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She looked a little tired. I could sense a bit fatigue too, when she took me aside and demonstrated how the energy should feel with the sequence they just taught in the class. That caused some envy from fellow students (or the new die hard J&A fans, if you will): wow, the maestra worked with you personally.

And that was the end of the last workshop at the festival. She took a seat at a nearby chair and asked: “XXXX (my tango nickname), where have you been? I have been looking for you in milongas. I couldn’t see you.” I was a little surprised by her question. There were close to a thousand dancers each night at the festival milonga.

“Tonight, sit close, where I can see you!”

I smiled. That was Andrea, when you had the good fortune to get to know her, warm, sensitive, subtle, intelligent, classy…

That night, at the last milonga of the festival, I sat and danced among newly acquainted J&A fans, waiting for the right song and the right moment to ask Andrea for a dance. Toward the end of the milonga, a lot of dancers had left and were leaving. While I was out by the door, taking photos with a couple of fellow J&A students, a Di Sarli tanda started. It would be the ideal tanda, but I didn’t want to be rude to rush back to the milonga. By the time I got back to my seat, it was the third song of the tanda. No way I was going to invite her at this point.

Beautiful Di Sarli 40s instrumentals had never sounded so long to me. Luckily, the next tanda was Lucio Demare con Raul Beron. The moment I heard the music, I looked over at the table where the professionals were sitting and saw that Andrea was scanning the room. Our eyes met. I cabeceoed her. She smiled, nodded and remained seated till I walked over to her table (como una milonguera!).

That Di Sarli. I was looking around, where is XXXX (my tango nickname, so fondly called by Javier and Andrea)? She said to me in the mix of English and Spanish. “I like Demare too.” I smiled. We embraced and danced to the beautiful voice of Raul Beron.

In between the songs, she asked me if I liked the dress she wore at last night’s performance. “Javi made it” Her voice was full of pride for Javi. She also talked about Guada, her little daughter. “Guada is going to kindergarten now. She likes it.”

There she was, a tango goddess (how much I hated this overused term, but nobody else, imho, more deserving of it than Andrea ), a generous teacher, an elegant, beautiful and talented artist, a loving mother… every virtue of a perfect woman, embracing a normal tanguero, a student of hers, without reservation, just like the way she and Javi taught us, embrace and dance 100%…

At the end of the tanda, she thanked me, sincerely, the same way most of the tangueras would have said it after a good tanda with me. Of course, I thanked her, just the way I would have said to any other tanguera if I just had a blissful tanda. It was the last tanda for both of us at that festival, late spring of 2011.

If only i knew that it would be my last tango with her, the incomparable Andrea Missé.

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Posture is up.

Energy is up.

There are endless possibilities when you dance up.

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Year by year you arrive to a point where you have more feelings than steps. You can always work on making beautiful steps, but when the Tango is over, you are going to remember how it felt, not what steps you did….It is better to be transparent in what you feel.
For me the secret of the Tango is in the abrazo and it is important to experience it. More here

So what is the secret of the embrace? For me, the first and foremost: attitude…

Not long ago, a friend of a friend came to the milonga with us. A very beautiful young woman she was. She was asked even in her street shoes and wrapped up in leather jacket. She was sitting there watching, skeptically.

“So how do you find this?” I asked her.
“looks interesting” she was being diplomatic, judging from her facial expression. “but it looks sexual, i wouldn’t let anyone get so close to me other than my boyfriend or husband.” Truth was spilled out. I smiled:” I understand. You have to be comfortable to be embraced.”

I think the most difficult part of tango is to embrace and to be embraced by, a stranger; much harder for people who come from cultures that do not encourage or even prohibit touching of bodies. Imagine when one doesn’t accustom to embrace one’s own family: brother, sister, parents, how could one embrace a stranger?

Yet for whatever reason, we dance tango.

Some say that tango is the few dance that man can still be a man, woman a woman. It seems sexist, old fashion, politically incorrect, from many modern eyes. For a lot of us, that is the exact reason we dance.

Most of my private lessons with various of maestros, i was taught how to dance with the right attitude: from the posture to embrace, to movement (yes, attitude in movment!) and energy… i could only remember once or twice that I was actually working on technique in the classes. I still remembered that once, Silvina Valz asked me why i went to embrace the woman. Let her come to you, tango is machismo dance. Of course, she didn’t mean by dragging the lady into my arms. But that underlined the fundamental roles of man and woman in tango, IMO: man invites, woman accepts.

That is why often Andrea stresses to female students: if you don’t want to dance with the man for whatever reason, don’t! If you accept his invitation, then give 100% of yourself, try to kill the man. It makes sense, right? You can’t dance to one body four legs, with one side is reluctant.

As much as I remembered all those great moments, I was scarred by dances where women were absent minded, trying to escape, tense…regardless how good looking they were, how technically proficient they were. The bad feeling after lingered for the rest of the night, sometimes days. I would rather sit and listen to music, than dance a tanda like that. That is why i use cabaceo most of the time, by looking at the woman, I could pretty much see how much she wants to dance (with me). If the intention isn’t strong enough, I always look away. Some say that you will miss chance of dancing with good dancers…well, if she isn’t showing the intention when she has it, she has some learning to do to become a good dancer. If she isn’t interested, even if she is the tango goddess, she is not the one I should be dancing with anyway.

One friend told me his experience dancing in Russia. One woman would take about literally 30 second to embrace the man, her left hand would slid slowly up to his right arm…I have goosebums he said to me, while imitating the movement on my arm. I felt a chill, and a tanguera friend of mine, who was standing next to me watching, was in awe.

Tango is a sensual dance…dancers ought to understand sensuality. Otherwise, it is only steps, movements, without a soul.

Stay tuned…

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The moment she embraced me. There was this indescribable sensation, rose from my chest, all the way to the top of my head, and came back down to my cheeks. My right cheeks was in touch with hers. My eyes were burning… something was about to come out from those eye sockets. I was startled. We were in this Embrace workshop. The light was bright in the room…

That was the first time I was overwhelmed by my own feelings. You had an or.. well tangasm! An wise friend told me later when I described my experience to her. ah…. now I understood why some women wept uncontrollably after …

But I was not attracted to her, even though she was very young and pretty. Judging from the color of her wrist band distributed by the festival, she had only danced less than two years, an intermediate, if you will. The maestros corrected her a few times during the class. But each time when the change of partner came, we looked for each other.

I had danced with hundreds of women from various backgrounds, origins and cultures. Good dancers I always remembered. Yet very few times I had experienced embraces that provoked so much emotion, even more rarely, from the moment she embraced me. And every such moment was so rare and precious that I remembered the very detail of each moment, even years after.

When I was dancing pretty well (or so fellow dancers told me) a few years ago, I often paid attention to what women raved about other tangueros.

Embrace! Unanimously.

His embrace felt like a giant pillow… like fluffy cloud…makes me feel like a flower, want to open up… I was incitingly jealous of those men.

What is the secret of embrace?!

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The first song came to an end. She was still here,  without any signal of breaking away. So we remained embraced, standing in the floor, breathing… Dancers were chatting nearby, some inches away. The noise sounded yet so far away.

We were in another zone, whichever space in the floor that we occupied at that moment.

The second song started. I forgot how to lead. I didn’t even want to move. I felt her nose, her eyelids, the contour of her face, the proximity of her lips, the moist warmth of her breathes…

The music stopped, again.  Our bodies were still glued together. I relaxed and readjusted my right arm, she her left. We let some air in between our chests. The cool air contrasted the warmth of the bodies, made me feel that her body was burning. Like magnets, we closed our embrace. The next song began.

Somehow (the instinct of a dj?), I realized that this was the last song. A twitch of sadness grew from nowhere, as if someone whom I have known for very very long were leaving, a part of my heart was leaving too. The feeling of void.  I had tried very hard to hold back, but something was coming down on my cheek. I couldn’t tell if it was bead of sweat…And I had never met her before… until 15 minutes ago.

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