What was tango for you when you made your first steps?
When you had your first good dance?
When you first entered the close embrace?
When you actually started hearing the music?
After your first milonga?
Even though these are some of the things we all go through and we could draw many parallels in how they felt to us, we still experience all of them in our own way. And, this is without counting the numerous other things: someone has never been to a festival while someone else visits at least one per month, there are people who have almost never danced tango to the traditional music and others who couldn’t stand anything else, you might dance with only one or two people for half a year, or perhaps with as many different people as possible…
So many differences, so many exciting things to explore, experiences to share. We are connected through tango, but you might as well say we’re connected through English – it’s a wonderful way to communicate, but we all carry our own interpretation of it and no two people feel it in the same way.
And then, when someone asks what you do, you say you dance tango, and you might as well have said that you ride dragons in the night, because you haven’t communicated almost anything to that person if they’re themselves don’t dance it.
On the other hand, they tell you that they do capoeira. Or they sculpt. Or they write. And when you know that you can’t share such a big part of you with the person you’re talking to, you realize that it goes both ways – you also can’t sense the world behind their words.
I recently chatted online with a friend who’s doing ballet. We rarely talk these days, and before when we hung out more, I didn’t really think anything about her dancing – to me, it was just something she did.
But now, we talked about our struggles with our ego, about getting to know our bodies, about expressing yourself through music, and, of course, about how people who don’t dance can’t understand us. So, even though we do dances which are quite different, we still had a lot to share.
That’s just one example, and I now find it fascinating to try and sense as much as possible the things other people do, to try to open up and understand their experience through all the ”languages” I speak – English, tango, activism and so on.
There’s another problem in there, though: we have a problem understanding what others do because we have a problem expressing what we ourselves do – we’re simply not taught anywhere how to do that.
So, we have to learn how to feel and think about what we do, and how we can communicate that with others. What are the best ways to do that?
Lessons from tango 