…then they would dance the tango. In a swingers club. In Buenos Aires. After months in the Dominican Republic and the holy Sundays under the gay French direction of Thiery in the former Regensburg harbour brothel, I seriously thought that salsa was the most erotic dance in the world. I was so wrong! Salsa is just pornographic couple wankery. Tango is sex.
Today. Here. Buenos Aires. Probably the only small non-commercial tango venue in the tango metropolis of 15 million people. I find Café Vinilo after a long search on the internet, half an hour before it starts and five kilometres away. At first I just look. I’m good at recognising patterns. I don’t recognise a single one. Everyone dances different steps to different rhythms. Individualistic like cats.
Cats never shed their fur. Not even in the swingers’ club. They dance, regardless of 30° at midnight and humidity levels that would give the snake swamp of Bangkok a fright. The tango had to be invented in Buenos Aires. They dance. Like cats. Pass on the left. Pass on the right. Bodies say “I’m not interested in you at all!”. Like cats. And then, always surprising but necessary, like lightning from a thundercloud – closer and more together than any couple will ever do in a German swingers club. Like cats: “Stroke me!”.
The orchestra is brilliant. Everyone wears street clothes. They apologise for the minimal line-up of violin, squeezebox, piano, sax and double bass because they are on holiday. I don’t see how less could be more. The singer sings “al punto”, without any aguillera yodelling, but with plenty of facial expressions and grandiose gestures. The suffering of the stage feeds the ecstasy of the dancers. Some of them are simply cute in their stumbling attempts at imitation. The Gran Señores of the dancefloor shine brighter than the sun in the Moroccan Sahara behind the best tapas.
A single violet spotlight shines out. The squeezebox player shreds his instrument solo in the centre of the dance floor. Then the singer dances around him. The hall falls silent. The dramatic ending is followed by frenetic applause and the “otra vez” of a large concert hall. We are just 80 guests. I’m sure I’ll never manage the hundred concerts a year of friends. This one, here and now, is enough for me. For years.
Frank Woelky, born in 1973. Kitesurfer since 1998. Since 2006, I have been combining kitesurfing and web design on trips lasting several months off the beaten track.