Tango: a spatial forensic 

Tango is a dance built on ritual, whether you are entering a club hall or just a floor delineated with unfurled cardboard boxes taped to the ground in an Argentine park. Born in the brothels of La Boca, and brought to the tea dances of the upper classes, tango, since its inception in the 1800s, was a practice synonymous with the illicit. Today the dance and its spaces serve as ‘contact-zones’ ‘where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power’ (Pratt, 1991, p34).

Based in Buenos Aires the research involved a dialogical process conducting interviews, readings of poetry, history and theory, performance, and drawing maps of movement networks and spatial consciousnesses. Understanding tango through the lens of architectural, feminist and social theory, this thesis establishes a spatial forensic of the dance and its practice at different scales overtime: the city, the streetscape, the building, the hall, the dance floor, the couple and the sensorial body. 

There is a distinction between the space experienced and understood by the leader, and the space experienced and understood by the follower (if in closed embrace and if the follower’s eyes are closed). The extent of one’s ‘spatial consciousness’, depends on the availability (and perhaps ability) of their ‘tools of communication’: the senses. These ‘tools’ can be split into categories, and within these, hierarchies of importance in the execution of tango. JJ Gibson regards the senses as 'aggressively seeking mechanisms, instead of being mere receivers'. Gibson categorises the senses into five sensory systems: the visual system, auditory system, the taste-smell system, the basic-orienting system, and the haptic system.’ (Pallasmaa, 1996, p29). In order of scale (from body to club interior), and separated by leader vs follower and the coresponding tools of communication.

The spatial distribution is constantly in a state of flux, some couples moving toward your space, some away from you, others rotating around in a hero or ocho. One cannot be sure that every couple will make their way around the floor at a constant pace, each part teasing in indirect movements around and back and forth but resultantly forward. Here it is useful to consider Ardener’s concept of ‘negative presence’, where ‘objects are affected by the place in space of other  objects; not only their presence... their absence, or ‘negative presence’, may be important’ (Ardener, 1999, p114). On the dance floor, the leader (when deciding where to direct the next steps) must have a consciousness of potential ‘negative presence’; seeking out the next momentary ‘absence’ of object. 

Some tango spaces officially require neither an economic transaction nor a spatial progression to a ‘hidden’ interior space, yet cultivate a sense of exclusivity through a change in materiality of the ground surface, an ambiguous monetary requirement and most of all through the unknown tango codigos which take rule in the space. You are at once welcomed by the music, and shunned by the unknown repercussions of stepping onto a surface unintended for you, into a realm bound by rules unknown to you. ‘The entry of a stranger may change a private area into a public one’ (Ardener, 1999, p113-114. The temporary outdoor Milongas of Parque Patricios could be considered ‘bounded’ through their ‘psuedo-private' status, where one might understand that to ask someone to dance, you must not approach with words.