Modern Tango World N° 8 (Moscow, Russia) | Page 38

Dance is not your connection to the music, either,. Al-
though your musicality is an important factor in creating
a dance. Whether you are able to translate the way you
hear the music into movement depends on many things,
but like the embrace, music is only one of the ingredi-
ents for the creation of a dance.
Dance is about your energy using your body to express
feelings and ideas that originate in how you hear the
music, associated with a specific movement vocabulary
and in connection to your partner’s movement. Every
creative act, from cooking to telling a story, needs ideas,
energy and ways of expression. In dance the way of ex-
pression is your body. Therefore dance is not something
you DO, it is something you must BECOME.
So, why is there so little dance in people dancing tango?
The specifics of tango is that it has two equally important
components: the need to move yourself and the need
to communicate with your partner (impulse exchange,
or leading/following). You can work on your own move-
ment, but for tango this is only half of the story. You need
to spend almost as much time learning to communicate
with your partner by very subtle, practically invisible
movements and intentions. You dance embracing each
other and even the slightest movement of your body is
felt clearly by your partner. The embrace in tango is an
extremely sensitive environment and can be a source of
huge discomfort or profound joy.
When the teachers do the small stuff the students copy
that, with the effect that they stiffle their desire to move
in order to be quiet. They cannot yet move freely AND
lead/follow subtly at the same time. By stifling the de-
sire to move they block their energy from flowing, with
tension as a result. The embrace becomes a rigidly fixed
shape. Add to this the necessity to navigate a space full of
other stressed-out couples and the picture is complete.
All over the dancefloors we see people stifling their
natural desire to move, trying to remain “fixed” in this
extremely sensitive environment of their jointed em-
brace. The desire to move is often also blocked by
personal difficulties. Shyness, fear of exposure, fear of
failure, fear of contact, inability to connect to the music
and therefore to get the ideas and feelings to express.
We also see the opposite: people letting their energy
run free, moving a lot inside the embrace, which does
create a sort of a dance, but the communication be-
tween partners amounts to two people shouting at
each other while standing only a foot apart.
Tango is a conversation and in order to have a conversa-
tion you need silence. To communicate by impulses with
another person you need to create a quiet space so that
the tiniest of intentions is transmitted. This is what makes
tango such an introvert and a fulfilling dance emotionally,
for we do not remember the steps, we remember the
quality of the connection. We remember sensations.
People who start learning tango are confronted with
the fact that they cannot just dance to the music. If they
do, they disconnect from the partner. Tango classes are
built on two levels, teaching people to communicate by
subtle movements and to move expressively themselves,
so that they can match the energy of the music. This is
what you see in highly skilled dancers: they look calm,
natural, often unmoving in the upper bodies, locked in
the embrace, yet as a whole they can create most ex-
treme dynamics and become infused with the music.
The teachers have the complex task of showing both
the dynamic side and the stillness of tango.
What does a beginner imitate? That which is most vis-
ible to the eye. When the teachers show very dynamic
dancing, the students naturally copy the big movements,
to the detriment of the connection in the couple.
In order to learn tango you have to do it wrong before
you can do it right, which means allowing your energy
to move no matter what. It does not necessarily mean
move A LOT, but sometimes this is what will inevitably
happen. When children or puppies learn a new skill they
start moving with a simple goal in mind and do it again
and again, moving too much or too little, falling over and
getting up, trying this way and that, until they get the right
reflexes activated and the movement is stripped of ev-
erything it does not need to be effective.
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