Resuming social dancing

For about two years I hardly did any social dancing. I thought I was finished with it. I thought the value of tango had been to motivate me to take body based classes like Feldenkrais Awareness in Movement, Authentic Movement, and Body Mind Centering and improve my alignment and coordination. I was pleased to dance to the music I was currently listening to. Rarely was that tango.

I’ve been back dancing for about 6 months now. I don’t know where I’m going with this or for how long. There is a momentum of sorts involved in this. I stopped dancing a few years back when the one partner who danced with me what I’m for want of a better word calling transcendent tangos moved. I discovered the few tangos a month I had danced with her had sustained all my other dance activity. Without those tango my momentum just ran down.

Cacho Dante actually coming to Eugene brought me out to his workshop even though I was having an episode of extreme back spasms. I took his first workshop with blue ice stuck down the back of my pants. The ice pack numbed my back and butt muscles enough that they wouldn’t spasm on me. Mostly I just watched Cacho. I think the revelation of his dance gave me an impetus to return to social dance.

At the end of my first year of tango, after 3 terms of classes, repeating tango 1 and spring term taking tango 2, I was in despair of ever learning the dance. We were learning open salon style and faced with challenges not only of learning sacadas but then of doing them in crossed and parallel in left and right turns. On a hot summer night at a ballroom dance a dancer returning from Daniel Trenner’s tango week in Montreal told me about close embrace milonguero style tango. And what she told me gave me the possibility of hope. A style of tango that didn’t use that many steps but the steps had to be well done and then danced very musically. I felt it would take me 10 years to learn to do one of the sacadas and then probably as long to master the rest of them. But if I could learn 10 different steps and find 10 different ways to do them I would have some variety to respond to the music. That was my idea. I began to use the web to find interviews, snippets of conversations with milongueros, anything I could find about tango.

Shortly after that I realized that I wasn’t listening to the music while I was dancing. I listened at the start and set a metronome in my head and then tried to do all the things that leading tango required. To dance musically it wasn’t enough to be on the beat, I had to be listening to the music the entire time. If I was sweating trying to do sacadas to the left and right in parallel and cross I couldn’t listen to the music. I went back to walking and simple turns, this still in open salon style, hardly any close embrace was being danced. Actually, I don’t think anyone was dancing close embrace at that time.

It was like meditating on the breath. I would notice I wasn’t listening to the music and return my attention to the music over and over again. It took a year or year and half before I reached the point where my mind listened to the music the entire dance. If I hadn’t become obsessed with tango I would never have done this. Only obsession could have gotten me through those horrible ego smashing miserable first years. I don’t think I’ll ever have an answer as to why I became obsessed with tango. I’m glad I did. The obsession did evaporate. At this point I would say I’m not obsessed but only somewhat preoccupied with tango.

I think one of the functions for me of this writing is to clarify to myself where I am going or want to go with dancing tango or if I even want to go on dancing tango.