo Carriego”. At the beginning of the piece, we encounter two classic tango types: the old aristocrat with money and the young woman from the outskirts of the city. We know this because in one scene he offers her his handkerchief to clean his shoes, which she does without remorse. Once past the first encounter, however, it is obvious that both recognize in themselves a power that the other desires: she desires money, he desires beauty.
The piece is at first an intemperate, ambiguous courtship. As she approaches, he seems to hesitate and then reconsider. He reconsiders because her beauty is a radiance that he cannot resist. In these first approaches, the embrace is almost violent, and as they move towards each other, it is as if they still do not know how to envelop each other. It seems impossible, even. There are doubts, there is detachment because they cannot find the other’s embrace. But then comes a reconsideration, and the embrace begins to take shape. Their mouths draw closer. They no longer walk towards each other defiantly, but they begin to walk in unison, meeting in the embrace.
Then, perhaps in the most iconic moment of the entire piece, both contemplate what has happened. He fixes his eyes on the distance because even though love has been consummated, it is the seed of what must come, separation, the end. His fixed gaze sums up the nostalgia for the love that has come too late. She, on the other hand, discovers her new powers and does not withdraw from him; on the contrary, she gives herself over once again, only this time without ambiguity, without doubts.
What follows is a tender embrace, very different from the first, and secure in that embrace, she allows him to protect her, and he allows himself to see beyond himself. The intemperate passion gives way to tenderness. From that moment on, everything is a celebration, and it is then that both can express themselves freely, showing themselves in all their breadth, culminating in an embrace that sums up everything that has come before: doubts and ambiguities, rejections and half-truths. It is an embrace in which she, more than surrendering, can finally merge into him. The conclusion is perfect: she, who is all-powerful in her youth and beauty, decides to give herself over, to trust him. He, for his part, moves from pride in himself to the worthy pride of possessing, albeit briefly, the woman he loves.
