Nothing to Declare

Back from a week in the states to renew my visa. I decided to save some money and take the bus back. Yowza. That'll be a whole other entry. Nothing super eventful, just an endurance test - 24 hours each way.

Got back Sat night and Sunday morning, had a surprise tango lesson. Leonarda called to say she found a class. Can’t remember the teacher’s name, but it began with a V. She’s from coayacan, a neighborhood in Mexico City, and had a partner with her, though he didn’t say much.

This class was great, and it was the first time back after my disasterous tango debut. That's right. I danced in public, in a show, the night before leaving for Texas. Delayed my trip so I could do it. Our little class is a motley but intrepid group of dancers - three men and five women novices, of varying natural talent. Our instructors, Jesus and Aurora, are fantastic. The show was supposed to be a small "demonstration" of what you can do after only a few tango lessons. IT was also supposed to be a draw for their bigger tango performance that weekend. Next time, they may want to consider advertising in a newspaper.

The performance went like this - we did a dance together - kind of like tango line dancing. And then we paired off and each pair danced to a song. Now we practiced this line dance about 500 times. But only twice on the stage where we danced it, and never without our instructor either leading or counting for us, and never with bright stage lights shining in our faces.

It was bad. And when I say bad, I don't mean some of us missed a step here or there. Or the kind of cute bad of Sandra Bullock style movies, where the star starts out tripping over her feet and ends up winning a dance contest at the end. It was more like bunnies being trampled by buffaloes. We lost the beat, we lost our counts, we went in different directions, we ran into eachother and eventually, there was no way to recover, we could only wait for it to end. Our poor instructor tried to be so positive. And the audience was very polite. But we really blew it.

The great thing is, we all came off the stage laughing. If you suffer from taking yourself too seriously, appearing in public, or trying to be perfect (ahem...) dancing can really help you get over that.

Anyway, the teacher Sunday has a philosophy that compliments Jesus and Aurora nicely. She breaks the dance down into a series of moves. Not the basic steps. Her philosophy is you don’t learn to do the dance creatively, intuitively, if you’re just learning chains of steps. I wished I could take notes while she was talking, because she had some great insights into learning tango that apply a lot to what I believe about learning to dance, and about life, in general. It’s about letting go, being in the moment.

There are eight basic steps to tango. You make a rectangle, with (if you’re the woman) one big lunge forward, a step to the right, two long steps back, a cross at the ankle, one more long step back, a step to the left with your left leg, and then slowly bringing your right leg to meet your left, closing the box.

But the teacher broke the dance down into a series of four steps. A warrior position, grounding, basically the forward lunge (though lunge is overstating it slightly and you can reverse it.) A walking step. The cross. And the pivot. With these, you can do most of the basic moves, and she had us practice them in several ways. The famous “ochos,” (means "eights" and is kind of a swiveling figure-8 move) are a just a lunge or a step and a pivot.

Why do we want to learn tango? What is the ultimate goal, she asks. It is to know the other. Because there are always more women than men in the class, we will have to learn to lead. But this will just help us to know the other.

We will also get to know ourselves. In tango, the body is divided into two parts. The waist up is all about your heart, she explains. From here you fly. Express emotion, your personality. The hips down are about the earth. Balancing. Feeling grounded. And you must develop a passion, a love affair with the floor, with the earth. You must also learn to move those two parts of your body independent of each other, i.e. hips face forward, chest faces the wall, or vice versa.

You can’t put on an act in tango. Instead, you find a way to express your personality, convey that you are holding your own secret, and that maybe, just maybe, you want to tell it to your partner. Your way of loving the earth is yours alone, she told us when we were practicing walking and caressing the floor with our feet. If you don’t know yourself, your body, you can’t find the right ways to express yourself in tango.

We did balancing exercises, feeling our weight shift. We did one exercise with our eyes shut, letting our partner rock us gently to the left and right. Leonarda and I did this together and we didn’t quite get it. But the teacher demonstrated that if you lean forward on the balls of your feet, into your partner’s hands, it is a giving move. It also looks pretty. And we lean forward and into our partner because it is giving.

I hope this woman continues to come back to SMA to teach. We'll see.