Interesting, Women and Tango

               It is my belief that the women who get the most repeat dances are those who are interesting to their partners.

               You might ask, “How does a person become interesting?”

                You don’t.         

               Simply being a member of the human race makes you incredibly interesting. Unfortunately, all your life you’ve been taught to hide what makes you unique. You’ve been led to believe that you must project competence and sanity.

               There is no room for these lies within the tango embrace. No amount of preparation can equip you for what the leader is going to do next. This is an exercise in spontaneity.

               In the privacy of your own mind, you know full well that you have seriously questioned your own sanity, yet your experience has been that the crazy side of you is what people love most.

               The follower must enter the tango connection listening intently and completely exposed. In such a state, a woman’s emotions float on the surface like a scoop of ice cream in a tall glass of soda.

               Tango is a conversation conducted in a series of individual and distinctive steps. The dancers may appear fluid in their movements but each step is a negotiation. If I say something and the person to whom I am talking answers before I even have a chance to complete my sentence, I will lose interest in the discussion.

               The lady who worries about how she appears to others does not need to hear the end of the sentence; she will decide when it is time for her to move. She has no connection and the best part of her remains hidden from her partner.

               A woman who is concerned with where she is going will wait until she has gotten all the clues. She is so focused on reading her partner that she is completely unaware of what is happening to the rest of her: she flushes, sighs, gasps, becomes frustrated, angry, happy, all in the span of a song. She is like an open book, an incredibly interesting novel written by the universe. She is a movie and a play and an opera, all at once.

               A follower becomes interesting when she is a part of the conversation, listening to what her partner has to say and then responding in whatever manner she chooses.  She can make no mistakes for her imperfections are not distractions, they are assets; they are what makes her unique.

               This woman is a tanguera. She is a drug that men, once having tasted, cannot resist. Every woman can be her from Day One but few are. For some it is a journey of years, for others it is the impossible dream and for the rest, it is pure ecstasy.

              

For more of the Kayak Hombre, read my book Fear of Intimacy and the Tango Cure or River Tango. Available on Amazon.com in paperback or Kindle.

Climbing the Walls of Tango

                Understanding that people have invisible walls that must be broached before a tango connection can be established is an equation that is just as hard to solve as any mathematical formula.

               As a person who has many walls of his own, I know that the most difficult problem is acknowledging their existence.

               My biggest wall was my fear of arousal. I took it down by convincing myself that tango would never lead to any close encounters of the sexual kind. It was almost like a vow of celibacy.

               Some walls have to be torn down by the occupant behind the wall. Some walls have to be taken down by the intruder.

               I have to imagine that performance anxiety is the most common barrier encountered by partners in this dance. It can be surmounted by letting a person know that he/she can never make a mistake; that you are completely aware that this engagement is an attempt to choreograph movement to a song spontaneously and that turbulence is to be expected.

               It takes two to tango. If you want to dance, it is imperative that you let someone else into your space: physical, mental and emotional. You must leave your expectations for success and your fear of failure behind. In tango, there are no penalties or rewards; there is only the music and the next step.     

                

For more of the Kayak Hombre, read my book Fear of Intimacy and the Tango Cure or River Tango. Available on Amazon.com in paperback or Kindle.

               

Tango Blossoms in Viroqua

               There was no tango in Madison this weekend, so I decided to go to Minnesota to buy a canoe. On the way, I recalled a tanguera mentioning that there was a tango workshop and a milonga being held somewhere in the Wisconsin Hill Country, which is where I just happened to be.

               I went to http://www.madisontango.org/ and found the workshop was being held in a town called Viroqua. I made a detour and attended a terrific class on the fundamentals of tango taught by a pair of excellent teachers: Craig Rypstat and Catherine Young of http://tangohouseofmadison.com/.

               My arrival provided a perfect gender-balance to this group of twenty students. 

               Viroqua is a small town of seven thousand people located in southwestern Wisconsin. It is separated from the Mississippi River by a small mountain range twenty miles wide. It’s an incredibly beautiful area that is full of Native American landmarks and Norwegian-heritage gift shops.

               Going to different tango events is always a learning experience inside and outside of the classroom. I learned that here the hills aren’t called mountains, they are called bluffs; and the valleys in between are called coulees but they all looked like mountains and valleys to me.

               The class was conducted in a Masonic Lodge meeting room. After the lesson, there was a milonga at a nearby winery that provided vino, crackers and samples of Wisconsin cheeses that would make a Frenchman jealous.

               In the interaction between qualified tango instructors there is often a dynamic that provides a very important lesson. So it was here in every demonstration of the seemingly simple movements that we studied. 

                With each of Catherine’s rudimentary exhibitions, she sent a powerful message about the follower’s role in this endeavor. With her demeanor, she conveyed the intense concentration necessary to read Craig’s body language. 

                This is almost always lost on the beginners because they are so focused on learning patterns. I too was oblivious to it during my entire first year, yet it was the biggest hurdle I had to overcome before I could truly dance tango.

               The couple’s ability to listen to each other with total absorption is what gives this dance its legendary mystique. To the untrained eye, the exchange between two competent tango dancers can appear to be one of intense passion, often mistaken for anger or lust.

               Within their embrace, however, there is only the music and the next step; there is no room for anything else. The spontaneous choreography of a song by two persons while each maintains a separate balance is a demanding task.

               To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to find such an authentic tango experience this weekend but I did. I danced with women I had never met and connected with them through the music in a way that I found satisfying, recuperative and edifying. 

               I left there with the same feeling I have after a night of good tango dancing. I felt refreshed and my mind raced with memories of all the wonderful encounters I had on the dance floor.

               The seasons changed that day. Winter finally conceded to Spring amidst the bluffs and coulees of southwestern Wisconsin. The music played and the people danced as tango blossomed once more in a place where before there had been none.

              

For more of the Kayak Hombre, read my book Fear of Intimacy and the Tango Cure or River Tango. Available on Amazon.com in paperback or Kindle.