Notes on this blog.

I discovered the problem of posts not appearing had to do with the browser cache. Clearing Firefox's cache allowed the posts to show up.

I'm in the process of transferring the posts from myblogsite over here. I find this site harder to navigate and the dates and times are off because of the delay of several days between first posting them at blogsite and then moving them here.

Still not sure which site I'll favor or if I'll find a site I like better.

To continue of just stop?

What if I just stop dancing tango? I’m thinking of it. Stopping the struggle. The suffering. Just letting it go. Problem is I want to go eat a pint of Hagen Das coffee ice cream to celebrate. Not good.

What if I keep going tango dancing? Well, I ride the roller coaster. Some nights I dance well and have some really good tangos and feel elated and think things are getting better, only to find the next week I don’t dance so well, the tangos I dance all suck and I’m turned down for dances like I’m no good and then I go home bummed. Then later I think about Cacho’s dancing or Alicia’s and decide I want to modify my dancing somewhat and try something new and I go back and something kinda works so that I want to pursue that and then the cycle starts over again. I really want to find something else to takes its place. Tango seems to me like a futile activity. Like a hamster spinning the wheel in its cage. Well, it is exercise and I need that, and it’s coordination and that is good. I’m tired of the social intricacy and buffeting. I wish I could avoid that all together.

I need a new interest. I maybe will just stay home and read Borges. But my destiny is not my choice. Choice is something else. I don’t know what conditions will arise or what my response will be. Right now I am frustrated and disappointed and resisting Hagan Das coffee ice cream. All I know is that this too will pass.

Tango as JABD

What I seek is communication of the embodied feeling in the music with my partner. That doesn’t happen very often. I grow sleepy dreaming of the elusive heart of tango.

I am still mulling the concept of translation that came to me when I was writing about Borges--the notion that the tango danced in the US is not Argentine tango in it’s native form but rather a translation of it and often not a very good translation of it. I think I’m on to something here. And the notion of how to translate the tango seems like something workable. I think the tango is often translated into a JABD (just another ballroom dance) because that is what is kinda sorta understood what dancing is here in North America. Perhaps it is a particularly difficult JABD but what is missing is the feeling for the music and the feeling in the embrace that is transmitted heart to heart. It’s a very real question how to translate that. It’s possible it can’t be translated. I just don’t know.

Is there a way to introduce new students to the heart and spirit of the music? And then introduce them to the feeling that can be transmitted in the embrace? Perhaps not.

Obscure Tango: Borges on tango

Obscure Tango: Borges on tango

" Musically, the tango ought not to be important; its only importance is that which we give to it. This reflection is correct, but perhaps applies to everything. For example, to our own personal death or to the woman who disdains us... The tango can be debated, and we have debates over it, but it still encloses, as does all that which is truthful, a secret." Jorge Luis Borges

http://www.tangonoticias.com/articles/articles2003/may03/may03_history.htm

Borges was not speaking of the dance in this passage in his essay “Historia del tango”. He was principally writing about the music though the passages about the brothels do hint at that other activity practiced there ... tango dancing.

My paperback copy of LABYRINTHS bears on the flyleaf the date Oct. 1968. When I was young I did that, signed and dated a book when I purchased it. I’m now glad I did as it fixes the month when I most likely first read Borges. I am more grateful to Argentina for Borges then for tango though I don’t know what esteem his countrymen hold for him. Borges is for the centuries. His art has duration that seems denied to dance, though I suppose film and video now give the possibilities for some dance performances to endure.

Dancers as well as musicians and those who listen to the music have an access to the secret tango encloses. I believe this secret has touched me from time to time and then withdrew. It is not something I have any concept of, nor words for. Borges art is using words to summon an understanding beyond the reach of language. I feel such awe and affection for him. He produced such marvels of the story teller’s art. Like Shakespeare he was a sage who used the arts to transmit transcendent truth in a medium of popular entertainment.

If it weren’t for verbs I might try to learn Spanish, but as I have been soundly defeated by Latin, French, and German verbs I have no reason to believe that I would be any match for Spanish verbs. I have no facility for languages. Oh, I could learn some new names and adjectives even though I’m gender challenged when it comes to words, but those squirmy, slithering, shape shifting verbs never fail to elude and shame me. I do from time to time read tango lyrics in translation, just as I read Borges in translation, and dance a translation of tango.

When Alicia Pons graciously danced two tangos with me I learned how badly tango has been translated here. The tango danced here is very low wattage, like a flashlight running on a single battery. Alicia’s tango was full of power, thousands of watts coursed through her heart and poured forth to me and left me stunned, blasted with visions of a tango danced in BsAs full of passionate energy and feeling. Tango that is a statement of the soul and not merely a statement of skill. I’ve even thought of visiting BsAs though I hate traveling, but tango is perhaps not my path to my soul. It may just be an adjunct activity. Like a character in a Borges story I wait to embrace my destiny.

Borges on tango

" Musically, the tango ought not to be important; its only importance is that which we give to it. This reflection is correct, but perhaps applies to everything. For example, to our own personal death or to the woman who disdains us... The tango can be debated, and we have debates over it, but it still encloses, as does all that which is truthful, a secret." Jorge Luis Borges

http://www.tangonoticias.com/articles/articles2003/may03/may03_history.htm

Borges was not speaking of the dance in this passage in his essay “Historia del tango”. He was principally writing about the music though the passages about the brothels do hint at that other activity practiced there ... tango dancing.

My paperback copy of LABYRINTHS bears on the flyleaf the date Oct. 1968. When I was young I did that, signed and dated a book when I purchased it. I’m now glad I did as it fixes the month when I most likely first read Borges. I am more grateful to Argentina for Borges then for tango though I don’t know what esteem his countrymen hold for him. Borges is for the centuries. His art has duration that seems denied to dance, though I suppose film and video now give the possibilities for some dance performances to endure.

Dancers as well as musicians and those who listen to the music have an access to the secret tango encloses. I believe this secret has touched me from time to time and then withdrew. It is not something I have any concept of, nor words for. Borges art is using words to summon an understanding beyond the reach of language. I feel such awe and affection for him. He produced such marvels of the story teller’s art. Like Shakespeare he was a sage who used the arts to transmit transcendent truth in a medium of popular entertainment.

If it weren’t for verbs I might try to learn Spanish, but as I have been soundly defeated by Latin, French, and German verbs I have no reason to believe that I would be any match for Spanish verbs. I have no facility for languages. Oh, I could learn some new names and adjectives even though I’m gender challenged when it comes to words, but those squirmy, slithering, shape shifting verbs never fail to elude and shame me. I do from time to time read tango lyrics in translation, just as I read Borges in translation, and dance a translation of tango.

When Alicia Pons graciously danced two tangos with me I learned how badly tango has been translated here. The tango danced here is very low wattage, like a flashlight running on a single battery. Alicia’s tango was full of power, thousands of watts coursed through her heart and poured forth to me and left me stunned, blasted with visions of a tango danced in BsAs full of passionate energy and feeling. Tango that is a statement of the soul and not merely a statement of skill. I’ve even thought of visiting BsAs though I hate traveling, but tango is perhaps not my path to my soul. It may just be an adjunct activity. Like a character in a Borges story I wait to embrace my destiny.

Tango, as unknowable as everything else

For the last few months I have been pursuing tango 4 days a week beginning with a noon class on Thursday, followed by evening practica, then milongas on Friday and Saturday, and finishing with a Sunday afternoon practica. But I feel weary of tango now and may end up not doing any tango this week at all.

The Indian nondual teachings put an emphasis on destiny. One function of that emphasis is to discourage consciousness from identifying with contents. One watches the unfolding of the causes and effects in life and can never know any but a tiny fraction of what those causes and effects are. Socrates also said something to the effect that the most profound knowing is to know that we don’t know. This observation can enable one to abide in being rather than struggle with doing so that one observes the doings as they take place rather than identify with them.

So here I take some notes on my tango destiny as I observe it unfolding. The taking notes is part of that doing and I don’t really know what any of it is, or is for. I’ll just accept it now as an infinitesimally tiny part of the vast play of the universe.

Pugliese's Desde El Alma

I don’t know if Pugliese recorded more than one version of this vals. The one I listen to is on the EMI CD Ausencia. It is my favorite vals. From the first slow questioning notes through to the passionate finale it is full of feeling. In a platonically perfect world to waltz to this music would be a crime and to dance this music a perfect fulfillment. How to make this distinction between doing a dance to music vs. dancing the music? Language works by referring to what we already know, what we’ve already experienced. I doubt it can convey a new experience. So either you know what I’m referring to because you’ve experienced the difference or you don’t.

I hate dancing. I am passionately a defender of music. Music has such range, subtly, depth. I believe dancers should acknowledge that music is the greater art. Dance should be an act of gratitude for music not a flaunting of large motor skills set to the accompaniment of music, otherwise we end up with something like the floor routines in gymnastics where the young girls do a little dance routine as they catch their breath and then running full tilt hurl their bodies into the air twisting and turning and attempting to stick their landing to receive a point evaluation on their tumbling. It can be breathtakingly beautiful but it is not dance that expresses the music.

With Desde El Alma it is not your dance skills that matter most. Not to me anyway. It is how much you are willing to feel. Pugliese in giving so much asks much of us. I’m told this is not such a problem in BsAs, but in the US many people don’t feel comfortable, publicly at least, feeling as much as Pugliese requires of them. This typical American cultural inhibition makes me cranky.

I’m not interested in dancing tango, or vals, or milonga. There are however tangos, valses, and milongas that when I hear them I want to dance that glorious music because of the feelings that they arouse in me. It is those feelings I want to share, not the dance. The dance is just a vehicle, a mode by which two people can share their feelings for the music. If for some reason I am partnered with a woman who doesn’t have rapport with the music and me then we sadly dance some stupid dance steps and the whole thing is an empty routine no matter how polished. If you can’t open your heart and let your feelings pour out when you hear Pugliese I can’t dance with you because opening your heart and letting your feelings pour out is what dancing is for me.

Feeling, music, dance

I’m beginning to suspect the mystery is prior to music/dance. I think it may lie in feeling and kinesthetic expression of feeling. I think it is time I reread this book

Author: Damasio, Antonio R.
Title: The feeling of what happens : body and emotion in the making of consciousness / Antonio R. Damasio. Edition: 1st ed. Publisher, Date: New York : Harcourt Brace, c1999. Description: xii, 386 p. : ill. ; 24 cm.

I’ve got these chunks and I’m trying to figure out a relationship so that I can then fill in the gaps. I might have first encountered this puzzle metaphor in this book

Author: Gendlin, Eugene T., 1926-
Title: Focusing / Eugene T. Gendlin. Edition: 2nd ed., new rev. instructions. Publisher, Date: New York : Bantam Books, 1981. Description: xii, 174 p. ; 18 cm.
Series: A Bantam new age book

I’ll start by naming a continuum: outer dance and inner dance. Outer dance is the dance we see when we watch a couple dance tango. Outer dance is the dance that we learn in class, the walk, ochos, giros, ganchos, etc. These techniques have a developed vocabulary. My confession is this. I’ve danced with dancers much better than myself who did all these things really well. I was miserable and bored. I admit the necessity of the outer dance but it is not sufficient for me. If the outer dance were all there was to tango I wouldn’t dance it.

The inner dance has a language of allusions, “tango moment”, “tango trance”, “tangasms”. (I’m not sure “allusion” is the best word here but then maybe it is.) I think the inner dance is much more closely related to the music and to feeling than is the outer dance. The inner dance is not separate from the outer dance it is rather a further refinement of it. It is the quality with which we do the steps and moves of the outer dance as well as other things. Are we listening to the music? Are we aware of our breath? Our partner’s breathing and heartbeat? Feeling our feet against the floor?

The outer dance allows us to dance kinda sorta with anyone else who shares our vocabulary. The inner dance discriminates strongly between those we have a rapport with and those we don’t. No rapport, no inner dance. The inner dance is why I bother to learn and dance the outer dance. The inner dance is the only reason I dance tango. My feeling that I don’t spend near as much time dancing the inner dance as I do dancing the outer dance is my motivation for this writing. My problem is I want a lot more inner dance than I’m getting. I don’t have the solution. More classes isn’t the solution to this problem. There are dancers far more advanced than I who won’t or can’t share the inner dance with me. I don’t have a solution. This writing is part of my search for a solution.

The Flow of feelings with the melody

I experience listening to music as a flow of feeling. This flow is a response to the melody. It is this flow of feeling expressing the melody that is the subject of my dance. All the technique I have, which admittedly doesn’t amount to much, is used for that expression.

I think of the stories of how much Artie Shaw scorned dancers saying and I paraphrase, “They’d dance to windshield wipers.” I’ve seen dancers with that attitude. All they care about is their cool moves, their steps, they just use the music as a fancy metronome but their dance is just all about what they can do. My sympathy is with Artie. I’ve been a music lover all my life. I listen to music just about every day. And for some years now end up moving or dancing to it. I can go a very long time without watching dance or dancing socially. Music is much more important to me than dance. I’m not that interested in dance really except in that it can serve in my appreciation of music. For this reason I feel a bit of an outsider amongst social dancers, a bit of an imposter, and from time to time grow weary of dance.

This subject of how the technique of dance serves emotional expression interests me and yet I find it hard to find language to discuss it. There are some words that I use for qualities that I find most important in dancing. I have a feeling for what these words mean but can’t really define them. The word “rapport” I use for the resonant exchange of expressive meanings. I’ve no idea of why I have rapport with some people. It’s a little easier to be concrete about the lack of rapport. There is also question of whether or not I have rapport with the music.

I am circling in on issues I hope to understand better trying to find key elements and their relationship to each other. I think I’m hoping if I see this more clearly I can find more of that which I seek in dancing. I know what I seek. It’s just I don’t find it as often as I want it. I am frustrated by the ratio of mundane dance activity to transcendent dance experiences.

There is a cost satisfaction ratio involved. Is the time, money, effort, and frustrations I put into social dance worth the moments I value? Particularly when I could get very close to the same satisfaction listening to music I love or dancing to it alone. Though it’s true that when I experience the sharing of the music in the dance in rapport with a partner there is something about that that is particularly wonderful. That experience can be addictive in a sense and can be a variable reinforcement conditioning dance-seeking behavior. Should I extinguish this behavior or reinforce it?

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.

Easing into my topic

I now wish I had been more methodical in my journaling, but then I’m not methodical now. I will guess it would have been late in the second year of dancing tango but that seems too soon so maybe it was during the third year that out of the blue the first of what I have come to call “transcendent” tangos occurred for me.

I don’t like the label “transcendent” but I like the term “trance” even less. I simply don’t have a name for it that I’m comfortable with. “Transcendent” seems pretentious but I’ve come to have a specific referent to what is transcended, that referent being what I now call the deliberate ego. I use the term “deliberate ego” to refer to what Tim Galway in his Inner Game books calls Self 1. That which transcends the deliberate ego is the total organism, the total brain including those functions that are unconscious.

That first experience was the epiphany that I have organized all my tango dancing around. My initial mistake was thinking that “oh, this is what tango dancing is. As soon as I get good enough this is what I will be dancing”. Wrong! Though it did get a tiny bit easier. It is a shared experience and absolutely depends on the rapport and participation of both partners.

I’ve little facility for dance and was fifty years old with a lifetime of stooped hunched posture when I started classes in 1997. As a child I would read books by the hour, a habit I gave up only of late as my eyes just can’t take it anymore and gave little thought to my body. I also listened to music for hours a day, a habit that continues to this moment. So I can’t learn to dance very elaborately and this remains a frustrating situation for me as I’m not without ambitions and wish I weren’t forced by my situation into humility. It is not a position I would adopt were it not forced on me by necessity.

But I’ve an odd facility for kinesthetic expression that is shared by only a few people I’ve danced with. This facility when met in a dance partner can result in a dance conversation of nuances of feeling that is extremely satisfying. I believe this may be the basis of the tango experience Daniel Trenner calls “trance”. I don’t like the term “trance”. Dictionary.com has these definitions.
trance
n.
1. A hypnotic, cataleptic, or ecstatic state.
2. Detachment from one's physical surroundings, as in contemplation or daydreaming.
3. A semiconscious state, as between sleeping and waking; a daze.
Ecstatic is the only word that I would apply to my experience. It is a state of heightened sensory awareness and I want to read Charlotte Selver on her approach to this subject.
I am intending to explore this topic in greater depth. For some months now I’ve wanted to see to what extent I could find words for these nonverbal experiences.

Brief Opening Statement

This is an experiment to see if blogging will be a useful activity for me to clarify my thinking about tango and communicating my ideas to others. My purpose is not to be controversial but I don’t see how I can escape it and I will try not to be inflammatory but I won’t suppress all my opinions that might conflict or offend dancers who have a different take or feelings or values in regard to tango.

I welcome comments yet this is my blog and if I think the content detracts from my purpose I reserve the right to delete or censor responses.

As this is an experiment I might discontinue it at anytime if I fail to find value in continuing. I make no promises.