The Enduring Fascination: Tango and Chess
I just love pondering parallels between dance and other disciplines. Robert Grudin writes about this in The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation:
Inspiration often expresses itself as a sudden connection or closed circuit between ideas that had never before been so connected. The mind is open to inspiration to the extent that it is open to such continuities, whether between details (as with the combination of words in a fresh poetic metaphor) or between larger subject areas (as with some new combination of materials in a manufacturing process). By extension, the sense of continuity can extend to dynamic relationships between whole disciplines or ways of thinking. In The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler names this process bisociation – the dynamic interaction between two normally distinct frames of reference. According to Koestler, all creative thought, from humor to philosophy and science, is bisociational, and creativity derives from a feeling for the implicit continuity of ideas.
On a seemingly unrelated note, I recently revisited a video I first watched earlier this year of a very young girl dancing tango with her father. So precious. Actually, the original video of the performance they did was (sadly) removed from YouTube, but luckily I was able to find another video of them dancing at home that is also pretty sweet. Check it out:
Coming back to the original topic, last week’s much-discussed Wall Street Journal article quoted author Christine Denniston calling tango “a blend of sex and chess”, prompting a member of Dance Forums to ask what the heck that meant. It can of course mean many things, and the more you know about chess the more you will perceive the parallels (I will leave the topic of sex alone for now), but I recently came across a fun interview that may shed some light for those of you who don’t have a connection with the game.
I myself became a fan of chess a couple years ago, when I started playing weekly games with my father. I quickly became captivated by the game, which led me to read David Shenk’s awesome book, The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, or How 32 Carved Pieces on a Board Illuminated Our Understanding of War, Art, Science and the Human Brain. I read this book last year, but I recently came across an old interview with David Shenk in which he talked about the book and his thoughts on chess. The following two questions and answers stuck out to me in thinking about the parallels between chess and tango (or any other dance):
After all your research and thought on chess, can you take a stab at what you think is the enduring fascination of the game?
Sure. It’s a game that is simple enough that a five year old can learn to play, but complex enough that a 95 year-old can still be flummoxed even after spending his whole life studying it. The five year old can play the 95 year old and they can share an intimate human experience, even if they don’t know each other’s name and don’t speak the same language. It’s a game that can endlessly fascinate the human brain and also bring human beings together.
Any predictions on the future of chess?
It will last forever.
I have nothing to add to what David Shenk said, except to take you back to the video of the young girl dancing and to now point you to Practimilongero’s recent interview and demonstration tango dance with Alberto Dassieu, not quite 95 (he turns 75 this year) but close enough – along with the video of Sofía above – to show me that dance, like chess, has an “enduring fascination”, from age 5 to 95. Enjoy the video, then come back and answer the questions below!
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What about you? What is the enduring fascination of dance for you? Can you see yourself dancing at 95?
