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 Vespers and Slaves.
    I once danced with a partner who was clearly well coordinated, more so than average.  She was a professional dancer, who reeled off a whole list of dances, of which tango was one, which she danced, performed and taught. Too many, I though - talent too thinly spread.  I wasn't surprised, because her following, although stylish, was automated. Now, in my experience you can't talk about tango in the same breath as all the other dances, even all the other Latin dances. There's something about tango which sets it apart.
    To my knowledge no other dance demands the connection between the dancers with quite the intensity with which tango demands it.  If you're not connected, technically, physically, psychologically, not much will happen.  Although we talk about followers and leaders - these terms are useful up to a point - we are ultimately talking about a negotiated, albeit improvised, collaboration on the floor, which starts at the moment of 'capucea', when a couple, strangers, relatives, passing acquaintances, make eye contact as an invitation to dance. Once that opening contract has been made the dancers acquire obligations towards, and privileges of, each other. To understand the nature of this contract it helps to remember that tango's origins lie in a culture of complete and utter destitution. In fact the defining principle of tango is that the person you embrace at that moment is all you have, and all you may ever have.
     Why should this be so? The orthodox record of tango extends back just about 100 years. However my personal feeling is that this century of history merely represents the reach of the earliest printed documentary evidence that we have, and that tango itself is demonstrably much older. More recent research places tango within the spectrum of Latin dances, by reference to musicology rather than documentation, giving tango much greater historical reasonance. What emerges is a picture of tango as a cultural attachment to slavery, and as a dance which made its way south from the Caribbean, from port to port along the Southern Atlantic Coast.  Tango marching bands were once well known along the coast, particularly in Montevideo, just across the River Plate estuary from Buenos Aires, which suggests a connection with the home of the marching band - New Orleans.
    In fact a diary has recently come to light written in 1786 by the then Spanish governor of  New Orleans, which includes the telling entry 'After Vespers the slaves are allowed to do tango.'  Whether the slaves' tango resembles our tango is debatable, but the connection is undeniable.  Tango, it would seem, arrived from West Africa, with slavery, and was reinvented to comply with Christian, allegedly, standards of conduct, in the New World.  So not only does tango connect us with the recent past. It also connects us with prehistory. Perhaps this explains the overwhelming sense of occasion which we experience when we connect with each other in tango, and why tango is a dance apart.  
'El Ingles'