I Discover what it Really takes to Tango

In one's fantasy, one has a certain flair for the thing one wants to learn. And so I had high hopes when I set out last year to learn to tango, something I had wanted to do for years and that I now fully expected to transform my exercise-free self into a lithe, super-fit dancing sensation – preferable overnight.

I had accumulated a number of tango clichés – beautiful outstretched legs beneath swirling red dresses, killer shoes – and I gathered that I was not alone in my fantasy, Madonna, and so many more famous people had used tango to stand in for sexual freedom in their movies, and there is the insane popularity of Dancing with the Stars – it sometimes seems you cannot turn on the TV without seeing some sort of related show. How could one not be seduced by a dance that is both languid and ravenous of such sweetness and intimacy?

On the advice of a choreographer friend, I call a dancing center in downtown Bangkok, which has been training dancers for many years. This is probably the dance studio in Bangkok to offer classes in Argentine tango; it is taught by professional tango dancers.

I am reliably told the dance studio owner, who worked as a dancer and choreographer for many years, teaches basic tango best, and I start by taking private lessons, building up to three times a week, with her. Faced with a real live dancer, I realize that expecting her to teach me to tango in matter of months is bordering on the offensive: Would I ask the same of a ballerina? The dance-studio owner puts it beautifully – the tango, like a language, has a vocabulary, she says; what she will teach me is 'conversational tango', enough for me to get by at any tango dance party. As for my developing a dancer body, my teacher warns, I shouldn't expect to see immediate results, but me legs certainly will become stronger and my alignment will improve.

As soon as we begin, I am stunned by my own stiffness and by now unaware I am of what my body is doing. All the teacher is asks me to do is walk backward, yet every move I make is too big, too clumsy, too crooked. I begin to wonder what kind of idiot would try to learn something new in her mid-30s.

I am inspired, however, by something the teacher said. She told me that you could listen to the same piece of music hundreds of times and never dance to it the same way, which makes me see that although you can't pretend to tango - there is a proper vocabulary to it – it is a magically open-ended or, in the teachers phrase, 'unruly' dance. She mentions that one of their teachers, is a 'surprising' and 'witty' tanguero. I like the idea of wit being expressed this way and want to learn enough of the language to get the joke.

By my second lesson, things already feel better. I am still anxious and fail to keep in mind all the things that are supposed to be second nature – flexed knees, balance tipped toward the front of my foot, shoulders mirroring my partner's – but I have learned some steps that feel like tango steps: cruzadas and ochos forward and back. There is one called el dibujo which highlights the way in which all of these steps were originally devised, in the rough barrios outside Buenos Aires in the nineteenth century, for women in long skirts to make patterns in the dirt and be judged by the traces they left behind. A little more practice and I live the swiveling ochos, which make my feet feel like paintbrushes weeping across the floor.