I met her again.
I asked her to dance one more time.
She gave me a lesson I will never forget.
It was two days after our first dance.
We probably have about 45 years of difference, half a century almost.
It doesn’t matter.
Yes, some parts of her might not be moving as well as they used to.
I would definitely not try an enrosque.
But, again, it doesn’t matter.
When I danced with her, I simply wanted to create moments of shared meaning, of pure creation.
At least… that’s what I thought.
We danced the first two dances, a bit of walking, a couple of side steps, a few ochos and one media luna.
We had a quick discussion.
She spoke only Spanish, I speak broken Portuguese, so I understood most of it (I think).
And then, the third song started.
And I forgot why I was dancing with her.
I started moving faster, and did a couple of giros.
The steps taken where not the steps I was intending.
We lost connection.
And then, as simply as only a person who has lived for 7-8 decades can react, she started laughing.
-Dimitris… ohohoh… Dimitris, no puedo! ¡Por favor camina! Camina! Camina!
(-Dimitris, I can’t! Please walk! Walk! Walk!)
We burst into laughter (maybe a lit bit too much).
-Camina! Camina! she continued laughing.
Oh, that was a fun tanda (especially seeing the people around us laughing as well).
Yes, we might have destroyed a few people’s seriousness, around us, but people were laughing, so I think it was worth it.
The thing is, I didn’t realize the true meaning of what had just happened until three days later.
You see, in that period I was preparing the book TangoTips by the Maestros.
In there, more than 40 maestros from all over the world with more than 600 years of combined tango experience came together to share their tango advice in the form of small actionable advices.
So, I had plenty of calls with many great maestros.
That day, I was talking with Juan Stefanides.
I shared my experience with him.
What he told me, will stay with me forever:
When I dance, I just think that I want to be with that person.
To be open, to flow, to not try to “control” her too much.
This way, it is easier to see what her maestros have taught her.
I can notice easier where she is naturally going.
You know why this is important?
Because she needs to have trust that you will do what her body and experience accept.
She has given you her trust, she has given you everything.
You have asked her to give her permission, and let you assume responsibility.
Do you have any idea how much strength is needed to close your eyes and trust somebody else to lead?
Look at Geraldin Rojas.
You watch her and you think:
She has truly given herself.
And her dance is beautiful.
Exactly like that, followers deliver responsibility to you.
Now it is your responsibility.
If there is a mistake done, by her or by you, it is still your responsibility.
Laugh and apologize.
No, you are not apologizing to make her feel good.
That’s not the reason.
You are apologizing, because that mistake might make her decide that she wants to take that responsibility back.
And then the connection is lost.
When that old woman started laughing and telling you to simply walk, that’s not what she was truly saying.
What she was saying was the following:
“Hey! Give us the chance to meet again, give me the reason to give you back that responsibility. Let’s go again, and slowly meet each other one more time. Let’s try to surrender again.”
I felt goosebumps all over my hands.
That’s it!
When you dance to protect the trust, to give her the certainty that her decision to deliver responsibility is the right one, then the dance will be a shared experience.
To understand why this was so important for me, you need to know my life’s vision:
I work day and night to help people create more moments of personal transformation through tango.
I am trying to make tango empowering for tangueros and tangueras arount the world.
I wrote the book Tangofulness: Exploring connection, awareness, and meaning in tango, in order to help people experience more meaningful moments while dancing.
I am building the platform Tango for Good to empower projects that use tango for alternative therapy, palliative care, social inclusion, and trauma healing.
I took 6 months of my life to create the TangoTips by the Maestros book so that dancers can learn from it and find maestros they love.
And I write blog posts like this, to bring more humanity in our dance.
And here I was, having my moment of personal transformation.
Figuring out a deeper level of tango, a deeper level of purpose in my dance.
That was invaluable.
I wonder, how do you feel when it is time to deliver responsibility, or time to assume it, in tango? What’s your experience with taking that decision? Let me know in the comments below.
Hug, and let go,
Dimitris Bronowski
TangoArgentinoFestivals.com
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2) Buy the book Tango Tips by The Maestros. In its 250+ pages you can find the invaluable advice of more than 40 world class maestros for the price of one milonga. Check it here.
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In my humble opinion, I honestly think that to dance tango one simply has to be generous. To be in an embrace with no preconceived ideas of each other’s ability to dance.
To be in “The moment” is a shared responsibility for both leader and follower…
To be in each others embrace requires primal trust… be it dancing with an acquaintance or a stranger.
I liken it to a critically ill patient coming into the ER entrusting me with his/her life. There has to be faith and integrity on both parts. Only then there is fullfillment.
I can’t help but seeing in your comments how often tango is just a magnifying glass of what real life is about. Thank you for sharing Prasannah!
I dance as a follower in tango, and both as a follower and a leader in other dances.
And I couldn’t agree more. Like you said Dimitris, you should dance to protect the trust.
As a follower I have the desire to give myself, no steps, no thinking, no expecting, just letting go. So I look for a light, immersive lead.
As a leader, I’m beginning to learn the hard task of gaining that trust, of being somehow a cradle to my partner and just enjoy the joy I can give her.
*”we might have destroyed a few people’s seriousness” loved that!!
Hehe… Yes, it was a fun moment. Sometimes all we need is a good laugh, and sometimes this is what the couple next to us needs to do as well 🙂 (We did shut up after a while though, some people need this feeling of seriousness in their tango, and we all need to respect that).
I said in a previous comment that I dance to feel the love that comes with connecting with other people. However, sometimes this connection with a person gets confused with romance. I can tell, I feel it. But tango is about giving, not hoping to receive, and therefore, this becomes a lost connection. Similarly, I danced with a maestro yesterday. He could have picked out the best dancers in that room, yet he stayed until the last tanda, making sure he got to dance with everyone there. He gave his time freely, and we loved it.
Beautiful! These maestros need to be celebrated! Would you mind leaving a link to his facebook page or website in the comments?
His name was Igor Sitchuk and he was visiting from Prague. He was a lovely dancer.
Good you found out. Any good leader should have noticed the reserved posture of a follower at the start of the first song. She is protecting herself from a bad lead.
If you do it well, at a certain point in time, the follower starts to give trust to you. Often this feels like leaning in, grounding, even 3cm downwards. You have to earn that trust. It is not given for free (except from Russian women who must give trust immediately or the don’t get any dances any more… the instant trust, that is the Russian embrace). If you don’t dance good enough, it will never happen. I always love that moment I get fully trusted by the follower. Together with the do-not-want-to-release hug at the end, these are the signals where you really feel rewarded for you effort, to make something beautiful together.
I was at the Encuentro de Brujas and danced with a woman of 74 years old. She was very good, even to 50 years younger standards. She gave me that trust some seconds after we started dancing. It was one of the best dances of the last month. Would die for another chance of dancing with her. Getting the trust from a young girl, athletic, stable, etc, that’s easy. But to be honest: the older lady was that good, that it was her doing, to give that trust so easily. Love her for that…
Now you got me so curious Martin. I have limited experience dancing with Russian dancers. Is that “Instant trust” perspective on Russian embraces a common belief? Has it originated from something that you are aware of?
Unfortunately for the Russian women the ratio male leader to female follower is very bad, even up to 5:1 I heard. Only the top few dance. Top for the leaders, also means no-reserve, all in at the first second. Combine that with very hard ballet like training to stick out in competion with other women and the woman can do without the I-have-to-protect-myself posture.
I love that part that she is laughing… even you lost connection and she couldn`t follow up with you. Of course it was your fault… and I agree with all that people say about the responsibility and so on. But… you also make her to feel good. You, unconsciously, without any word, told her how much you loved that dance with her… how good you feel, that you really forgot about any rational responsibilities and let your emotions get out. Of course she had to stop you, but I`m sure she enjoyed this feeling for a few very precious moments. I`m sure people are most of the time overprotecting with her because of her age… and this is good. But sometimes we need a bit of something more …
This is so true Aliona. At home I have a happiness journal where me and my wife write down everyday what we liked more about the day. The journal has capacity for 5 years, so if you keep writing, a few years later you will be seeing exactly what you did one year ago, two years ago etc. This journal brings us a lot of happiness. Each page has also a phrase in it, something to read to put yourself in the right mindset. Yesterday it was written: “One of the great paradoxes of happiness is that we seek to control our lives, but the unfamiliar and the unexpected are important sources of happiness”. I think that fits perfectly with what you said. (P.S. for anyone that liked the idea of the journal: The Happiness Project Calendar )
I am not sure if my answer makes sense with your question, however I recently had a bit of a cultural and style shock. I’m Italian but I live and normally dance and practice tango in the UK. I had to go to Italy for 2 weeks and I looked for a dance school and a milonga locally in order to keep practicing.
After the class it was milonga time and I realised after a few tandas that this wasn’t working.
I am used to dance in the tango school I go to in the UK with a close embrace, instead at this milonga the leaders were using an open embrace and one of the following leaders directly asked me to use open embrace. It was evident that no matter who I was dancing with, that night I was struggling to dance.
I didn’t feel any connection, I didn’t feel the ” intention” that I usually look for when I dance, and by the end of it I was feeling like an absolute beginner, I lost confidence in myself and felt frustrated and insecure.
I probably had lost the trust not only in the leaders but also in myself.
It wasn’t a nice experience as I left the milonga in a pretty low mood and unhappy.
I think that experience showcases exactly what this blog post was about.
It always shows a lot of inexperience when a dancer requests verbally for a follower to dance in a certain way. This simply shows that the leader doesn’t have the technical capacity to adjust.
But your answer shows another point:
When a leader does a mistake, the mistake manifests 99% of the time on the follower’s body and movement. When a follower does a mistake, it manifests 99% of the time also on the follower’s body and movement. Aka 99% of the time all mistakes, no matter where they originated, tend to appear on the follower’s side. No wonder why so many women feel that they don’t dance well, even when they have nothing to do with it.
Whenever I hear someone giving me a verbal instruction during a milonga, I like to reverse the table and simply ask: “Why?”. If I hear something that makes sense, I try to incorporate it. But if I hear something that simply doesn’t make sense, I continue with “And how would that work exactly?”, and “What if instead…” and “But, wouldn’t this assumption mean that X, Y, Z?” This way you challenge their assumptions, and you might learn something, or you might realize that they simply have a different understanding. Of course this is the one way to do it. The other way, would be to simply respond: “I prefer close empbrace. I understand that this is not something that you can do or that you like doing, so let’s look both for a partner that enjoys the same thing as each one of us.” And then you hug, and let go.
Thank you for your nice advise Dimitris.
I didn’t need to challenge his reply as he also told me that in that school they are taught only to dance with an open embrace, hence why I struggled to dance with everyone that need. Also the ones I danced before him, too polite to ask me to open the embrace, were struggling to dance with me and I was struggling with them.
Hopefully I will regain my confidence when I’ll go back to what I’m used to.
I wonder if this was the famous “dark place” that I once read tango can take you too?
I probably have still lots to learn..
“I wonder if this was the famous “dark place” that I once read tango can take you too?”
Maybe 🙂 And if it is, then the best advice I have heard (which beautifully fits with tango in so many ways) is: If you feel you are in hell, the last thing you want to do is to stop walking 🙂 Dark places are the places where we grow, and are able to challenge and understand how our own expectations define our reality. After all, the mental construction of our daily activities, more than the activity itself, defines our reality. Hug
There are several techniques of dancing tango, and if somebody use to dance only one of them and meet a partner who dance only other technique – no connection can happen. Dance will be at beginner`s level. Something like this happened to me about a year ago. I never dance “milonguero” style. And at one molonga we invited an argentinian DJ who played wonderful music and danced so nice. I was watching his dance and wish to dance a tanda with him. And at some moment the miracle happened, he invited me and…I felt like a beginner. There was very close embrace and it supposed to facilitate the intention transmission but I never used to dance this style so I lost the most of his… very smooth and subtle marks. Of course he was an absolutely amazing leader, saved the situation, start to use only that movement that I got and me also, tried to make as much silence in my had I could and avoid to panic… I`m sure it was mostly on our connection level and problems were barely noticed form outside..but..I felt that tanda wasn`t what we both expected. So… after this milonga I was looking for a few workshops with teachers who teach milonguero stile. I understood that the more information about different styles of dancing we have the better we can adapt to different leaders and finally have more wonderful tandas. I like to dance close embrace , but I had absolutely amazing tandas with some leaders who dance open embrace and I would never want to lose some wonderful experience just because I dance in just one way of dancing. I don`t know what happened in that Italian school..maybe it was something wrong in their teaching..but if there is only the open embrace style they are teaching..I would try to use the time and learn something new . This will only enrich our experience as dancers.
Very nice the idea about the journal!
I’m at a marathon and took a break to read this just now – a friend had posted it on FB. I then shared it with several other followers at the event I’m at right now… We are all sending you waves of gratitude.
Thank you:-) you just made my night! For the rest of the night, check this https://tangoargentinofestivals.com/postshare/what-if-tango-was-like-that/. 🙂 and if you could share it on your walls I would be grateful (tag me to know who you are 🙂 )