Did I make use of them? Did I mention them even once? Of course I didn’t. Tango is not a dance to be watched, it is a dance to be felt.

Yes, it is good to picture what you are doing, but you must picture what is going on inside instead of trying to fit yourself into an image.

¹Great floor but absolutely no air movement.

That is the beauty of language and communication, you only need to recognise the words to understand the sentence. You don’t even need to know all the words, context will often reveal their meaning.

Besides if you knew what I was going to write next I don’t see the point in me writing it.

And yet there persists this idea that the quick fox jumps over the lazy dog for evermore. Maybe, just once, he doesn’t. Perhaps the dog gets tired of always being outwitted, does some exercise and finally catches the fox.

Tango is not a typing class or a recitation. Tango isn’t even a dance, it’s a language. It is life and living. It is molecules colliding at random that at each instance is unpredictable but over big numbers is describable.

BC: Ben what was it that captured your imagination initially and turned you into a scientist at school?
BM: What I really liked about science was the fact you didn’t need to know anything. You know I really liked the fact that in the arts there was all this stuff to remember, there were all these dates, there were all these quotations, there was all this incredibly time consuming stuff but that in science there was a kind of purity. You know which was if you were listening and you could understand the idea then you had something that you would then have forever. You didn’t ever then need to do any more work, laziness basically. You didn’t ever then need to do any more work because you kind of understood the fundamental of the theory and then the fun was then you could apply that in any different situation. You know once you understood the general principle then you just simply applied the boundary conditions in whatever different example it was and out would pop the answers. It just completely fascinated me that our brains worked like that. That once you understood a principle it was kind of job done, you know, move on, you could then apply it.

And you could also question the teacher and there was no authority in the room because once you understood the theory you could argue with the teacher and you could say ‘well surely, hang on, you know, if it’s based on an inverse square law then surely x… and how can that be right?’. And there was an equal authority in the room as well and I always quite enjoyed that as well.

As an engineer that makes perfect sense to me. It also makes perfect sense to me as a fencer. But most importantly, as this is a tango blog, it describes tango, and how I dance it, to a T. Why I have absolutely no interest in learning long complicated sequences. It shows why George Bernard Shaw was able to describe tango as “the only discoverable dance”. It explains Ricardo Vidort’s claim that people only needed eight classes with him to learn tango. Once you know the fundamentals the rest is opportunity and variation. And it implies that there are no tango-gods to hand down sequences to you inscribed on stone tablets. There is only you, your partner, the embrace, and the music.

This is quite a common reaction from tango initiates. Maintaining posture, keeping intention, the hold, the embrace… the list can go on. But far too often the last, overlooked, item on the list is actually enjoying dancing. Sometimes we adhere to our belief in technique far too much. Enjoy the music, enjoy the embrace, light up and fill the dance. Do what brings joy to the dance and avoid anything that subtracts joy (which happens to be technique by another name). It is the couple that delight in their dancing that inspire not those sourly plodding perfectly through technique.

Just remember to enjoy it.

Inspired by Tangri-La.

Left
Left
Left
Change the weight onto the left, left
Open left
Close left

In all seriousness the words right and left are not words that I’m able to work with. There is the weightbearing-leg and the free-leg. Attaching the identifiers right or left to these is nigh on impossible to me at times. Layer on top of this the sides of the embrace, the open-side and the closed-side, and you have the perfect dance for someone who has two left feet.

As every student of exploration knows, the prize goes not to the explorer who first sets foot upon the virgin soil but to the one who gets that foot home first. If it is still attached to his leg, this is a bonus.

Jingo- Terry Pratchett

One of the lessons I use in fencing has a strange quirk. It is a chain of exercies that moves up through multiple orders of feints. The quirk is that people don’t perfect the first stage until they have perfected the last stage. The quality of movement that is exposed by the last stage is exactly that required to perfect the first stage.

In a way you could describe it as wisdom. “…I’ve seen this room and I’ve walked this floor…” and this time I know what to say.  (Hindsight is all very well but it’s better when you can recognise what is coming down the tracks.)

I’m beginning to think that this applies to the dancing of Tango¹. That your basics may never be great until you delve deep into the mysteries of the embrace. That it’s not just enough to make the journey but to return as well. That each layer of tango that you unwrap applies not only to itself and those inside it but those that came before it. It indicates the potential folly of ‘becoming Advanced’ and leaving those things of beginners behind. That in the end you have to walk the miles.

¹Note capitalisation, I’m not writing about the dancing of tango.

When you extend your arms for the embrace face your palms upwards, only turning them when the embrace closes. This will keep your shoulders upright and relaxed giving you one less thing to worry about.

¹Depending on what material is being covered.

Is language the father of thought?¹

No it’s not. Language is with what we frame our thoughts. Our thoughts are not words but as they bubble up through our conscious we abstract them into words and language. Each age views the working of the mind in what it can see around it. From computer routines to clockwork mechanics there are umpteen ways of describing how the mind works.

Currently among cognitive psychologists there are two competing chicken and egg theories about which comes first: thought or movement.

The first states that the neural pathways organise themselves first and then move out through the body figuring how to move these new found limbs.

The second states that movement begins first; stimulating the sensory pathways and kicking the neural process into action. This essentially means that movement is the basis for all thought even though it gets abstracted out as our thoughts get more complex.

Personally I subscribe to the second theory. It explains why my thoughts ‘move’ and why I do my best thinking while walking. It may also be the reason for my inability to use the terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ immediately after performing a movement.

Think on this, or rather don’t, the next time you tango.

¹Obviously he’s not the first to raise the question but it was his essay that inspired this post and is the nearest reference I have to hand.