The Pleasure and the Pain of Tango

               Inquisition is a natural phenomenon.  So is our reaction to it in other people, we are naturally inclined to provide an answer or at least join in the search.  This is an act of compassion. 

               People inquire because there is something missing in their life and its absence causes them discomfort. We find pleasure in helping to ease someone’s pain, even if the act is unpleasant.

               “Why?” is the cry heard most often after a senseless tragedy.

               I once came upon an elderly man having a heart attack. His wife was hysterical. She needed to touch someone and she needed to be held. My mother and my sister were with me and they consoled her with hugs and soft words while I performed CPR.

               There is a primal voice speaking in the Universe. Sometimes it whispers and sometimes it roars. It is both the pain of a question and the pleasure gained from the appropriate response to it. It is the agony of birth and the joy of watching a life grow.

               Tango is a nation’s response to its birthing pain. It is the mechanism through which Argentinians found comfort as their country emerged as a world power in just fifty years. It is the salve that kept them sane through fifty more years of right-wing repression.

               We come to tango hurting. We don’t know why we come but we soon find the answer in the arms of another who is willing to help us find the answer to what we do not know.

              
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.

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.

               

Women and the Tango Question

               

               Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the question in tango. Once again, I remember Mariela Franganillo’s short lecture/lesson on that subject one Saturday afternoon at Dance Manhattan in New York City.

               “Do you hear the question?” she asked as she demonstrated a seemingly simple pivot which I found impossible to replicate with my partner.

               I kept waiting for her to say something about the answer but she never did. I found that frustrating and that is probably why it is still on my mind three years later, here in Wisconsin, where Winter refuses to yield to Spring.

               Men and women are different, especially where questions are concerned.

               Men rarely inquire, we simply do. This is not always a good thing.  

               Women are always asking questions, “Do you think I’m pretty? Where are we going? Do you love me?”

               When a man asks a woman a question, her response is not always an answer. If he doesn’t pose it properly, she may not do anything. How he asks is everything.

               I think this is why Mariela did not talk about the answer, because there doesn’t have to be one, there only needs to be a response and the response can be anything, even silence.

               This is a woman’s prerogative. This is yet another reason that some find tango so addicting. It is a dance where a woman can be a woman and react to what she hears instead of what her partner thinks he is saying.

               I can see that this would be heady stuff for a lady of the 21^st Century. It must feel very liberating, especially after a hard week of work.

               Over the course of seven years, I’ve seen many women give tango a whirl. For most it is a flirtation but there are those few who fall into it as if gravity had pulled them into its orbit.

               A woman’s first real tango dance is her best for a long while. I can imagine her profound confusion and absolute delight when she asks, “What do you mean, ‘I can never make a mistake’?”

               Once she begins her education, it is a downhill slide for a very long time. At first, she finds her fear of falling overwhelming as she careens downward. Instinctively, she carves a turn on the floor to slow her momentum and maintain her own balance. She suddenly realizes that this is exactly what she was supposed to do!

               Just as gravity is a force of nature, so too is her movement as a woman. In tango, she is a skier on the unpredictable slope of a man’s intentions, responding to his musical inquiries in a spontaneous and instinctive manner.

               I wonder how it feels for her to be with a man who is finally asking questions. He is not just asking a question, he is asking all sorts of questions: silly, serious and serendipitous, to the rhythm and to the melody.

               It is my guess that tango is a woman's insight into a part of men that is purposefully hidden from her. Here, she can see all the possible other halves of herself that could be.

               As her tango education progresses, she nears the bottom of the hill and hits the gas to carry her up and over the next incline. She delights in the freedom it gives her to connect with her true nature, to hear the question as it really is and to respond to it in whatever manner she feels is best.


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 Workshop Orgasms

               It happened again….so good, so long, so nice, it lasted all the way home to Wisconsin and beyond. It was a journey just getting there but it was worth it.  

               When we are totally exhausted, that is when we are most open to new frontiers: physical, emotional, spiritual and more.

               The object of torture is to wear down the victim to the point where he will believe anything. It is an Oriental art that the Argentines have perfected.

               Tango workshops often border on that fine line between art and torture.

               When a tango instructor takes us on a painstaking analysis of a maddeningly simple and fundamental concept, it is a struggle to keep up. If we do, we are usually rewarded with an unexpected pleasure that I am calling the Tango Workshop Orgasm.

               It occurs halfway through the first class of the second day of the seminar. We are given one further piece of the puzzle and, instead of the same two songs that have been playing over and over, we are exposed to a new one, an unfamiliar piece of music that the instructor, our interrogator, finds personally appealing.

               That’s when it happens.

               The music resonates with a chord being struck somewhere deep inside us, in our subconscious, or on a cosmic level or who knows where, but it is profound and moving. Fatigue leaves us and we submit to the arcane-ness of the lesson, that we will be exploring this simple movement forever.

               The Tango Workshop Orgasm is not a few moments of spasm followed by a messy release of body fluids. It is a soul-searing, slow-motion explosion that lasts for several days, past the point where you leave the classroom and begin, once again, to interact with ordinary humans.

Note: Check out my new book on Amazon: Fear of Intimacy and the Tango Cure.

Tango is Food for the Soul

               

               When we think of nutrition, we narrowly assume that all the nourishment we need comes from food.  Beyond fruits and vegetables, carbs and proteins, vitamins and omega 3 fatty acids, proper maintenance of our corporeal shell must also address emotional and spiritual sustenance.

               We place too much importance on finding the right combination of groceries and not enough on the other factors affecting our health. Our body has all the elements necessary to heal itself, no matter what we eat. How else could the placebo effect be a reality?

               I’ve heard of people who live to a ripe old age on the most bizarre diets; Sarah Knauss lived to 119 years on a diet of chocolate, cashews and potato chips. Her daughter, who lived to 101, said her mother never let anything upset her and that was her key to longevity.

                Plants are dependent not just upon the most obviously tangible elements, water and dirt, but also upon something that is not so easily measured: sunshine. In fact, the rays of the sun are of utmost important. Variations in daylight are signals to begin growing, to flower and to wither.

               People are like plants. We need food and water…and love. Love is sunshine for humans and it comes in many forms, just like the plethora of food sources from which we have to choose. Love is an emotional and spiritual nutrient.

               Dancing tango is like going to a high-end grocery store that sells love in all its many forms: organic and pesticide-free. At the milonga, the place where tango is danced, we find music to feed our brains and much 'fresh produce' to sample. Here we can connect with another soul and move as one to the music.

               In the course of one night, we can sprout, flower and wither in imitation of the natural circle of life. We part unwillingly with a shopping cart brimming with warm emotions and a heart full of love. 

             
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.