Monday, April 23, 2012

owning tango

I don't think I write enough about tango.  Anyone who doesn't dance it and has been reading this might disagree with me, but if you really look at the proportion of my time I spend dancing tango, thinking about tango, talking about tango, listening to the music, it would be clear to you that I spend a disproportionately weensy amount of time writing about it as opposed to about other things.

Thing is, I think I may have had a bit of an epiphany this weekend with respect to my dance (which inevitably translates into an epiphany about my self - or at least I can imagine it does).  Despite having danced tango for about 6 years on and off (luckily, more on than off), I don't think I have ever thought of myself as a "tango dancer".  Tango dancers have always been my teachers, or the people who come in to teach me and my teachers, or the graceful, willowy people I see at milongas in Washington, D.C. or New York or elsewhere.   I think I've always perceived myself as an interloper, someone who hasn't been at it long enough to assert my interpretation of the music or call myself "good" enough to not have something to prove.

I'm an innate teacher; it's something that I do without even meaning to and in fact, articulating my experience of things to someone else helps the lessons imprint upon me.  So, if it's in the context of learning among my peers or with those who have less experience than I do, I'm all confidence and certainty.  Get me into a social setting where the dancers are truly good, though, and suddenly I'm a clutching, cowering ball of nerves whose walk and embrace say  "did I get it right?  Is this what you wanted?  How am I doing?  How about now?"

I mean, I danced for four years before I finally allowed myself to buy a pair of regulation tango shoes.  I felt like I had to earn them somehow, to graduate to those stilettos.  They are the most beautiful thing, by the way.  If a fire burns our house down, I will save them after the dog but before my wedding dress.  But I held that door closed to myself until I managed to meet some unspecified, murky criteria that I alone invented.

Since then, I have written about and sung the music, DJ'ed events, danced successfully with strangers far from my own cozy little community (always a big test), met some of the people in those YouTube videos and found them human, I even started learning the leader's role... yet I still somehow haven't thought of myself as an insider.  Just because I dance tango three nights a week and think about it constantly and try to get everyone in my life to do it, just because it's become my pet metaphor for life, the universe and everything, doesn't mean I think I'm any good at it or have any claim to it.  Yet I don't begrudge anyone else that ownership and pole star of identification regardless of their level of expertise.  My criteria for belonging applies uniquely but unappealably to me and me alone.

After a private lesson with teachers I respect, I now think this is a big part of what's holding my dance back.  The next frontier of learning for me is to dance without apology, but with every ounce of joy it gives me.  To turn off the perpetual evaluation machine in my head and just be present to my partner inside the music.
To concern myself less with doing exactly what's expected of me, and to be more open to the possibilities that are offered to me...then, to go boldly forward (or backward, or sideways, or around, depending), because this space is mine to claim.

Uh-oh.  This is almost certainly telling me something about my life.


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