EMBRACE IN MOTION – TANGO BETWEEN INDIVIDUAL EXPERIENCE AND SOCIAL PRACTICE

Text topic: Cultures of Rhythms and Spectacle

Text author: Љиљана Рогач

The topic in focus encompasses the spaces in which the gatherings of tango dancers occur and where people of different nationalities and identities practice this dance, using Argentina as a powerful referent point, but at the same time constituting various tango expressions. New information technologies, changes in mass media, increased mobility and flow of people, changing practices of subjectivity together with intensive and occasionally confronted life “cultural poetics”– all become part of what makes possible the formation of authentic tango social practice. What are the possibilities in the given situation for the movement and the speed of the tango dancers’ bodies in the most intimate space they share, expressed through a particular notion of the embrace as well as of the walk / the steps? What are the circumstances and environments in which the embrace is being actualized? How does the public expression of the embrace open the space for the semi-private embodiment of the embrace in the social arena? This paper is about to research the transnational “dynamics” of tango as well as the ontological dimensions of this dance.