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I learned the art of the cabeceo, a k a “the eye game,” three years ago at my first milonga, a place where tango is danced, in Buenos Aires. The lights were dim and the room packed. OK, I thought, so how is this going to work? Five minutes later, I figured it out.

I stopped staring at the glass of agua sin gas in front of me and, instead, sat at the edge of my chair and looked around the room. No quick, shy peeks, but a slow, confident sweep of the room. Everyone was doing it! I had to be alert to a glance, a smile, a raised eyebrow, a nod. Instead of walking up to a woman’s table to ask for a dance, men were trying to catch a woman’s eye—from as far away as 50 feet—because the cabeceo minimizes the embarrassment if she turns him down. Women were using it to signal interest and to accept a dance because it’s the procedure a porteño, an inhabitant of Buenos Aires, expects. The challenge, though, is knowing for sure if I am the chosen one.

It took a couple of visits to the dance floor, with long walks back alone to my seat, before I realized that patience is the key to the game. I had to remain in my seat after my response and allow my potential partner to reach the dance floor. Once he got there, and if he was still giving me the eye when the other dancers started to couple up, then chances were high that it really was me he had signaled and not the lady poised at the table behind me.

I found tango everywhere in Buenos Aires. Milongas start at 3 p.m. and stretch until dawn. Some are housed in cafes and charming halls with crystal chandeliers dangling from ornate ceilings, others at abandoned churches or basketball courts strung with neon lights. Tango music plays in subway stations and taxicabs. Porteños show off their boleos, tango kicks, at tourist sites. Magazines and flyers tout classes and milongas. Tango shops, with tango shoes that offer more support in the arch and sole than street shoes, line Avenida Suipacha in the city center.

Salon Canning, 11:49 p.m. We meet on the dance floor. The handsome stranger and I are surrounded by people from their 20s to their 60s. He smiles and takes my hand. I drape my left arm across his shoulder. Our torsos find each other.

The embrace. I had a preview of both types of abrazo—the close embrace (chest to chest) and the open embrace (arm’s length)—at my first Argentine tango class in the summer of 2004. In the open embrace, dancers can get fancier and take bigger steps. In the close embrace, steps are smaller and turns tighter, sweeter. The goal of the abrazo, the teacher said, is to secure a connection so that two bodies move in harmony.

I found the close embrace the most difficult part about learning to tango. My teacher, a transplant from Buenos Aires, constantly had to remind me to trust my partner, the leader, so that our movements would synchronize, that we could become the tango ideal: two heads, one body, and four legs. But, to me, trust meant arresting all thought and surrendering my body, many times to leaders I had just met. I prided myself in being self-sufficient and super independent. I wasn’t about to blindly become someone’s puppet.

According to lore, prostitutes were among the first to dance the tango in Buenos Aires. They danced the tango in the 1800s with lonely immigrant men who had come to the port city in search of greener pastures. They danced it with their pimps to woo the best customers in the bars. Many of the social elite shunned it because of its indecent origins in the barrios. The Catholic Church frowned upon it, too, accusing its salacious form as having been influenced by the devil.
Tango enjoyed a golden age throughout the 1920s and ’40s. Tango orchestras were hired a year in advance. Then came the period of Argentina’s Dirty War, when as many as 30,000 people “disappeared” for speaking out against the military dictatorship. Tango went underground between 1955 and 1983, with the curfews and bans on public gatherings. Outside the country, the dance receded in the era of jazz, pop, and rock ’n’ roll.

Tango’s revival came when democracy returned to Argentina and Broadway shows such as Tango Argentino and Forever Tango renewed interest abroad. Today, Argentine children learn tango in grammar school.

Salon Canning, 11:50 p.m. Step, step, step, pause, shift weight, step. We’re traveling counterclockwise down the line of dance. My eyes are closed, but I see all the places he is inviting me to go. I feel it in his body, from his center. He puts me into a cruzada, one foot crossed behind the other.

Argentine tango differs from ballroom tango, a later derivative. It’s not the rose-in-the-teeth dance that most people are familiar with. Argentine tango is unforced. It is visceral. Watching two people dance the Argentine tango is to become privy to an intimate dialogue.

At the milongas I visited in Buenos Aires, tangos were danced in tandas, sets of three or four songs, followed by a cortina, a short musical break to clear the dance floor and facilitate partner changes. (One typically shouldn’t dance more than two tandas with a stranger or rumors might sprout. And dancers may prematurely end a tanda after the first or second song with a polite gracias if either partner is not enjoying the dance.) Many tango songs, I was told, reflect lost love, a country at war, or urban themes and characters: the immigrant trapped in poverty, the ambitious but poor girl who chose prostitution.

I hardly heard the music, let alone the rich lyrics, in my early years of tango. I was too distracted by the floor (I couldn’t stop looking at it because I didn’t know where to put my feet) and with wanting to memorize patterns (when there were really none). My body felt foreign, my balance was awful, and my posture disgraceful.

“If you can walk, you can tango” is a saying among Argentine tango dancers. In those weekly tango classes, I walked endlessly forward and backward, this way and that. I picked up basic tango forms, such as the ocho, or figure eight; the giro, turn; and the barrida, sweep, which dancers could string together in an infinite number of ways.

Day after day, in my living room, I practiced again and again. There was so much I craved to perfect. Eyes forward. Shoulders back. Stomach in. Tailbone down. Knees soft. Feet together.
Twice I almost quit.

Salon Canning, 11:51 p.m. We dance, and we dance, and we dance. I hear the plinking of a piano, the wail of the bandoneón, and the surge of violins. My partner gives, I take. He demands, I yield. The music crescendos and then stops. We stop, breathless and elated.

Last fall, after leaving a private tango lesson disgruntled and in tears, it dawned on me that I had started to view learning tango as a chore. Tango began as a curiosity because Ranja, one of my best friends, danced it. But I was smiling less and snapping more during lessons and becoming increasingly self-critical at milongas.

I called my tango teacher the next day to apologize, and we talked for nearly an hour. When I hung up, I decided it was time to stop striving for tango excellence. I gave myself permission to relax. If my 36-year-old body didn’t get something right away, no big deal. I thought about the spiritual side of tango, how the dance is internal, how it’s about looking inside and paying close attention to what my body does and about reading the nuances of my leader’s body.

Juan Carlos Copes, a choreographer and tango dancer, once said, “The tango is man and woman in search of each other. It is the search for an embrace, a way to be together.” A tango encounter is similar to that of a romantic encounter, in that both are like chemical reactions. Each coupling is different according to the individuals involved. And it’s hard to hide who you are. If you’re playful, it will come out. If you’re serious or you’re sad, your partner will know it.

The tango has become for me like a good book or a great movie. It can quiet the random chatter in my mind and transport me to another place. A place where office work disappears and bills and laundry don’t exist.

Salon Canning, 11:52 p.m. I feel my heartbeat and my partner’s. When he releases me, I once again notice the other couples on the dance floor. “Hablás Español?” he asks, wiping his brow with his finger. “Un poco, a little,” I reply, fixing my hair. “You dance from your heart,” he says. Another Di Sarli tango begins. Slowly, I return to his embrace. 

Here are two favorite tango videos from Pauline Oo.
Geraldine Rojas and her former partner Javier Rodriguez are from Argentina. This is a milonga (faster tango music); watch the precision of her feet--that's why she's a star:

Yes, "milonga" also means a type of tango music or dance and a place to dance tango.

And this has one of my favorite songs to dance to (Poema):

And finally, here is Pauline herself:

Pauline Oo, a writer and an editor in the Office of University Relations, is a tango teaching assistant and a board member of the Tango Society of Minnesota.