TWELVE MINUTES OF LOVE – THE INTERVIEW
I’ve read as many tango books as the next person. None of them have really left a lasting impression though. Books about how tango ‘heals’(oh for God’s sake), books about the origins of tango (again? REALLY?), which go over and over the basic steps and turn the whole thing into rocket science. I’ve even stumbled upon a book or two about foreigners who fall in love with tango and give up their everyday lives to follow their tango dreams and become successful stage dancers.
Sound familiar? Probably. Inspiring? Not so much. I never felt I had anything in common with these people. Let’s be honest, I’m not about to give up my day job to uproot to Buenos Aires, no matter how much I may dream about it. And I’m sorry but I don’t need diagrams of feet all over my reading material – I come from the ‘Shut Up And Dance’ school of thought.
It was going to take a lot to get my nose back into a tango book of any kind.
It wasn’t until my tango friends from north of the border started making excited noises that I started taking notice of ‘Twelve Minutes of Love’, and its alluring author, Kapka Kassabova. Another dear friend gave a signed copy to a newlywed tango couple. The book and its author seemed to be popping up everywhere. It seemed that we had some mutual friends and this piqued my curiosity. I love my friends and they seemed to love her…perhaps finally I would find a tango story which would resonate with me?
TMOL doesn’t disappoint – neither does it show off. It’s an endearing, heartfelt account of one woman’s life with (and without) tango. You’ll come away genuinely liking Kassabova, and actually wishing you’d have been there for each other because let’s face it – who hasn’t needed a tango-shoulder to cry on once in a while?
And so, for all those who have experienced Twelve Minutes of Love, Kapka Kassabova tells us what we really want to know…..
In ‘Twelve Minutes of Love’ (‘TMOL’) you describe how you found tango by chance. Do you think that if it had indeed been a knitting club there that evening, tango would have eventually found you anyway?
Yes. You know what they say about tango – you don’t choose it, it chooses you. And anyway I would have lasted about ten minutes in a knitting class. I lasted about that long in a salsa class. In tango, I’ve lasted ten years and still counting.
What do you think a non-tango dancer would make of TMOL? Would it entice them to try tango?
I’ve had letters from readers who are inspired to take up tango. Others find the idea scary. A few people told me they signed up for classes after reading TMOL, but found it too daunting or emotionally fraught. In other words, the book acts like a mirror for each reader. And so does tango itself. Anyway, TMOL is not really about tango. It’s told through tango, but it’s about life in the 21st century – how to live it fully and passionately, how to love, the choices we make, the fantasies we follow, the price we pay for them, the knowledge we gain and the illusions we lose. Tango, as we all know, is a metaphor for life’s journey.
One of my favourite quotes from the book is ‘Gringos want flash’ – excellent! But do you think this is still true today?
Perhaps not as much ‘flash’ now, as tango travel to Buenos Aires has become very common and anyone with half a brain will find out very quickly that authentic tango is not about flash. But people will always want the fantasy of tango. The ‘flash’ of performance tango is one of the symptoms of that fantasy. Tango is about fantasy, even if you’ve been dancing socially for years and feel that you know everything about it. Social tango gives you a parallel reality. And in that reality, you have permission to imagine things about yourself and your life that are very seductive – and not always safe of course. That’s why it’s like a drug. That’s why we get hoooked on it. Because we can all feel like artists on the dance-floor, for an evening. Tango brings out of us both beauty and demons.
You chose to visit Buenos Aires relatively early in your tango ‘career’. With the benefit of hindsight, would you recommend doing this?
Yes – go as soon as you can, or you might spend two years doing stupid ganchos in some studio without knowing how to walk. Tango is an organic thing, it came out of suffering, not out of a textbook. In that sense, Buenos Aires milongas give us an insight not just into Argentine tango, but into the unique society that gave us tango, and the two are inseparable. One of the reasons why tango appeals to so many people is that it was born on the fault-line between the New World and the Old World. It was a wunderkind of cultural mutation. And there is no place like Buenos Aires where you can feel those tango vibrations.
Ok I’m desperate to know – what’s Clive James like to dance with??!!
Nice. But I’ve danced with him very little. Our friendship hasn’t revolved around dancing, but around literature and social observation.
What’s your favourite milonga anywhere in the world? And what makes it your favourite?
Niño Bien in Buenos Aires. There is always a good vibe there, a good mix of ages and faces. It’s traditional, but not antiquated.
Describe your favourite tango shoes.
A simple, cheap burgundy pair of sandals I bought in a nameless cobbler shop in San Telmo from two ancient cobblers who had to blow away the cobwebs. As I tried them on, they paid my feet the most touching compliment ever. I nearly hugged them.
Which tango track have you been humming most recently?
‘La melodia del corazon’ – because I like to play it around my man, who is not a dancer, thank god, but loves tango music. He says that it is precisely the liveliness and the major key moments in tango tunes like this one that make the sadness of it so heart-rending. [GREAT choice - this song moves me possibly more than any other – T.]
Do you still dance?
Once a dancer, always a dancer. But I dance incidentally now, not devotionally. Writing the book – which spans ten years of living – took the tango sting out of me. That, and a few other things which are in the book…
Which dancer/couple most inspire you?
The most graceful woman dancer for me is Mariana Montes. [one of my absolute favourites! – T.] Carlos Rivarola is pure class, he has a timeless quality. Horacio Godoy and Cecilia Garcia do what I call molecular tango. They dance with every fibre in their bodies, as one. My eyes water when I watch them.
Is there any particular place you wish you’d danced or hope to dance in the future?
I want to tango in Istanbul – because like Buenos Aires, it’s a city of great sensuality that straddles two worlds.
How does it feel knowing that potentially millions of tangeros all over the world are reading about some of the most vulnerable, poignant moments of your life?
Millions would be nice. But seriously: what’s the point of writing about tango, and about life’s quest, if you can’t be honest with yourself, and therefore with your readers? And anyway tango by definition makes us vulnerable, if we do it properly. Tango music is about the human condition, with all its paradoxes. And part of that – along with the beautiful fantasies and the narcissistic delusions – is to be vulnerable, open to blows, open to possibilities. It’s to be fully human. For me as a writer, anything less than that is false, a mere ‘exhibition’.
Do you think ‘less-emotional’ people have a more positive experience in tango?
Perhaps ‘less emotional’ people have an incomplete experience of tango. It means they’re not fully open to its exquisitely painful beauty. But even the most anal-retentive nerd and the most autistic perfectionist you’ll meet in tango will be touched by the music and the body contact. Even if they are fixated on steps. People are emotional in different ways, I think. Tango touches everyone who comes into contact with it, otherwise we wouldn’t hang around for years. We’d go and hang out with the ceroq crowd, grin like muppets and drink mojitos. Now that’s a ‘positive’ experience.
But yes, I went all the way with tango – it’s my temperament. I went to the edge and over it, briefly. I don’t do things by halves. But in the end, because I am first a writer and second a dancer, I could not transcend tango only by dancing it. I had to write about it. That has made my tango experience complete. Writing this book has made me understand the true nature of my tango-life quest.
And finally, what can we look forward to from Kapka Kassabova? Any more tango works in progress?
I don’t like to repeat myself in my writing, so the next book will have nothing to do with tango, just as my previous book was a mystery novel set in South America. You have to keep yourself fresh, or you become a bore. In tango and in life.
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See? I told you, you’d like her as much as I did. ‘Twelve Minutes of Love’ is published by Portobello Books and is now available in bookstores worldwide. Love this book. Love Tango. Love, Tanguera xxx
You can find out more about the book at the Twelve Minutes Of Love Website, watch the trailer which features some really good animation not to mention the lovely Laura Julia De Altube by clicking here, Or get your hands on a copy from amazon.
