Nick Marketos: Psychotherapist , tango d.j
e mail: nmarketos@gmail.com
Con permiso, soy el tango... Yo soy el tango
que llega por las calles del recuerdo.
¿Dónde nací? Ni me acuerdo, en una esquina
cualquiera.
Una luna arrabalera
Y un bandoneón son testigos.
Yo soy el tango argentino. Donde guste y
cuando quiera
|
Excuse me, I'm tango... reaching the streets of memories.
Where was I born? I do not remember, in any
corner.
A suburban moon
And a bandoneon were witnesses.
I am the Argentine tango. Like where and when
you want
|
Tango is not about just the music, not just about the poetry, is not
just about the dancing. Ferrer says: «tango
is a way of life, to feel and to capture passionately the existence and the
world". Such a passion is
contagious, a gesture that invites to the banquet of life ". Only through such a holistic approach the
contact with the spirit of tango can be maintained.
Being a spontaneous, popular form of expression, tango acquires
universality and timelessness because since its origins, it has been speaking
on behalf of the collective unconscious and has been motivating fundamental
archetypes of the human psychic structure. Tango is a hybrid or ''mestizo''
product, born in the slums and emerged of the combinations of tropical Havana and
African dances and the mixture of the native Creole and the immigrants.
Archetypes
Tango is revealed as a metaphor for life. In tango as in life the patterns for sex,
loss, pain, courage, love and hopes, the struggle for virtue, are all
encountered.
The archetypes of anima (feminine psyche) and animus (male psyche) which
contain the psyche of men and women respectively in the collective unconscious
are emerging in the game of the dancing embraced couple.
The key to balance, both in the dance and in life, is for these male and
female archetypes to work symbiotically. Αnima and
animus coexist in each of us.
The couple dancing in a close embrace manifests another archetype. The
pursuit to experience the merge arising from the closed embrace and the contact
of bodies being in touch with each other sensations, and the coordination in
movement as it were ‘’one heart and four legs” refers to the myth of
androgyne mentioned by Aristofanis in the Plato’s Symposium.
Tango as a dance, along with the close body contact constitutes a
ritual, a ritual that reenacts the archaic myth of integration of separate
individuals in the initial condition of the complete human. It seems to be
something beyond an erotic ritual, as one may see superficially. For others and
the true joy of sex has to do with the temporary merge. The occult importance
often given to the sexual act is that orgasm mystically reunites, momentarily,
separated souls and brings the participants mystically closer to the absolute.
The music
Tango music belongs to the genre of music whose narrative permeates the
whole multiplicity of life, and seen from such a perspective, the music and
lyrics of tango return us back into the mythical time of Orpheus.
Music has the ability to unite
us with others in anthems and marches (Apollonius element) or to connect us
with the rituals of nature in dance and rhythm (Dionysian element) or to
function as a reminder of our mortality and longing (Orpheus element).
Bandoneon is the lung of tango, the ironmaker’s bellows where passions
are melted away and forms which elude death are created (Ferrero, 2006). The profound meaning of each sound of
bandoneon, its unexplained and mysterious nuances, invoke on a shared past and
a secret communication. Far from being solely a musical instrument, it is the
melancholic messenger of the nostalgia of Buenos Aires (Salas, 1996).
The best composition of all these elements, where poverty, loneliness
along with the innermost secrets of personal stories co-exist, are expressed
through the hidden meanings of the sounds of bandoneon, as it is outlined by
Homero Manzi in the verses of the tango
‘’Che Bandoneon’’ played by Anibal Troilo’s
orchestra in 1950 with Jorge Casal as the singer.
Che Bandoneon!
.....
Tu canto es el amor que no se dio
y el cielo que soñamos una vez,
y el fraternal amigo que se hundió
cinchando en la tormenta de un querer.
Y esas ganas tremendas de llorar
que a veces nos inundan sin razón,
y el trago de licor que obliga a recordar
si el alma está en "orsai", che
bandoneón. VRE Bandoneon !
|
hey,
bandoneón
...
Your song is
the love that did not occur,
and the sky that we dreamed once, and the brotherly friend who sank working hard in the storm of a love affair. And those tremendous desires to cry that sometimes they flood us without reason, and the drink of liquor that forces us to remember if the soul is off-side, hey, bandoneón. |
Poetry
Poetry forms a "symbolic universe and a belief system" for the
society of Buenos Aires. Borges says that «the poetry of tango has been
deposited in the soul that sings”. It is
perhaps the solemn ritual at Buenos Aires Milongas, where people sing the
verses as they dance and through the act of dancing, interpret the poetic
phrase. They are poems learned totally by heart. It is due to the poetic
quality of all these verses of tango. For an inhabitant of Buenos Aires tango
lyrics represent a real mirror to look back at themselves and at the same time,
a resort in which many find the solace and the wisdom of life. It is also a
complete system of values common among most of the inhabitants of the Río de la
Plata region. But even those who don’t live in those times and in those places
have incorporated the poetry of tango as part of their popular tradition. The
lyrics of tango, with the power of the truth inherent to them, resonate within
us because they speak on behalf of the collective unconscious.
Ernesto Sabato says:
A Napolitan dancing a tarantella does it for fun; A porteño dances a
tango to reflect on his fate, to express a deep concern for the human
condition.
The main topics of the poets are death, the relentless passage of time,
the dislocation, the search for identity, the nostalgia for a lost paradise.
The lyrics seem to attempt to describe all aspects of reality: the financial
crisis, social injustice, class-related discriminations, Races, the
carnival, the mystery of God, friendship old age, etc.
Hanna Segal (1995) argues that the artist combines the ability to
express symbolic fantasies with the perception of reality. This is seen in
major tangos, where the composer's inner world reflects the reality of the
Buenos Aires society. When this synthesis, achieves the true symbolism, that
transcends the denial of the loss and the idealization of the lost object. The
true symbol, says Segal, is used to accept and overcome the loss and not to
deny it.
Tango Cafetín (1946) by Argentino Galván, and Homero Exposito’s lyrics
expresses the emotional state of the immigrant, who longs for his idealized and
distant homeland:
Cafetín,
donde lloran los
hombres que saben el gusto que dejan los mares.
Cafetín
y esa pena que
amarga mirando los barcos volver a sus lares...
Yo esperaba
porque siempre soñaba la paz de una aldea sin hambre y sin balas.
Cafetín,
ya no tengo
esperanzas ni sueño, ni aldea para regresar.
|
Cafetín,
where men cry who know the taste left by the seas.
Cafetín
and the bitter shame watching the boats return to their parts ...
I expected because I always dreamed of a village peace without hunger
and bullets.
Cafetín,
I have no hope no dream no village to return.
|
The mechanism of idealization denies emphatically that distant homeland
is also a mother who did not give to, or did not hold her children. In this
sense, migration is a traumatic experience continuously repeated in different
contexts, which can be understood in radical unity with the unconscious. The
country that turns away the immigrant and the woman who abandons (amura) is the
same phenomenon, as well as migration from the countryside to the city and the
suburbs to the city center (Dimov J, et al 2003). Anyone who has felt dismissed odd and useless, identifies with this drama.
Passion and sublimation
The result of sublimation is the equivalent of ecstasy in the form of
aesthetics and the transformation of abjection to psychic greatness. The sublime and magnificent is attained with
the basest and most despised ingredients (Nietzsche F., 1908).
Through sublimation death, sexuality, aggression, loss of self, vulnerability
and isolation become embraced and exceeded without being negated or denied. The
externalization of fantasy, of desire, and fear, becomes a light that exiles
the shadows, broadens or modifies the ways through which the experience and
the self may be organized and acquire meaning.
In addition, part of the power of the sublime is the successful and sanctioned
discharge of desexualized libido. The dance has a strong erotic component.
According to Freud, «Beauty as sublimation of sexual desire, redirects libido
to be expressed without being negated without ever being vulgar.
Kohut refers to sublimation as the larger issue of creativity in
general. During the late of 19th and the beginning of the 20th century social
and historical conditions in Argentina left people of the lower class feeling
empty, fragile, and fragmented. Music
and dance have particular importance for the man who is destabilized, as the
pain of the loss, defeat, loneliness, exile, is directed aesthetically in the
forms of tango.
Gustavo Hurtado says : "The
dance itself offered the final composition of the mourning of Creoles, of the
duel with knives and of the sexual intercourse ... The movement of the knife turns
into a corte in the rhythm ... almost
all the steps of tango have notations from the composition of the Creole
mourning and sexuality: the quebrada, the volteo, the media luna, the parada,
the cruzado, the rueda, the paso de lado, the corte, the paso atras, the embe
stida, the abanico, the medio corto cuerpeadas ......”
The despair of being incapable to resist to the threat of fragmentation
of self, and the pressure of unacceptable strivings, lead us in our
artistic activities to substitutive forms of discharge, mastery, and compliance
in a nonverbal medium that lies, usually, outside the field of inner conflict
(Kohut and Levarie, 1950).
The extraverbal nature of music and dance offers a subtle
transition" (by means of regression)"to preverbal modes of
psychological functioning.
In the earliest psychological organization (pre-ego, pre-object . .
.preverbal), the archaic mental apparatus tends
to perceive sound as a direct threat and reacts reflexly to it with
anxiety" (Kohut and Levarie,
1950). This early acoustic trauma may be
re-enacted in each musical experience, with a chance to resolve it within the
medium of music and dance."
Tango and ritual
Milonga is a ritual that has a mystagogue character. In the ritual of
milonga, two silhouettes, corresponding to the silent, codified exchange of gazes, are
directed towards the dance floor without haste.
The formation of the hugging is made in slow ritualistic manner.... The
pair becomes embraced facing each other, eliminates the distance and imposes
the body friction. They start rotating
around an axis moving on the dance floor where other couples are already moving
and coordinated with other couples who are already creating a whole, in a
fashion similar to participating in a collective dance and simultaneously
maintaining intact the total contact with the partner and the inner self. The
lightness of movement and the severe jubilation of faces reinforce the intensity of
the situation. The dancers make doodles (firuletes), flirt and tamper with
shapes. They dance together, an entire
tanda (four tangos), without swapping of partners. Once the tanda finishes, the
man accompanies the woman back to the sidelines, often maintaining some amount
of physical contact, such as holding hands. This process allows for closure of
the intimacy shared within the dance and for a chance to reflect oneself
on the experience before a new dance begins.
The ritual is a meaningful celebration that aims to make manageable what
appears threatening, what is unknown, frightening and overpowering. In
the cultural ritual we construct a consensually validating system of meanings.
Ritual draws the participant into a symbolic experience of the world (Jenkins
H., 2014).
In all rituals it is evident people assume specific roles with patterned
rules - rules that end up making the self one with an infinite series of
others. The free self voluntarily enters to the servitude of otherness and to an
entire world of objective relationships and moral imperatives.
Improvisation
Tango is opposed to the academicism; its "school" is life.
Technique is not dominant-The goal is improvisation in a manner relative to
each individual dancer’s capacity for creativity and personal style, circumscribed within a set of given steps.
Improvisation entails states of mutual playfulness and curiosity among
partners or among the musicians. The attunement in improvisation is truly a
two-way version of intersubjectivity. Thus, improvisation occurs around the
players capacity to engage in a higher quality of communication (Nachmanovich,
2001, Ringstrom, 2001b) wherein each takes something of what is communicated
non-verbally and mirrors recognition of it adding something to it. Back and forth
the players are both mirroring one another while also Improvisational moments
arise when the “characters” draw from something real within themselves.
Thus, in improvisation, we can be more spontaneously ourselves, as we
unconsciously inform and direct one another by virtue of what we each
implicitly “believes” to be true in human relationships.
Moments of improvisation ultimately involve moments of mutual surrender
to the creation of the “improvised script”, versus submitting to the other’s
domination.
The improvisation process gives rise to the heretofore unimaginable, or
unarticulated. This form of subject-to-subject relating, creates moments of
mutual recognition, laying down a foundation of trust and relationality
instrumental for secure attachment of
the dancing couple.
Equally noteworthy, however, is that improvisation often entails
ruthlessly playing with the other as “object” (i.e. as a functionary to one’s play). This
It is because when the two parties can play with one another as “objects” they
intrinsically reveal something about themselves as subjects.
The origin of tango and
the historical and social context
Tango is intelligible only when observed within the culture and social
milieu out of which it emerged. Culture becomes the horizon within which
aesthetic experience is possible and intelligible. Culture provides the
language of art and the general standards that define quality are developed as
well. Tango is a “mestizo” born from the trauma of Black slavery, European
colonization and immigration and the uprooting of both racial groups and is recreated in the
daily ritual beyond conscious considerations. Marta E. Savigliano (1995)
suggests that tango expresses and reproduces “exiles and alterity”.
We can not fully understand the tango without reference to immigration
phenomenon that happened in Argentina during the mid-nineteenth century, and
particularly from 1880 to 1920 (Dimov J., et al 2004).
Immigrants arrived in large numbers and from various regions of the
world with the expectation of a better life, but also bore the nostalgia for
their homeland and the difficulties inherent to the process of integration into
a new country. If we understand these immigrants with the scheme of Melanie
Klein (1952), we can say that these depressive anxieties for their lost
homeland (which represents mother) are mingled with persecutory anxieties that threatened
their adaptation.
The Argentine Creole,
reacted to both these types of anxieties, having felt the invasion by
immigrants from outside ( persecutory anxieties ) and having to give them a
place as new compatriots (depressive anxiety).
Forced to compete with the immigrant for jobs, women, social status, the
urban creole took out his frustration and bitterness against the immigrant and
the bourgeois in a new ‘duello criollo’, the tango.
In this ‘duello’, the object was to show up the immigrant or the upper
class ‘swell’ as well. Through the development of a complicated footwork and
body movements (‘el corte’ and ‘tango
con quebrada’), the tango as a dance was not easily done by the novice. The
poor immigrant or the swell who tried to emulate the ‘creole compadrito’ was
made the object of ridicule. The
immigrant, for his part, participated in this ‘duello criollo’ to show his
equality and his desperation to become something other than a ‘tano’ (Italian)
or a ‘gringo’ (foreigner). The upper
class ‘swells’ also participated in this ‘duello’. They sought to prove their
masculinity seeking high adventure through slumming. Tango was not ‘their’
dance, but instead an adventure. It was an adventure into the ‘low life’ and a
flirtation with danger (Castro, 1990).
The tango ‘’Así se baila el tango’’
on music of Elías Randal and Lyrics of Marvil (Elizardo Martínez Vilas),
played by Ricardo Tanturi orchestra at 1942, singed by Alberto Castillo
talks about the way a true creole approaches his dance :
Que saben los pitucos, lamidos y shusetas!
Que saben lo que es tango, que saben de compas!
Asi se
baila el tango,
mientras dibujo el ocho, para estos filigranas, yo soy como un pintor. Ahora una corrida, una vuelta, una sentada.
Asi se
baila el tango,
sintiendo en la cara, la sangre que sube a cada compas, mientras el brazo, como una serpiente, se enrosca en el talle, que se va a quebrar. mezclando el aliento, cerrando los ojos para oir mejor, como los violines le dicen al fuelle, porque desde esa noche, Malena no canto. |
What do they know, the crybabies and rich
snobs!
What do they know about tango, what do they know of the beat!
This is
how one dances the tango,
while I “draw” a figure eight, for this fancy footwork, I am like a painter. Now here is a corrida``, a turn, a sitting.
This is
how one dances the tango,
feeling in the face, the blood raising in every beat, while the arm, like a serpent, coils around the waist, that it is going to break. mixing the breath, closing the eyes to hear better, as the violins say to the bellows, why from that night, Malena sung no more. |
On the other hand, the integration of Argentinians and immigrants was
achieved in the conventillo*
,settlements where the poor locals lived along with those who came from the
countryside to the city (drawn by the new conditions of rural labor) and
immigrants. Tango united everyone in the symbolic embrace of dance, song and
music. This embrace, as Dimov (2003) points out, was both sexual and fraternal.
In a recent paper, two sociologists at the University Constance, Silvana
Figueroa and Jochen Dreher (2002) argue that, since the last and serious crisis
in Argentina in 2001, tango has re-emerged as a dance symbolically
representing a fusion and as an attempt to foster social coherence in the
fragmented Argentinian society.
The universality of tango
Tango’s transmission through the time and space is submitted to the
determinism of ecology of action. The
principle of ecology of action is central: once an artistic creation enters
into a different cultural environment, it distances itself from the historical
and cultural context in which it was created, it enters into a set of multiple
interactions and feedbacks and ends up coming from its teleology, or even gets a
completely different meaning. The ecology of action has a universal value.
(Morin E., 2005).
We encounter the aesthetics of tango according to the structure defined
by our history and our cultural tradition (structural coupling: Maturana, H.,
& Varela F., 1980). We are open to
interaction to the degree we have receptors capable of handling the stimuli of
tango. What resonates from the depths of tango is an asymmetrical harmony, totally
different from the academic ‘’Euclidean’’ harmony. It is the harmony of those
who feel and conceive the existence and the world passionately, the harmony of
ecstasy and of those who exceed the allowable limit of emotion and expression.
The forms and contents of culture reverberate and mutate continually.
Cultures as ever-changing constructs emerge from interactions among
individuals, and communities. Aesthetic standards are social ideals in which
communal subjectivity is concretized and elaborated. These values are continually being negotiated
and explored at all levels of subjectivity.
It is the external embodiment of the community’s subjective life, and,
culture reflects back to us who we are as a people; we continually act upon
(and within) our culture to refine and perfect it—and in so doing, we refine
ourselves.
Other people’s cultures interacting with our culture begins to influence
society’s idea of art. In other words, in the creation and appreciation of art,
there is a vast, complex dialectic, a creative encounter with our own
subjectivity by which we are renewed.
With the mediation of art, we try to eliminate the borders that divide
us, we are trying to escape from our solitude, to abolish the polarity between
the self and the world. The potential space that exists between subjective
experience and objective reality is the area of cultural experience (Winnicott
1971).
Globalization, in contrast to universality, along with the free movement
of commodities imposes global cultural hegemony and homogenization. Tango in
its new bourgeois version was readdressed to the world market. It became an ‘exotic’ good in the political
economy of Passion.
For the philosopher and musician Gustavo Varela, the revival is really a
fact that is not touching the popular classes it rather excites the middle
classes. There are some foreign fanatics.
In the wider Buenos Aires there is no milonga, there is cumbia. Cumbia
villera expresses currently the marginal classes who live mainly ιn slumming around Buenos Aires. It is a furious
primordial sound and talks about the experiences i.e. chase with police etc.
(Varela 2010).
While the African rhythms that gave birth to tango were suppressed and
confined as the dance form was ‘refined’ by Western Europeans, those roots
nevertheless sustained the vital passion inherent in the dance, because they
sprang from and spoke to the collective soul of humanity. Jung believed that a crisis opens the door to
the Collective Unconscious and allows an archetype to reveal a profound truth
hidden from consciousness. By its revelations It tries to save us from mental
inertia and shows us that there is something incompatible, not assimilated and
conflicting inside us.
Epilogue
An ongoing complex dialectic forms the universality of
tango from its origin. The first is connecting humans by means of the
collective unconscious, as a true continuation of ancient rituals relating to
the existence and death and also as symbolic art of high aesthetics. Tango
undergoes a constant elaboration as it encounters other cultures across space
and time. Today, tango bears similarities to the tattoo that one can fill the whole body,
and can remove it anytime, but can just as well symbolize a sign in life which is
indelible.
FOOTNOTE
*Conventillo was the poorly home that rented by
immigrants. It consisted of several rooms around a central courtyard.
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Etchegoyen*
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