To The Darkness Dance By Martin McGhee
Dinner is being digested and the blank canvas of the evening stretches, affixing the light-fading hours to my thoughts about what to do before the body prescribes the darkened calm of sleep. As usual the temptation of tango is loitering, painting a picture of closeness, warm skin, beauty, beating hearts, gliding, orchestras, emotion, suits, skirts and heels, and it wakes me from the unconscious humdrum that could set my body in its stiffened mould to occupy the dent in the couch that inertia has carved. But this destiny of the latter part of so many people’s day can be, easily, steered off course, thrusting the terminal sitter in to a thousand arms of others. To hold and be held is the soothing that calms a crying child. The simple feeling of touch has a power over the mind that is bigger than science and the lexicon. Touch reassures and wilts loneliness; it brings people into something; gives a feeling of belonging. When you rise from the sofa with tango as your destination, you know you are on your way to belong and engage. To be wrapped up, and not just calmed in the arms of many partners but, also, soothed by a pumping and crying bandoneon, a bow drawing out the longest emotional note from its conversation with the violin’s strings, the Argentinean singer sweetly bellowing out his pain about a lost love or her mourning the passing of her favourite dancer. This mixture of music and touch creates the fuel that powers the dancers into motion - the perfectly synchronized movement of partners entwined in each other’s embrace, leading and following in a unified flow of passion.  A dance of shapes - ochos, ganchos, boleos, media lunas, flicks and leans - collectively decorate the sequence of bodies as the milonga sails around like a pod of playing dolphins through a calm sea. The union of the dancing couple gives them separation from the world beyond. It renders them lost in the fervour, melted in the emotion, drenched in the music. As, outside, barely conscious aloft Ireland’s capital, the Dublin evening light quietly slips off, inside the dreamiest, most beautiful, sweet atmosphere is created in the safety of the smouldering darkness of a candle-lit milonga, the dancers mentally adrift, cradled in the tango embrace.
© Martin McGhee 2011 Martin McGhee writes on behalf of www.milonga.ie representing Dublin Tango and tango throughout Ireland.