Perhaps tango is the secret doorway into another world, beyond time... beyond age.

Tango may be the one dance where you will see a 26-year old dancing next to a 96-year old – especially in Argentina - and it is the 96-year old that may steal your attention on the dance floor – as the better dancer!

In a world where everything is boxed in, categorized and evaluated according to statistics, logistics and familiar standards, where there is not much room to bend or step outside of the solid parameters of what we experience as ‘real’, it is a breath of fresh air - perhaps the first breath of life, to experience the joy of a fluid, flowing, borderless sensation where you lose track of time because you are for the first time truly moving, truly living in the moment.

Your body, mind and soul all awake and align to this joyful experience that takes you beyond the usual confines of your life – almost without notice.  You come alive.  You wake up.  You experience life filling all parts of your being [the entire you]… and it is at this moment that you go beyond age, because it does not exist in this experience.

This is the world of the Argentine Tango.

In fact, the very roots of Argentine tango began in a world where people were looking to enter a world beyond the one they were living in – to go beyond their existence.  Displaced, poverty stricken European immigrants – many of who fled to avoid the devastation of war - found their new home in Argentina, where they sought a way to connect, to feel warmth, nourishment, to find their identity, to feed their soul – and it is in this dance called the tango that they found the fulfillment of this desire.

Their soul came alive, and this is where they found life.  It took them beyond the poverty, loneliness, and harsh living standards of the physical world they found themselves living in.

And so this eternal fire lives on, in and through the tango today, and anyone ready to experience it enters a world beyond the confines of their own – a world beyond the limitations, boundaries, and parameters of our ‘accepted’ reality - a world beyond what we know as possible. 

Carmencita Calderón, a dancer in Buenos Aires, continued to dance well into her old age. Here's a video of her rocking the tango on her 96th birthday.

José Gobello defined her as follows: "You are the girl without age / a dancer of highest rank, / you are eternal like the tango that drives you in its soft beat."

Sources:
http://www.todotango.com/english/creadores/ccalderon.asp - Article published in the Madrid magazine, GILDA, mujeres en el tango (Women in tango). December 2002