tango, the comfort food of dance

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Argentine Tango, Comox Valley, Comox Valley Tango Practica, connection, Courtenay, Energy, Practica, Tango, Valley Tango

This is what happens when I watch Top Chef after tango practica….

For me tango is like comfort food served family-style.

Comfort food highlights all the ingredients in a simple, no-fuss kind of way with lots of love.  To have a really simple, delicious dish requires excellent technique.

Sure I like to eat at fancy restaurants every once in a while.  I might marvel at the presentation, amaze at the garnishes, and ooh at desert but I can’t eat it every night.  It would be too much, get too old too fast, and would feel too external for me to enjoy it.

Wrap me in comfort food served tango style any day.

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Falling in love with tango

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Argentine Tango, Comox Valley, connection, Energy, first dance, love, tango energy, tango junkie, Vancouver Island Tango

Falling in love.

What does falling in love have anything to do with tango?  Well, it has been described that learning tango is like falling in love and that to really learn tango you must first fall in love with it.

When someone begins he can be dazzled by things that are external; the things of tango are internal… A dancer arrives at the roots of tango when he falls in love…  ~Eduardo Arquimba

For some people tango is love at first sight, head-over-heels, married-in-Vegas kind of love .  For others it is a slow burn.  Maybe they are already dating another dance but wake up thinking of tango and need to be near it.

El tango te espera (tango waits for you).  ~Anibal Troilo

Tango is the kind of gal you take home to meet your mother.   It is a serious commitment not a passing fancy.

Tango is a culture, not a dance. Neither is tango a summer or weekend fashion. ~Jorge Dispari

Learning how to live life and be madly in love can be a challenge, especially to the real people in your life.  A balance must be found and everything needs to be put in perspective.  You have to be able to think for yourself and make good, solid choices rather than blindly following your new found love down any old road named ‘tango’.  It is not a competition about who is the most in love, nor is it a race.

I also think, in certain circles, that tango needs to be grouped into Things-you-don’t-discuss-with-relatives like sex, religion, and politics.  It can get rather heated if Tango-L is any indication.

Falling in love is blissful.

No matter at which stage of love you are with tango, I wish you a long and wonderous relationship.  I welcome you to share you love stories.

Tango community

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Argentine Tango, community, Energy, TED talks, Vancouver Island Tango

I watched this clip of Derek Sivers on TED about how a movement starts.  It is hilarious, truthful, and profound.

I thought of tango and how sometimes I feel like the fool dancing on the hill all by myself.  And how it only takes a few other brave folks joining me to keep the energy going.  “The first follower is actually an underestimated form of leadership in itself…It is the first follower who tranforms the lone nut into a leader.”

I like being at the beginning of something.  I think there is pure magic in it.  Yes, it is hard but the reward is in knowing that you helped shape something.  While doing so there may be big bumps in the road but the fun part is in the discovery.

My tango community is somewhere in the middle; not quite brand new but sustaining itself nicely.  Tango is like life or a relationship; some days are mundane while others are magical.  Without a few brave souls dancing by themselves and then the ‘followers’ joining in there would be no tango here, that is for sure.

Tango: A feeling that you dance?

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Argentine Tango, Comox Valley, Energy, Focus, Intention, Tango, Vancouver Island Tango

Tango:  A feeling that you dance.

That saying is all well and good but how on earth do you teach and learn ‘feeling’?

For me it comes down to being present in the moment, the millisecond, the breath.  Working with what you know, sticking to the fundamentals.  Focusing on your steps, your embrace, your inner thoughts, your energy until you feel a connection with your partner and/or the music.

What is your intention?  Let’s connect in the embrace, with our first step, and have intention with every step after, every pause, all the time.  Let’s have tone in our embrace, our baby toes, our ankles.  Wake up forgotten knees, hips, hands, shoulders, necks and be aware throughout the entire dance.

Great professional athletes, dancers, actors, musicians all have incredible focus.  They train for it. And because of this intense training they are able to perform to their utmost ability.  We as tango dancers need to harness a fraction of that focus to be present with our dancing, to experience connection.

It is a heck of a lot easier to teach fancy figure after fancy figure, step after step.  That would be fine if we were doing choreography for a show, but we aren’t.  We are trying to form and become great tango dancers within our tango community.  And in order to do that we need to somehow teach and learn how to dance with feeling.

How do you turn off your inner to-do list, find the moment, feel connected?  How is your teacher helping you get to that place in your tango journey?  Or how are you as a teacher teaching this to your students?