improving through opposites

They say that growth lies in the path of your fear, and one of the things you fear are those you’re not used to. So, trying the do the opposite of what you usually do, whether in tango or in life, practically guarantees that you can learn and grow from it.

I remember when one student from our school approached me during a practica and asked me to give him some general advice on what he should work on in his dance. I observed him dance a bit and the thing I noticed is that his steps were mostly short, quick and rhythmic.  While this is quite useful in the ronda, it is very difficult to be present and musical when you’re dancing in one narrow way.

So, I suggested that he should try expressing himself through the melody rather than rhythm, all the while making only long, slow steps. He did so, and because he’s very focused and diligent in his practice, his dance got a lot richer already by the next milonga.

However, his case was easier to spot because it was clearly on one “extreme” end of a scale, so to speak. What do you do when you’re not really sure what you’re working on and thus what the opposite of that is?

Perhaps the solution could be to try both “extremes”, and see what experience each of them will bring. In some cases, just thinking about behaving in a certain way can trigger a defensive, rationalizing mechanism – “No way, I’ve never behaved like that, it’s not me” – which is a clear sign that you’re on the right way to determining your opposite.

Furthermore, as you get to know the opposite of a certain thing, you learn to understand more deeply what you already knew, as now it’s being put into a broader perspective, compared and combined with the new experiences.

This is just a quick glimpse into one of the ways of improving. Robert Greene wrote an excellent post which I read a long time ago, but didn’t get it half as much as I do now. Tomorrow I hope to go through it in detail and write a bit more about this line of thought and what it could bring.

to be continued

School of activism

As I said, I want to try and apply how we learn tango to activism. This was the initial outline:

There will be at least one class per week, preferably two. In these classes we will look at activism as an activity which includes various skills that one can and should continuously practice. We will explore leadership, teamwork, project planning and so on as skills, and we will use the projects of all the participants as examples, instead of relying on theoretical scenarios. Thus, everything learnt will be applied in the work they do every day and discussed in the next class.

While this sounded like a good outline to me, I actually didn’t really think through the teaching part in detail: I conducted it as an open discussion with my questions as guiding points, and the students would discover the answers themselves. From the feedback I got it went really well – but experience has taught me that what a person think he or she has learned is one thing, while actually applying it in real life is another thing entirely.

This just goes to show that I’ve gotten rusty with my own organizational skills. The last workshop I personally designed and conducted was almost a year ago, and without the constant practice, I did the best I could at the time, but now I realized how far away that is from what I’m capable of. It’s like the feeling of forgetting a language you haven’t used in a while – it’s something we find hard to imagine happening, like it will always be with us just because it’s a mental skill, but that’s just not the case.

So, it’s time to do some mental practice and design this whole thing at the highest level I’m capable of. All of a sudden I’m not half as sure what it will look like, the way I was sure a week ago, but something is telling me it will look a lot more like a school of tango than I expected. We’ll see.

to be continued

 

 

 

“I don’t see you as a tango dancer”, pt. 3

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?

“I don’t see you as a tango dancer” pt. 2

While others couldn’t see me dancing tango, for the first few months in some ways I couldn’t either.

My reasons weren’t of the “you’re not the type to dance tango” sort. Due to some lucky circumstances and a bit of my own thinking and initiative, I went into tango with perhaps just the right frame of mind:

First of all, I didn’t have the slightest idea of what tango really is. I knew I wanted to learn some form of dance, and argentine tango seemed to have depth due to being improvised. I suspected that the rose-in-teeth were stereotypes, but on the other hand, I had no other impression of tango.

When I observed our school’s class for the first time, I saw that there was something special in this dance, but observing and doing are worlds apart. Then, the next day I attended my first class, and when my teacher showed me what it felt like to be led, I was shocked at how powerful the sensation of two bodies moving in unison was. From that moment I was completely hooked.

But while I was so excited about tango, I still couldn’t really say what it was – calling it a dance wasn’t anywhere near conveying the whole of it, and when I started to realize how much deeper it was than I suspected, other things became apparent too:

First, as I went through one of the usual symptoms of beginner tango junkies of trying to share my enthusiasm about tango with others, I became aware that even after a mere few weeks of classes, I had no idea how to really communicate what I was feeling. There were simply no words and concepts to explain what it’s like to create movement out of the moment, to be led, to be in an embrace with so many different people….So, you just grin and you say tango is something amazing, but you know that the only way to share what you’re feeling is to drag that person to your class.

But then you realize that you can’t really “explain” tango to yourself either:  you’re learning something new, building in yourself this whole world of sensations, ideas, concepts, thoughts, challenges and so much more, something that did not exist within you before and is always changing and growing.

What’s funny to me now is my entire train of thought: while I liked dancing, I never thought of myself as a “dancer “, as someone who would grow and express himself through dance (though, as I said in the beginning, I wasn’t set against it either) – and yet, while I took up tango because I wanted to learn how to dance, from the moment I started doing it I didn’t see it as a dance, but as, well… tango.

I don’t know if what I’m saying makes sense, but I distinctly remember a moment at one milonga when during a dance I thought “Whoa, all these months I’ve been actually dancing!” Then the next one was “Yes, you are, now stop thinking and respect your partner”.

The reason I’ve been thinking so much about this is because I’ve been trying to get a deeper understanding of how we think about the things we and others do – what it means to be a dancer, a martial artist, a musician and so on. I think there are incredibly important lessons to be learnt there, and so far I think we’re really, really not equipped to think about these things properly.

to be continued