Social
The broken pebble jar
Tango is all about trust. We all know it. We open our embraces and let strangers in, expecting that they will not harm us physically or emotionally. This requires a great deal of trust. And the more we dance, the more we learn to trust… or distrust some partners.
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Old and new shadows
In this post, I want to discuss… Shadows. Not the ones created by light hitting an object, but the ones we keep inside us. But before we go there, let’s start with a short quiz: What if a person is aggressive? Would you say aggressiveness is a good or a bad trait? Think about it…
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Causation, Correlation, and the Dance Between Them
In the first part of this little rabbit hole, we looked at how Tango has (thankfully) moved on from the days when your gender automatically decided your role. Back then, it was simple: man = leader, woman = follower. No questions asked. Today, that rulebook is gone, and we get to choose. And yet… the…
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Self exploration
Leaving home
I still remember the feeling of leaving my parents’ house and living alone at 18. Do you? I had spent time away from my parents before, but in most of those cases, I wasn’t truly on my own. There were always other people around in case I needed help. Living alone for the first time…
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Frodo, Sam and the power of Tango
In the last post, I described how the Ring from The Lord of the Rings can symbolise Tango’s power and how it amplifies what’s already inside us. I used the relationship between Gollum and the Ring to show how Tango (The Ring) can twist us when we dance to escape ourselves (like Gollum used the…
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The Ring, the Gollum and… your Tango!
You’ve probably seen the “My Taaaango” T-shirts with Gollum clutching the Ring like it’s the most precious thing in the world. Did you find it funny? I hope so. But have you ever wondered what message it hides about how Tango, like the Ring in The Lord of the Rings, can take over your identity…
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Musicality
Precision, recall and musicality
Frequently, in discussions with friends, they tell me that they like such and such dancers because they find them very musical. When I ask for more details on why they think so, they have a very hard time explaining what exactly it is that they do. The answer is usually quite vague… Something like… They…
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Struggling with… noise
We had a very interesting conversation last week in the newly founded group about what is musicality. If you haven’t yet joined, do so! I saw so many different responses but amongst them, there was almost always a common pattern. Most people agreed that at some level, musicality means being able to understand the different…
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Do it like kids
I visited a friend’s house the other day. They have two adorable kids and we were playing with them all the time. It is impressive how a couple of game hours with kids can totally change your mood. For better or for worse. I mean you leave the house full of smiles or with a…
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Connection
Connection
This… the ability to sense your partner’s body within your chest, your core, your own body and eventually feel it as if it is part of your own body, is maybe the answer to the incompleteness of the previous post which satisfies our deep need for connection.
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Flawed
We are all flawed, incomplete peripherals, and the irony of the dance is exactly that. You need two to dance it but you will never experience it in its entirety. You can never understand the dance in its entirety.
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Incomplete
If you ever really grasp this… you can understand that there is no leading and following in Tango. There was never such a thing… not even from its beginning. There is only cooperation… partnership… like in a family… in a couple… from the age of cavemen till today… where the man hunted and the woman…
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Language
Story telling
Is it really your own story?
Then whose story is this in the end? Is it the story you had in mind to tell in the beginning? Is it the story your partner wanted to listen to? Is it the story they wanted to tell you?
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How do you tell a story?
What can we learn from TTS software, ebook reading apps, and so many other communication experiences? If the voice has its tools to communicate emotions what are the equivalent tools in our dance?
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What story are you telling?
“I now understand how important it is to listen to a lot of music.” A good friend (follower) told me recently. She explained that when she knows the song she feels more confident and natural for her to also contribute to the dance.
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