I started so I'll Finnish

12th March 2009

(Other reviews)

Date: Sat 7th March 2009

Location: Tampere, Finland

It takes snow to tango

It's a little after 12 noon on a bitterly cold day in the Finnish town of Tampere and in the middle of the main square, 20 couples are dancing the tango.

Odd? A little. But their dance floor is not wood, or even paving stones; it's snow. Six inches of the stuff.

This is the 5th World Snow Tango Championships, though it's about as 'world' as baseball's world series. The competitors are all local, and many are in fancy dress. It's pretty surreal.

They're dancing Finnish tango. Which is nothing like Argentine tango. One commentator once wrote that, 'Finnish tango is Argentine tango with a bucket of water thrown over it'. Today, make that snow.

The Finns generally take their tango very seriously, and although founder and head judge Asko Saari calls the snow tango - in Finnish, "Lumitango" - a light-hearted antidote to the country's many serious tango competitions, not everyone looks like they're having fun yet. Some of the male dancers are wearing expressions of quite scary intensity. One worryingly whey-faced man has his mouth open the whole time - for him it's like the dance of the nearly dead.

Another, a thin man in spectacles, comes on in a black top hat and black overcoat. He looks like an undertaker. Maybe he's come for nearly-dead guy. He takes off the coat to reveal long, sky blue tails. His partner wears a black hat with matching blue flower. They look rather striking. I worry that I find them eerily compelling.

Others look good: one attractive blonde woman keeps her eyes closed as she dances, which, given the uneven surface, shows a level of trust in her partner that I find very endearing. He smiles a lot and they do look like they're having fun. I like them, but what do I know. They reach the final but come ninth out of nine. That'd be last, then.

Parallel turns

I wouldn't say Tampere stops to tango, but there is a small crowd and a hot-dog stand (one euro, good value!) and a couple of live singers perform to suitably haunting backing tracks. There appear to be a couple of heats before the semi-final and final, but don't quote me, as the announcements are mostly in Finnish. In between rounds spectators duck under the rope and onto the dance floor - even we visitors, fresh from our lesson in Finnish Tango that morning. I quite like my partner, an attractive tanguera called Paivi, who I practiced with earlier. I try to impress her with a firm body lead and confident footwork. But the snow has piled up into lumps and hollows - it's the dance equivalent of skiing on moguls - and just keeping the rhythm without stumbling is a struggle.

I manage a couple of dips and leave the dance floor with new respect for the eventual winners, a couple I hadn't really noticed much, except for their matching black furry snowboots.


The Snowboots...

Summer lovin'

The winners get a week's all-inclusive holiday to Tangomarkkinat, the summer tango festival in a small one-norse town with the unpronounceable name of Seinajoki. (Really, when God invented Finnish he did so by throwing a set of scrabble tiles into the air and going with the words made when they landed.)

The Snow Tango is surreal enough, but Tangomarkkinat must be like crash-landing on planet Tango - 100,000 people descend on Seinajoki (usual pop: 30,000), and take it over for five days. I'm told they dance in the street, in bars, restaurants, shops, even the racetrack, in fact on virtually every square inch of ground space, apart from some sanctuaries which are officially designated tango-free zones... I imagine those to be like the pub scene from Shaun of the Dead. Inside, a few survivors huddle together for comfort, while outside, shuffling tango dancers roam the streets in slow-motion, looming at the windows, goaded on by the haunting, melancholic strains of Finnish tango music pouring from speakers mounted on every lamppost and every tree.

Why tango?

I was baffled when I first heard that the Finns' love affair with tango borders on an obsession. How could a Latin-inspired dance have travelled thousands of miles around the world from its birthplace in Buenos Aires and, in the 1940s and 50s, send down deep roots in a frozen land of snow and ice where it's cold and dark for half the year, and where you can't switch the sunlight off for the other half?

At an introduction at the Tampere tango school, Tanssiseura Hurmio, instructors Mika Niemela and Heidi Pohjola try to explain. 'In tango, there is something that goes into the Finnish heart,' says Mika. 'It somehow fits our mentality. There is much melancholy in Finland.' Heidi enlightens me further. 'Finnish men don't talk. They find in tango a way of expressing themselves.'


Mika and Heidi

Inarticulate and emotionally crippled by shyness, it seems the body language of Finnish tango enables them to at least get beyond hello.

Pity then, the Finnish man who can't dance. No FT, no comment.

Chatting to the locals it seems that many Finnish men dance, not so much to express themselves, as to meet women. If Argentine tango is a private conversation, then Finnish tango is a chat-up line.

The key word, says Mika, is melancholia. Finnish Tango is a distant relative of its playful and passionate Argentine cousin, literally and figuratively. Finnish tango music is mostly written in minor keys, its heart-rending lyrics yearn for home, for lost love, and speak of nature, sorrow and a hope of renewal. The quintessential Finnish tango is Satumma (Fairytale Land) a lament written in 1955 by the God of FT, Unto Mohonen. It's about an elusive paradise over the sea, attainable only in the mind. The dance itself is kept simple. In tune with the Finnish psyche, there are no embellishments or decorative footwork, no ochos or ganchos. The basic step is just slow, slow, quick, quick, repeated on an endless loop.

Groucho club

Our small group of visitors begin our lesson by walking around the room, slow, slow, quick, quick, slow, slow, quick, quick. Then we do it again, only lower. Finnish tango is danced the way Groucho Marx walked.

Satisfied that we can at least walk the walk, Mika and Heidi demonstrate the other fundamental difference between AT and FT. In FT there is no open embrace, only a close one, actually a very, very close one. In FT the couples are virtually stapled together from shoulder to knee. The stance is offset, so the leader's right leg goes between the follower's legs. This is a physically very intimate dance...

Mika's team of local dancers help us out, and I find myself clamped to the delightful Paivi. We're so close I think I can feel her heartbeat. While Mika counts out the rhythm we set off and mostly I lead it right, with pressure from the hip, and mostly managing to avoid her toes. Already I feel we're getting to know each other...

Next, Mika and Heidi show us how to dip - it starts like striking a pose in blues dancing. Mika rotates Heidi to his left and she leans out and down, lengthening her body but keeping herself balanced. Her head nearly touches the floor. Her blonde hair does. We all try it. No-one falls over. Result. We dance a bit more with new Finnish partners, until we more or less get the hang of it.

The rules

Our lesson over, we talk with our Finnish hosts and learn a little of the FT etiquette. Many Finns will travel up to 200km to dance pavilions in remote, beautiful areas, such as lakesides or forests. At a dance the girls sit or stand in one area, the guys another. The best women dancers will be at the front, and often they will group themselves by age, too. Wordlessly, a guy asks a girl to dance by holding out his hand; she mustn't refuse, unless she suspects he's drunk (a whiff of alcohol or vomit is a sure sign). Occasionally, there is an official 'women's hour' when the girls can ask the guys.

The enforced intimacy of the tango is very revealing and allows both sexes to silently check each other out. The guys tell us quietly that men use the first dance to gauge the press of the girl's body, see how close she'll come. When they ask her again, if she goes very close immediately, they know she's interested. Subtle stuff.

Very little alcohol is consumed by the best dancers. Beer breath is a real no-no, guys.

But the reek of melancholia is acceptable, it seems. Much later, around midnight, we are taken to the dance restaurant Hameensilta. There must be more than 100 people here, and the only ones under 40 are the waitresses. This must be where parents go to dance while their teenage children are getting wasted and listening to that other Finnish obsession, heavy metal; it's where the divorced and lonely go to find a mate.

The 19th century American poet and philosopher Henry David Thoreau wrote that 'most men lead lives of quiet desperation'. He must have been to a Finnish dance hall. Everywhere I look at Hameensilta I see sad faces, seemingly waiting for a chance to find, in the tango, a way to overcome their shyness, their innate reluctance to invade another's space, or have their own invaded

On the small, cramped dance floor couples slow-step their way through a succession of sad shuffles, bouncing gently off one another like padded pinballs. Our hosts oblige us with a couple of dances. I like my partners, they are kind, warm, attractive and accommodating, but the whole experience is too surreal to be satisfying.

Tampere's tango school has around 800 members and shares its premises with the town's Swing Team, which has another 600. The Swing Team holds classes in Finnish Jive. Not modern jive, Finnish Jive. The Finns also have their own version of foxtrot. They call it 'humpa'. A sign on the wall advertises classes in West Coast Swing. How long, I wonder, before the prefix Finnish appears. The dance version of comfort food.

- Roger Fulton, 12th March 2009

More information: Snow Tango site

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