From Paragone to Symbiosis. Sensations of In-Betweenness in Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson

Abstract Sally Potter’s The Tango Lesson (1997), an homage to the Argentine tango, situated in-between autobiography and fiction, creates multiple passages between art and life, the corporeal and the spiritual, emotional involvement and professional detachment. The romance story of filmmaker Sally Potter and dancer Pablo Verón is also readable as an allegory of interart relations, a dialogue of the gaze and the image, a process evolving from paragone to symbiosis. Relying on the strategies of dancefilm elaborated by Erin Brannigan (2011), the paper examines the intermedial relationship between film and dance in their cine-choreographic entanglement. Across scenes overflowing with passion, the film’s haptic imagery is reinforced by the black-and-white photographic image and culminates in a tableau moment that foregrounds the manifold sensations of in-betweenness and feeling of “otherness” that the protagonists experience, caught in-between languages, cultures, and arts.1